Housing is absolutely essential to human flourishing. Without stable shelter, it all falls apart.
~Matthew Desmond[1]
The issue of housing is of fundamental importance that has a direct connection, among other basic rights, to democratic participation. Despite that (or because of it) it is being contested by capitalist forces worldwide. Capitalist forces, which submit everything to the doctrine of profit-making, are in the process of also shifting the use of urban space from one serving communal needs, to one generating profits.
This results in the expulsion of urban residents (via rising rent prices etc.) away from whole sections of cities, so that space is made for profiteering, a phenomenon that can be observed in many cities around the world. One stark example is the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, where over 100,000 people live in occupied buildings, because of the housing crisis.[2]
As Peter Marcuse suggests, “neither cities nor places in them are unordered, unplanned; the question is only whose order, whose planning, for what purpose?”[3] In this sense, the current housing crisis is a product of structural adjustments of a system that favors certain social roles and behaviors over others. It is through the enforcement of scarcity over certain resources, which are often more than enough to satisfy the needs of the people,[4] that capitalism prompts societies to embark on wasteful consumerist lifestyles. As Samuel Alexander and Alex Baumann write:
The huge cost of land and housing has significant implications, affecting what we do for work, how much we work, our need for a car, and a range of other consumer habits. Our economy has developed in such perverse ways (particularly when it comes to land cost) that we are often locked into high-impact consumerist lifestyles.[5]
In other words, people are pressured to lead a passive type of life, where there is barely any time left outside of the work-consumption-sleep cycle. If someone dares to drift away from it, they run the risk of being deprived of vital resources for recreation. Once without them, people become marginalized, with different systemic obstacles and conservative prejudices standing in their way to come out of this marginalization.
People who are subjected to the stress of homelessness may have previous mental illness exacerbated, as well as have their mental state burdened by anxiety, fear, depression, sleeplessness, and substance use.[6] Homelessness thus sickens human beings, slowly crippling them in multiple ways. But despite that, we have seen many times that even under such violent conditions human beings are still capable of self-organizing and fighting to reclaim urban space for their recreational needs. These examples show that no matter how grim a given condition may get, there is always potential for radical change, as long as people work collectively.
The absence of a right to housing should be viewed as an act of violence, as yet another means of keeping people engaged in a passive consumerist lifestyle.
But a real democracy, one that is based on direct popular participation rather than on elections of representatives once every four years, requires social and individual autonomous activity. Political theorist and researcher Katy Wells underlines the connection between housing and autonomy:
Individuals require somewhere they can sleep, prepare food, use the facilities of a bathroom, and be at leisure. Some of these are pre-requisites for basic health, and basic health is a pre-requisite for autonomy. Being able to relax and be at leisure is also a prerequisite of autonomous activity since otherwise we can never replenish our mental and physical resources.[7]
This relation is also highlighted by classical philosophers like Aristotle, according to whom:
The objective of work is usually to sustain our lives biologically, an objective we share with other animals. But the objective of leisure can and should be to sustain other aspects of our lives which make us uniquely human: our souls, our minds, our personal and civic relationships.[8]
In a truly democratic environment – one where everyone shares power on equal basis – we can suggest that every member of the community will also have their personal space, where they are able to retreat from the public sphere and recreate. For a healthy civic life to be established, one cannot exist solely in the public sphere – i.e. in the agora – where one is exposed to encounter every possible member of the community. While stimulating, the debates and encounters produced in the public sphere need to be followed by citizens retreating to a personal sphere – i.e. oikos – where they can reflect on their own, or with their closest circle of people, on social matters and life in general. Without this symbiotic relationship between public and personal spheres, popular participation decays.
One example in history that points toward the relation between popular reclamation of power and right to housing is the Paris Commune, when the inhabitants of the city claimed for themselves the role of real citizens that directly participate in the management of their city through a network of revolutionary councils and sectional assemblies. In this revolutionary environment the rebellious Parisians decided, on 29 of March 1871, to suspend payment of rent. On 25 of April, the Commune also made the decision to requisition empty housing for the victims of bombing by the troops of Versailles[9], since by mid-April, the French army had began a bombardment of Paris.
In the more recent past, during the 1970s, a civil war broke out in Lebanon. Due to a severe capitalist crisis, the grassroots rebelled against the ruling elite, in an attempt to radically restructure Lebanese society. This uprising saw the emergence of people’s committees that undertook the management of cities, towns and villages. Sources state that the inhabitants of the slums and refugee camps surrounding the capital city of Beirut had taken control of their own communities, and that government authorities were unable to enter the ‘belt of poverty’ for several months.[10] With the inhabitants reclaiming their control over their habitat, they refused to pay for rent or electricity. Instead, they gave money over to the committees that administered the areas so that basic services could be provided.
In both cases, as well as in other historic moments, we see the that the implementation of these policies indicates that with the radical and equal redistribution of power also comes similar redistribution of urban space.
Nowadays the struggles for participation and space remain tightly interlinked. Initiatives for the Right to Housing and municipalist movements all can be viewed as different parts of the popular claim to a right to the city. Housing must be taken away from bureaucratic management (which by its nature tends to benefit the ruling oligarchies), and instead placed under the control of the collective citizenry (whose everyday life directly depends on it). As 20th-century philosopher Harry Overstreet suggests:
Recreation is not a secondary concern for a democracy. It is a primary concern, for the kind of recreation a people make for themselves determines the kind of people they become and the kind of society they build.[11]
References:
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/mar/13/we-must-separate-the-idea-of-house-from-home-the-case-for-drastic-action-on-shelter
[2] Baruq. Casa encantada: A Portrait of the Fight for Housing in Belo Horizonte (Seditionist Distribution, 2024) p11.
[3] Peter Marcuse. ‘Not chaos but walls: postmodernism and the partitioned city’, in Postmodern Cities and Space. (Oxford: Blackwel, 1995), p244.
[4] https://www.housingevolutions.eu/project/the-empty-homes-initiative-tackling-irelands-housing-crisis/
[5] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-03-03/access-to-land-plus-a-participation-income-could-change-the-world/
[6] https://www.homelesshub.ca/about-homelessness/topics/mental-health#:~:text=The%20stress%20of%20experiencing%20homelessness,%2C%20sleeplessness%2C%20and%20substance%20use.
[7] Katy Wells (2019). ‘The Right to Housing’ in Political Studies, 67 (2), pp406-421.
[8] https://philosophybreak.com/articles/aristotle-on-why-leisure-defines-us-more-than-work/
[9] https://www.cadtm.org/The-Paris-Commune-of-1871-banks-and-debt#the_commune_s_positive_measures_dealing_with_rent_and_other_debts
[10] Georges Mehrabian. A Revolution Derailed: Lebanon in the 1960s and 1970s (Athens & Lebanon: Diethnes Vima & Dar Al Mousawar Al Arabi, 2023), p192.
[11] Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Recreation Act of 1962: Hearings Before the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1962), p32.
Source: TRISE
