Community-led housing: Between ‘right to the city’, ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ and post-pandemic cities

Abstract

This paper examines the Self-Managed Housing Program (Law 341), in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This programme created 45 cooperative housing units between 2001 and 2020 in consolidated urban areas currently undergoing renewal processes. It investigates the conditions that the programme has generated for the realisation of the ‘right to the city’ in the context of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ and challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper analyses the origins of the process and mode of cooperative housing production, including tangible and intangible aspects and capacities acquired by the inhabitants. This study used a mixed quantitative and qualitative methodology. The analytical strategy focused on defining a set of dimensions that characterised the self-managed mode of production, conditions of social and urban insertion in the case studied and participants’ perceptions of the influence of material characteristics and organisational arrangements during the pandemic. This paper contributes to our understanding of the socio-economic dynamics in the production of urban space by elucidating the role of the state and specific tensions arising due to bottom-up policies, specific forms adopted by urban experiences of resistance and their contribution in the promotion of concrete conditions of urban life. Finally, this paper characterises an emergent self-managed urbanism and reflects on its possibilities of dialogue with the construction of alternative local policies that challenge growing territorial inequality caused by the subordination of policies to real estate financialisation and its deepening tendencies in the pandemic context.

本文研究了阿根廷布宜诺斯艾利斯的“自我管理的住房项目”（第341号法律）。该项目在2001年至2020年期间，在目前正在进行城市更新的综合城区创建了45个合作住宅单元。本文调查了在“实际存在的新自由主义”和新冠疫情带来挑战的背景下，该计划为“城市权利”的实现创造的条件。本文分析了合作住宅生产的由来、过程和模式，包括有形和无形的方面以及居民所获得的能力。本研究采用了定量和定性相结合的方法。分析策略侧重于定义一系列维度，这些维度表征了自我管理的生产模式、所研究案例中的社会和城市融入条件，以及参与者对疫情期间物质特征和组织安排影响的看法。本文通过阐明国家的作用以及自下而上政策所产生的具体紧张关系，城市抵制活动所采取的具体形式，及其对改善城市生活具体条件的贡献，有助于我们理解城市空间生产中的社会经济动态。最后，本文描述了一种新兴的自我管理型城市化，并反思了其与能够挑战日益加剧的区域不平等的替代性地方政策的构建开展对话的可能性。这种区域不平等的加剧是因为政策从属于房地产金融化，并且在疫情背景下，还有不断加深的趋势。