Community led housing: Between right to the city, actualli existing neoliberalism andpost pandemic cities

RODRIGUEZ MARIA CARLA; ZAPATA MARIA CECILIA

Urban Studies

Sage

Año: 2022 p. 1 - 38

This paper examines the Self-Managed Housing Program (Law 341), in Buenos Aires, Argentina.This program created 45 cooperative housing units between 2001 and 2020 in consolidatedurban areas currently undergoing renewal processes. It investigates the conditions that the programhas generated for the realisation of the ‘right to the city’ in the context of ‘actually existingneoliberalism’ and challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper analyses the originsof the process and mode of cooperative housing production, including tangible and intangibleaspects and capacities acquired by the inhabitants. This study used a mixed quantitative and qualitativemethodology. The analytical strategy, focused on defining a set of dimensions that characterisedthe self-managed mode of production, conditions of social and urban insertion in the casestudied and participants’ perceptions of the influence of material characteristics and organisationalarrangements during the pandemic. This paper contributes to our understanding of the socioeconomicdynamics in the production of urban space by elucidating the role of the state and specifictensions arising due to bottom-up policies, specific forms adopted by urban experiences ofresistance 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 dialoguewith the construction of alternative local policies that challenge growing territorial inequalitycaused by the subordination of policies to real estate financialisation and its deepeningtendencies in the pandemic context.