Housing today constitutes new terrain for financial capital expansion and financial speculations. These changes have brought about the increase in the prices of housing and land and together with it the unprecedented household debt. Due to speculations the number of empty flats waiting to be sold off only when the price is right has been growing. In this situation housing has been increasingly changing function from someone's home to a place for investment, savings, or collateral for someone's pension. Some of the consequences of such a system have been growing housing precarity, an army of evicted and homeless, as well as the whole generations unable to provide for home of their own. In our opinion as long as housing continues to be treated as an asset these problems will prevail.
We believe that the housing question can be understood only in dialectical relation between economy and grassroots struggles. It is about unlearning the mainstream cynical narratives and relearning housing from the perspective of the struggles. We want to connect knowledge about housing to power relations. Our aim is to create grounds for the collective learning process about housing that could bring to better understanding about how to take constructive action and bring about necessary changes towards universal access to housing.
In this syllabus, the sessions have been organized with two focuses: critical perspective on certain issues related to housing and examples of organizing. The issues that we have chosen are just some of the building blocks that make a complex story about housing. We have organized this syllabus in eight sessions: Debt and Housing Struggles, Struggle for Social Housing, Housing and Maintenance Struggles, Rent Struggles, Squatting, Criminalization of Housing Struggles, Technology and Housing Struggles and Housing Struggles and Mental Health.
The sessions are organized around basic question: Is the housing issue the issue of collective care or means of profit? It is clear for us. Housing is a collective care that has to be fought for with mutual aid in constant disobedience to neoliberal privatization tendencies. We hope that we have managed to make that argument and that those of you who will be working with this syllabus will feel the same.
