Round Trip Policies: Housing and Self-Management, from Europe to Latin America and Back Again

Abstract

Current debates in radical urban studies and comparative urbanism focus in part on the denunciation of universalisation in urban theories as an expression of Eurocentrism. Decolonial and postcolonial scholars risk rejecting general theorising in the name of particularism, difference, and the fragmentary character of the world and reducing every urban policy transmission to the result of colonial relations. On the contrary, it would be more productive for radical scholars to pay attention to common pathways and universalist aspirations of anti-capitalist urban struggles. This paper traces the connections between three experiences of self-managed habitat production, developed by grassroots movements in Latin America and Europe. The comparative case study enables discussion of universalising aspirations of struggles against capitalist urban development. The paper concludes that collective and solidarity-based self-construction is a universal form of production of space, common to any culture at some point and to some extent, and that the self-managed production of habitat is a potentially universal paradigm for current anti-capitalist urban struggles.