Housing Movements, Commons and ‘Precarious Institutionalization’

Abstract

Understanding the relationship between struggles for housing justice and alternative housing models is riddled with epistemological and methodological challenges. A posteriori definitions of specific housing typologies–for example, “co-operative housing”–fail to account for the often informal and fluid practices that constitute the emergence of housing commoning through collective organizing. This paper offers an empirically grounded theoretical analysis of the development of short-life co-operative housing in London, UK, since the 1970s. Taking a longitudinal view, it explores how performative power surges by squatters and other precariously housed people were sustained by federative organizing and aligned with central and municipal institutional experimentation, giving rise to significant, if precarious, shifts in housing policy and practice. The concept of “precarious institutionalization” names this state of contingency and furthers a political analysis of the maintenance of housing commoning against multiple enclosures, with wider implications for scholarship on contemporary movements for decommodified self-managed housing.