Disrupting Gentrification: From Barricades and Housing Occupations to an Insurgent Urban Subaltern History in a Southern City

Abstract

AbstractHousing struggles are key to disrupting gentrification capital flows and dispossessions. Based on life histories, key informant interviews, and six years of engaged ethnography with slum activists in the Philippine capital, this paper explicates political geographies of insurgent housing practices, including community barricades and housing occupations, and marks a history of militant subaltern struggles for the right to the city. I contend that these highly‐organised insurgent practices disrupt real estate capital pathways and nurture political subjectification where emancipatory spaces and socialities of care can be founded. Moreover, I intervene in the lack of attendance to the co‐constitution of barricades and occupations to less visible forms of insurgent housing practices. As these are emplaced to other subaltern times and spaces, political knowledges and subjectivities developed against forced evictions and demolitions enhance anti‐gentrification struggles. In tracing this militant urban history, I mark the incremental advance of subaltern housing struggles in a Southern economy highly reliant on real estate capital investments.