Housing occupations as urban commoning: three modalities of transversal engagement

Abstract

Informal land and building occupations form a significant part of Southern urbanism, emerging as central features of city-making in places defined by colonial histories and dispossession. They transgress normalised property and legal regimes and thereby open the possibility for alternative relations connected to shared practices of use and being in common. Drawing on long-term engaged research in Bogotá, Colombia and Cape Town, South Africa, this paper traces the origins and dynamic trajectories of two occupations, paying particular attention to the ways occupiers engage state logics transversally to assemble material infrastructures and advance citizenship claims. In comparing these situated practices relationally, we identify three modalities of transversal engagement that shape their presents and futures: 1) direct co-design; 2) aspirational co-design, and 3) anticipatory counter-design. Whilst the potentiality and outcomes of these are uncertain, we argue they are important contributors to contesting racialised regimes of dispossession and reimagining more just and equitable urban futures.