Housing as Commons: Housing Alternatives as Response to the Current Urban Crisis

Experiences of the struggle for housing, ignited by the lack of social and affordable housing and foreclosure evictions as well as practices of establishing shared and self-managed housing areas, unfold in a world of harsh inequalities. In such a context, it becomes crucially important to re-think the need to define common urban worlds "from below', to trace contemporary practices of urban commoning through which people re-define what is to be shared and how, in, against and beyond the dominant.

Connecting to a rich literature on the importance of commons and of practices of commoning for the creation of emancipated societies, the authors discuss whether housing struggles and co-habitation experiences may contribute in crucial ways to the development of a commoning culture, and explore a variety of urban contexts in search for concrete examples that illustrate the potentialities of urban commoning.