Liquid Homes, Concrete Struggle. Understanding the financialization of social rental housing through the lens of (struggles for) social reproduction: Everyday alienation, precarisation and resistance to financialized housing governance in Frankfurt/Main

Keywords: housing, financialization, feminist geographies, activist scholarship, social reproduction, urban inequality
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 50

Abstract

In my contribution, I would like to discuss how a critical-feminist approach to researching and collectively contesting housing financialization in ›situated solidarity‹ with marginalized communities can help grapple with the challenges involved in navigating the researcher/activist relationship and positionality in the field.

Over the past decades, social rental housing in Germany has advanced to the new frontier of financialization, today serving the needs of institutional investors rather than those of low-income tenants it was originally built for (Fields/Uffer 2016; Wijburg et al. 2018). In my PhD, I approach housing financialization through the lens of (struggles for) social reproduction in the capitalist city. Focusing on how marginalized subjects experience and cope with their liquid homes, I sought to ›demystify‹ how the abstract dynamics of global property markets (macro-level) have reshaped rent relations, tenants’ everyday experiences of home and their struggles to stay put in neoliberalized contexts (micro-level). Following the long tradition of radical-feminist scholars fighting against dispossession in cities around the world, I understand my activist-research as a political praxis that is both ethically and methodologically committed to a »form of situated solidarity« with marginalized communities, hence seeking to work what Loretta Lees and Michael Herzfeld (2021) call »beyond the academy«.