The urban land question. Dis/possessive collectivism: property & personhood at city's end
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Date
2016
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AESOP
Abstract
Well after the Great Recession has supposedly ended, foreclosures and bank-led evictions continue in American cities. In this paper, I examine the work of one poor people’s movement, the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign, which resists evictions, occupies foreclosed homes, negotiates loan modifications with banks, and seeks to create new policy frameworks for housing rights. Organized around a simple but elegant motto, “Homeless People in Peopleless Homes,” the movement is an unusual combination of militant activism and a human rights framework. Inspired by housing struggles in different parts of the world, especially Brazil and South Africa, it serves as a node in a globally interconnected geography of urban protest. At the same time, the movement works with an explicit understanding of segregation, situating ongoing evictions not just as a symptom of neoliberalization but instead of long histories of racial banishment in the U.S. context.
The study of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign raises issues that I believe are of pressing importance in planning theory as well as in struggles for spatial justice. I am interested in how poor people’s movements fighting displacement and dispossession assert a logic of ownership and possession over land. In other words, how do they simultaneously contest and consolidate the category of property? I call such claims to property the politics of emplacement, a politics of defending territory and home.
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Proceedings of the IV World Planning Schools Congress, July 3-8th, 2016 : Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice in the north and in the south
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