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Saaristo, S.-M. (2024). Makeshift Urbanism by Occupation. Gendered housing struggles in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. RC21 CONFERENCE 2024: “The politics and spaces of encounters: advancing dialogues between and within the Global North and the Global South”,.

S. M. Saaristo,  "Makeshift Urbanism by Occupation. Gendered housing struggles in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area", in RC21 CONFERENCE 2024: “The politics and spaces of encounters: advancing dialogues between and within the Global North and the Global South”, Santiago, 2024

@misc{saaristo2024_1791598578168,
	author = "Saaristo, S.-M.",
	title = "Makeshift Urbanism by Occupation. Gendered housing struggles in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area",
	year = "2024",
	howpublished = "Digital",
	url = "https://rc21conference2024.coes.cl/"
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Makeshift Urbanism by Occupation. Gendered housing struggles in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area
T2  - RC21 CONFERENCE 2024: “The politics and spaces of encounters: advancing dialogues between and within the Global North and the Global South”
AU  - Saaristo, S.-M.
PY  - 2024
CY  - Santiago
UR  - https://rc21conference2024.coes.cl/
AB  - In recent years, there has been a steady rise in homelessness in almost all EU countries, while forced evictions have increased in frequency, number, and violence throughout the world. The main housing and policy agendas have tended to rely upon the creation of market-based housing models, and on the commodification and financialisation of housing, with States withdrawing from direct housing production. This presentation focuses on these phenomena by analysing council housing occupations and evictions in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. Based on a 15-month study, conducted from December 2017 to April 2918, realised in close engagement with the Habita association, it combines various approaches, involving multisited, engaged ethnography, policy analysis, and theoretical and historical inquiry.
The study investigates the agency and subjectivities of three groups of actors involved with social housing occupations and evictions: municipal employees, social movement activists, and women who occupy to contest their housing exclusion. The analysis reveals gendered, classed and racialised forms of subalternisation, which are also at times actively produced by the state agents. Council housing managers’ practice tends towards neoliberal, authoritarian and disciplinary forms of governance, not allowing for substantial participation in housing issues, which necessitates resorting to transgressive practices.
Occupations can be perceived as a transgressive and feminised form of city-making that marginalised urban dwellers opt for in the case of acute and intense housing exclusion. In this sense, strong similarities can be identified with some contexts of the Global South. Engagement with social movement actors emerges as a valuable tool for contesting the framing of homelessness as a personal failure, promoting the socialization of activism for housing rights instead. The presentation concludes by arguing that occupations have a high potential capacity to challenge housing exclusions and to contribute to transformation, yet this capacity is undermined by the stigmatisation they tend to face.
ER  -