Precarious housing is a growing phenomenon in Europe, particularly in the southern countries where it has become a structural problem. Resulting from of the housing financialisation process at a global scale, rising market values, as well as wage depression, access to housing has compromised the access of unemployed as well as low- and middle-income workers to adequate housing. According to the latest surveys from local authorities, more than 75 thousand families live today in housing deprivation in Portugal, 66% of which in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, in places like shacks, overcrowded houses, precarious constructions or degraded urban estates. Care(4)Housing [2022-2024] research project explores new housing concepts oriented to ‘othered’ groups. In close collaboration with housing activists and groups facing housing precarity, it focuses on rethinking current housing models through the idea of care through design: how can architecture and anthropology contribute to the collective creation of alternative housing proposals. Within the project, our aim is to explore housing struggles in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area through two particular contexts, central to Care(4)Housing: The Local Housing Platform (PLH) of dwellers associations in Loures, bordering Lisbon, and the collective ‘Women for the Right to Housing’ (MuDHA) operating at the metropolitan level. PHL is an initiative that brings together social housing and self-produced neighbourhoods in search of collective solutions to address housing precarity. In the self-produced neighbourhoods, the aim is to devise non-speculative counterproposals to the existent proposals of the City Council solutions, which tend to emphasise demolition and resettlement. Counterproposals under consideration include the community land trust, so far non-existent in Portugal. In social housing neighbourhoods, the current proposals of the PHL focus attention on combatting the segregation and stigmatisation of the neighbourhoods. MuDHA, on the other side, is a feminist collective formed as a mutual support group, bringing together homeless women, activists and organisations, that seeks to highlight the gendered aspects of homelessness and housing exclusions. This collective is shedding light on the specific conditions that, for instance, single mothers with low-income face when trying to access housing in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. Methodologically, the study focuses on engaged ethnographic fieldwork (participant observation and open-ended interviews), accompanying PHL and MuDHa activities, including workshops and assemblies. The presentation will share the experiences of the process so far, analysing how counterproposals formulated on the community level and by collectives are negotiated with the municipalities and the central state. The concept of care will be used as a methodological device to examine the social practices involved.

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housing precarity,commons,housing struggles