Maria Minic

Research project: Who are Cities For? Collaborative tactics and strategies challenging the neoliberal housing system

Abstract

Contributing to debates on the housing crisis in neoliberal societies and cities, my research aims to understand the role of citizen-led practices in addressing housing needs and to assess whether these can be the seeds for the development of an alternative housing system to the market-driven one.

The prevalence of the economic value of housing over its social one threatens the ‘right to housing' and has animated debates around citizens' ‘right to the city' more widely. Belgrade becomes interesting as an extreme case where, in the last 30 years, housing shifted from being a common good and a right to a personal struggle and an instrument for speculation. The parallel flourishing of informality and neoliberalism in city-making in the 1990s, following the fall of socialist Yugoslavia, resulted in the affirmation of an unregulated and uncontrolled form of ‘hyper-neoliberalism', ostentatiously supported by the government. In this context, the development of any non-profitable form of housing cannot depend on state-support, making the city a compelling ground to study emerging, citizen-led forms of resistance. My research looks at Belgrade as an incubator: What happens when citizens are not supported by the state in their housing struggles? How do they react and resist to neoliberal pressure over space and housing?

In the primary body of my research, I thus look at two scales of action that challenge the hyper-neoliberal housing regime in Belgrade:

• Collaborative tactics of inhabiting - I engage with the inhabitants of the city with the aim of exploring self-initiated practices of collaboration at a more capillary and informal scale. Through a combination of architectural and ethnographic methods, I shed light on the ways in which citizens cope with their housing needs by relying on solidarity networks at different levels of community.
• Collaborative strategies of resistance - by working together with the local PhD partner, the  collective Ministry of Space, I engage with civil society actors and explore their ongoing struggle to address housing unaffordability and inequality.

My research identifies collaborative ‘tactics' and ‘strategies' in the broader discourse over urban commoning to appreciate the potential radicality of everyday actions of sharing, collaboration and resistance.

Building on a Multi Level Perspective (Geels 2012), I locate citizens-led housing practices at the micro level of niches, while the neoliberal housing system occupies the meso level of the regime. My research argues that niche-cumulation strategies need to be developed in order for these to upscale and potentially trigger a transition at the regime level. Starting from existing housing practices, I thus formulate strategies of scalability and transferability by analysing regulatory and institutional frameworks, as well as spatial structures.