Editorial: Contentious urban politics and the struggle for housing

Abstract

The struggle for housing, especially by less affl uent groups which are, depending on the perspective, addressed as the “excluded”, “working class”, “oppressed”, “alienated” or “insecure” (Marcuse 2012: 31f.), and the probably most spectacular form of protest and disobedience – squatting – pave the recent history of contentious politics. In the long history of worldwide squatting and struggles for adequate housing, the question of the right to housing together with the right to the city (in the sense of a right to live in a central urban location and not only in social housing estates in peripheral areas of big metropolises) arose all over the world. Since 2011, the indignados movement in Spain, together with the wave of protests in Northern Africa, Turkey, Greece, Hong Kong, Thailand, Brazil, Argentina and many other countries, for very different reasons, but always appropriating central urban space, show how contentious politics grew and gained social and political weight in the last ten years. These new forms of protest and social movements also advanced research on resistance and disobedience from a human geography point of view, conceptualizing spatialities in the context of contentious politics (e.g. Leitner et al. 2008 and Nicholls et al. 2013). Behind this background of a worldwide spread and acceleration of disobedience, protests and the formation of new social movements in urban contexts, this special issue of DIE ERDE seeks to enrich the debate on housing for less affluent people under the conditions of predominantly market-driven housing policies on the one hand and resistant urban politics on the other hand from a human geography perspective.