Here you find:
section 4: Thoughts On...
recorded conversations
section 14: Looking back, looking ahead*
reflections
* In the book version, section 17 is the closing text. In this web version we placed it together with section 4.
section 4
recorded conversations
In May 2022, our CMMM team met face-to-face for the first time since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, after two failed attempts in 2021. At the margins of this gathering in Belgrade, on 22, 23 and 24 May, K LAB recorded conversations of about one hour with members of the city teams: Julian Zwicker from Berlin, Irene Escorihuela Blasco and Eduard Sala Barceló from Barcelona, and our hosts Iva Čukić and Jovana Timotijević from Belgrade. The aim was to create three podcasts of about 20 minutes each as a medium to hear the voices of the people behind the CMMM project and to provide an overview of key issues related to their work, discourses, obstacles, how they became and continue to be involved in housing justice movements, and the role of collaboration, solidarity, and humor in spite of things going wrong.
While editing the recordings, we decided it would be better to have the option of hearing the thoughts on particular issues together rather than separated into a city-specific podcast format, especially considering that the three conversations touched on similar topics in varying orders. Therefore, we shifted our strategy to that of cutting the recordings into short, themed clips as this allows for both options: listening to the thoughts of one team on the ten domains we discussed (columns) or listening to the thoughts about the individual topics across the three cities (rows). Each sound clip is captioned with a couple of sentences that highlight two to three of the key ideas, which you view by clicking on "show clip highlights." Several of the issues mentioned in these clips are expounded in the collaboratively produced maps, illustrations of processes (posters), and analyses. You can listen to these clips on the project’s website cmmm.eu, the directs links are embedded in the icons in this section.
BGD
Iva Čukić
Jovana Timotijević
BLN
Julian Zwicker
BCN
Irene Escorihuela Blasco
Eduard Sala Barceló
1 | … how it all started
2 | … engagements
3 | … discourses
4 | … humor
5 | … obstacles
6 | … things going wrong
7 | … academia and dis/connection
8 | … (non-)collaboration and democracy
9 | … solidarity
10 | … how we keep going
section 14
When we started this CMMM project, activist groups in Belgrade were questioning the lack of transparency around the housing strategy for their city and five of the prominent collectives involved in the right to housing were ironing out the last details for assembling the Housing Equality Movement. Soon thereafter, as a result of corruption and an intense level of collusion in most media outlets with the ruling party, most opposition parties decided to boycott the 2020 parliamentarian elections. Meanwhile in Berlin, mobilizers launched the campaign and referendum to expropriate Deutsche Wohnen and other large companies, building on the resonance from the annual Mietenwahnsinn (rent madness) demonstration. Shortly afterward, the Initiativenforum Stadtpolitik Berlin (IniForum, Initiatives’ Forum on Urban Policy) was created and the rent cap law went into effect, although it was short-lived. Large-scale real-estate companies were buying the city en masse, but mass resistance was crystalizing into widespread public awareness and, particularly in the district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, the right of preemption (Vorkaufsrecht) was proving to be a helpful legal instrument to “buy back the city.” Around the same time, Barcelona en Comú won 4.5% less votes in the 2019 elections compared to the previous one, and the city was starting a new term under a minority government. The following fall, the first Catalan Congress of the Housing Movement was held, gathering hundreds of people from 70 housing groups, neighborhood unions, and tenants’ unions to discuss how to move forward in defense of housing rights. This was the situation when we started four years ago, in late 2019.
Soon after we picked up the pace in our CMMM project, the COVID-19 Pandemic started spreading rapidly, revealing widespread housing vulnerability. While most European countries declared moratoriums on evictions, there were no mechanisms in place to relieve accumulated debts or tame the rise of prices in real-estate markets. As revealed in the timelines (Section 5) of the three cities, the past years have seen increasing challenges and some setbacks for the housing justice and municipalist movements. At the onset of our work, we agreed that one key tool in the struggles against vulture real-estate companies is access to cadaster data on their transactions. We discussed how our work and envisioned maps could help make this demand a reality. However, data protection laws and regulations do not differentiate between natural persons (owning one or two units) and profit-oriented large-scale companies (owning hundreds or thousands of units) and proved too complex to break through—which was also highlighted by the Who Owns Berlin project. Notwithstanding, this issue of data accessibility remains a central hurdle that municipalist movements need to make a priority in order to allow for targeted and effective actions that can change the paradigms and playing fields. The “Buy Back Berlin!” map and the “Stop Evictions!” map of Barcelona that our team produced corroborate this need, and we intend to revisit this endeavor in future endeavors.
Another issue we discussed and considered for investigation was that of mapping the housing-related legislation and policies of the European Economic and Social Committee and the European Investment Bank, as these bodies of the European Union (EU) play an important political role in terms of influencing national policies. This is true not only for Germany and Spain, but also for Serbia, which is a candidate state to join the EU. Although housing is considered a national competence, within the framework of the Urban Agenda for the EU, the Housing Partnership was established and the Pact of Amsterdam states that its “objectives are to have affordable housing of good quality,” whereby the “focus will be on public affordable housing, state aid rules and general housing policy.”[1] In the same vein, we considered studying the role played by international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the timelines of the three cities demonstrated that these were major players in the economic restructuring of Europe, the push toward decoupling housing from its function as a basic commodity and a right, and transforming housing into a tradable market asset for generating exorbitant profits. This mapping of relevant bodies, structures, and policy hierarchies is essential for addressing governmental discourses. However, as we started examining these dimensions, it quickly became clear that this topic required significantly more resources than those available within our CMMM project and, similar to the issue of accessing cadaster data, we intend to revisit this endeavor in the future.
To create helpful resources for the municipalist movements and particularly for those interested in critical mapping practices, in the early stages of the project, we compiled and examined existing critical maps and mapping projects by engaged mobilizers, initiatives, networks, and collectives that were (and most of them still are) pushing to reshuffle power relations in their geographies. We highlight some of these inspiring works that we found particularly relevant to our work and to the struggles around the right to housing in Section 6: Maps and Visualizations. Furthermore, a selection of other publications, handbooks, collections, and helpful project websites were arranged into a subpage on this website titled “Links” (in the Other Resources subpage), which also includes select publications by the three CMMM city teams. As our project advanced, we learned about further inspiring projects other than those mentioned, yet the need to draw the project to a close made it impossible to expand the selection any more.
As our team agreed that it is important to problematize the language we use and to differentiate between the connotations, subjectivities, and political positions that shape the variations in discourses, in the first year of the project, we embarked on creating a “Glossary” to map and reflect the various understandings of the terms critical mapping, municipalist movements, housing, and tentacled terms. This dynamic glossary, featured on this website, brings together definitions from (i) our city teams and their networks (filter: CMMM Wall); (ii) activists or public media and blogs (filter: Activist / Media); (iii) published scholarly sources (filter: Scholarly); and (iv) institutions relevant to our work (either because they echo a stance that resonates with our own, or because they advocate an oppositional one, filter: Institutional). Although we had initially foreseen this glossary as an activity that would continue to evolve and be reflected upon over the course of the project, the changes in the scopes of other outcomes and the time investment and effort required by those issues forced us to abandon this initial plan. While we think it was a worthy exercise to map the webs of issues connecting the three terms (domains), we recognize that it would have been more useful had it been revisited a second time toward the end of the project.
Figure 14.2
A screenshot of the preliminary Glossary that was created in the first phase of the CMMM project, around fall 2020.
Looking back, we recognize that our ambitions surpassed the time and budgetary limitations of our CMMM project. However, we also appreciate that abandoning some targets made way for other, equally important, unforeseen ones that emerged in the course of the project in response to the needs and changing dynamics of the housing struggles in the three cities. For example, to articulate the particular political demands, we had initially planned for each city team to produce a simple static map illustrating and communicating alternative perspectives, which we aborted to instead develop three customized interactive maps (Section 15) with the help of the Visual Intelligence team. These were more demanding in terms of time and resources, but they also promised broader usage and a longer lifespan in serving the local housing scenes. Other unforeseen additions include an expansion of the Status Quo section into four sections (initially thought of as only a ten-page brief), the production of advocacy posters for the three political demands, and more personal insight into the motives, paths, and opinions of some of the team members in the audio clips (Section 4, above).
It is important to note that CMMM was a side project carried out in part-time alongside other work commitments, including those towards the collectives in which we are involved, and while responding to unfolding political events such as the elections that were held in Berlin (2021 and 2023) and in Belgrade (2022). Looking back, things have changed since we met each other for the first time in early 2020, as the following paragraphs illustrate.
Belgrade team
During the 2022 general elections in Serbia and the local elections in Belgrade, the municipalist platform Don’t Let Belgrade Drown (NDM BGD) won seats in both the National Assembly and the Belgrade City Assembly, with 13 representatives in each (within the coalition “Moramo”). This change has given rise to opportunities with a significant impact on the work of the movement in general, as well as that of the Ministry of Space (MoS) collective. It has improved our access to institutional data and procedures that are normally closed to the public. It has also resulted in an increase in media and public appearances, where the housing movement now finds a larger stage than before to convey messages regarding urban development and to voice demands for alternative housing policies and measures. At a different level, the Ukraine war has exacerbated existing problems in the housing sector with a significant number of refugees arriving in Serbia, particularly in the first six months after its outbreak. In the second half of 2022, rents rose by 50%, and in some cases even by 100%, and this in an already unaffordable and unregulated rental sector. Meanwhile, the state and city governments remain silent on the affair.
These developments underscored the significance of the goals and objectives that we at MoS had defined for our activities within the CMMM project, for which we had been working in parallel on two tracks: 1) raising awareness and mobilizing the wider public around housing unaffordability and 2) advancing arguments and advocating concrete proposals in the city assembly and national parliament. The first track was the guiding principle behind the interactive map “How (un)affordable is housing in Belgrade?,” as well as several public events that we organized, including the podium discussion “Global housing struggles: experiences from Berlin, Barcelona and Belgrade.” In the second track, during workshops organized within and beyond the CMMM project, we discussed concrete proposals for the city and national parliament with the members of the Housing Equality Movement (HEM). Prompted by the deteriorating conditions in the rental sector and with support from MoS, NDM BGD announced a proposal for a law on rent control in November 2022. This was the first legislative proposal to address the inaccessibility of housing in Serbia in a decade, if not longer. In this light, and to support advocacy efforts, we produced the Law Proposal: Rent Control poster as our last activity within this project.
While experimenting with critical mapping and developing the “How (Un)affordable Is Housing in Belgrade?” map, our collective worked in parallel on another project that touches on the realm of housing in a broader sense and aims to inform and mobilize people around spatial interventions in their neighborhoods. Named “Where is the Plan?,” this website provides information on proposed urban plans and development projects that are underway within the administrative territory of Belgrade. We believe that both maps will significantly help MoS in its endeavors to communicate, politicize, and mobilize around the issues of housing and urban development. In fact, looking back on the past three years, we can say with certainty that the efforts of the broader spectrum of activists and political movements have made housing an issue of public interest and that there is a solid foundation of knowledge and materials to promote policies based on housing as a right and to contribute to wider political transformation in Serbia.
Berlin team
The 2021 elections at all levels (federal, state, and district/local) brought about little change to the political structure in Germany. Although the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is no longer the ruling party, the Angela Merkel politics of the center-right was granted another term,[2] and Berlin remained under the Red-Red-Green coalition.[3] On the same election day, the Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen referendum was held, which was preceded by several months of campaigning and collecting signatures. Close to 60% voted in favor of the proposal that large housing companies should be expropriated and their stock communalized, demonstrating that the housing emergency is a predominant concern of Berliners. Shortly thereafter, in November 2021, a court ruling on a case in which the right of preemption (RPE) was applied repealed the instrument that the housing justice movement had been increasingly invoking to protect tenants against vulture capital (and which was our focus in this project). Instead of prioritizing the matter and showing that they take the messages of the DW&Co. referendum seriously, the new Berlin government created an expert committee to study and propose measures for how to tackle the situation in the housing sector. Unfortunately, the committee has been working very slowly, its sessions are not public, and so far its protocols have been published after substantial delay.
The continuation of the modus operandi of the SPD under the new Governing Mayor of Berlin Franziska Giffey (e.g., paying lip service to civic movements while refraining from taking any real steps to change the status quo, among other issues) resulted in a resounding defeat for the party in 2023. Due to the large number of irregularities, in fall 2022, the Constitutional Court of the State of Berlin declared the elections of 26 September 2021 invalid and ordered a repetition on 12 February 2023. The widespread dissatisfaction with the SPD brought about the termination of its 22 years of ruling the city-state, returning the CDU (conservatives) to the helm while removing the Greens and the Left from office. Many housing activists see this new reality as a bad omen for their aspirations and demands. Meanwhile, the Ukraine war has led to soaring energy prices and inflation rates, significantly increasing already high housing burdens.
While these developments give little cause for optimism, we try to remind ourselves of what we have achieved and focus on the next steps forward. In November 2021, Häuser Bewegen GIMA Berlin-Brandenburg eG was founded. This cooperative real-estate agency brings together housing cooperatives, associations, and the Tenement Housing Syndicate (Mietshäusersyndikat), which believe in the principles of Gemeinwohl, to support them in buying houses for the benefit of tenants. In fall 2021, Baustelle Gemeinwohl was launched, a platform intended to better coordinate the various activities of the many groups, projects, and organizations that are vested in increasing the participatory space for making decisions on the gestalt of our city and changing public policies to better meet the needs of people. In December 2022, the Berlin Senate published an interim report by the expert committee on the DW&Co. referendum indicating a positive evaluation of the initiatives’ proposal for communalization. The release of its final report is scheduled for June 2023. Among other goals, we are pushing to amend the right of preemption (RPE) and reintroduce it as an effective and powerful instrument for defending the rights of tenants. We look forward to seeing the RPE poster that we produced to promote this objective around Berlin. While we are aware that the Buy Back Berlin! map[4] will require periodic maintenance and campaigning in the upcoming months and years to make it operational, we are optimistic about its connective and informative power (to support people and structures dealing with housing struggles) and about the fact that the size of the housing justice movement in Berlin has reached a level that cannot be easily ignored.
Barcelona team
As noted above, the CMMM activities in Barcelona commenced as Ada Colau was assuming her second term as governing mayor in 2019, albeit this time with a minority government (the mandate of which is about to end as we write these lines). During this term, the government pushed to implement its Right to Housing Plan 2016–2025 and introduced several regulatory measures, including those related to property harassment, touristic uses, and increasing social rental housing stock. At the same time, the groundbreaking Catalan Rent Control Law (Llei 11/2020) that was promoted by the Catalan Tenants Union was passed and then retracted by court ruling. On 27 April 2023, after years of deliberation, the Housing Rights Act of 2023 (de la Ley por el Derecho de la Vivienda de 2023) was finally passed. While observers note that the final text omits several important points that were raised during its drafting, this national law defines stricter caps on increasing values of rental contracts and on evictions and pushes to require regional governments to allocate more land for non-profit housing.[5] After many years of tragic consequences in the aftermath of the 2008 mortgage crisis, the pressure created by the many housing groups and organizations seems to be paying off. Nevertheless, the struggle is far from over.
When we joined the CMMM project, we saw it as an opportunity to expand our work at ODESC in relation to collecting data and strategies on evictions, one of our central topics. Our main objective was to identify and indirectly scandalize “who” the evictors are and to strengthen our longstanding track record of advocacy campaigns on social and economic rights of tenants. As accessing these data from the cadaster proved impossible, we based our "Stop Evictions!" maps on databases from PAH and other collectives (shared on the Desnonaments BCN Telegram broadcast channel), including information on who is evicting the tenants, when and where the evictions take place (showing frequencies and geographic intensities), and what the results of the process were. Thus, an important shift in the course of the project was recognizing the value of data gathered by social movements and deciding to build the maps with that data instead of continuing to struggle to gain access to records from public institutions. We are of course aware that the cases reported on our maps do not represent the total number of evictions in the city by far, and this is why we seek to expose the lack of official public data on the matter and continue pushing to change this reality. Notwithstanding, thanks to this map, we managed to utilize the existing private communication channel among anti-eviction activists (used to gather people to block an eviction) to create a system that transforms personal notifications into a consolidated database visible to everyone. Another layer of information that we wanted to gather and illustrate on the map was the “profiles” of affected people: Who are they? Are women more likely to suffer evictions? Are children losing their homes? However, we were unable to acquire this data from the Barcelona City Council or from other sources. Therefore, we will pursue this endeavor in future projects.
While considerable work still lies ahead for us in terms of expanding the base of social movements that use and supply data for the two static and interactive maps, the initial feedback has been optimistic. Furthermore, several journalists have shown interest and confirmed that the visual illustration of eviction cases will help demonstrate the depth of the problem. At the same time, we will continue investigating the people behind the vulture funds and how citizens, social movements, and public institutions can stop them from violating human rights, such as the right to housing.
CMMM team
Working within this team of engaged municipalist mobilizers from cities with similar experiences but different contexts and backgrounds helped raise questions, spark debates, and learn about lesser known facets of our three cities. It was a space in which we zoomed out and in at the same time. We compared thoughts, approaches, desires, and results from work with different points of focus while pursuing a shared goal: housing justice and de-commodification. We regularly took time for honest reflection, to question ourselves, and to rethink and change our strategies and agendas. It was touching, challenging, motivating, but also exhausting and overwhelming at some points. As we tackled arising emergencies and their sometimes serious consequences for our cities and for us as individuals, this exchange allowed us to keep sight of other perspectives, and to be human.
The CMMM journey as a accompaniment-research-project in addition to our stressed routines was not ideal, and we see room for improvement. Nevertheless, the various formats of mapping that we employed have enabled us to analyze information that was available but not yet methodologically collected and evaluated. This collective space allowed us to systematize knowledge about housing in our own local contexts and to articulate aspects of housing unaffordability in media accessible to the wider public. By recognizing differences and not pushing for unified deliverables at all costs, it was possible for our three city teams to deal with various elements and short-term goals, to remain focused on the needs of the local movements in which we are embedded, and to produce knowledge and tools that are directly applicable to and useful for our collectives and partners involved in housing struggles.
It is with great joy and sadness that we write these last few words. We regret not having a larger number of face-to-face encounters and in-space co-learning with each other (due to the COVID-19 pandemic). We did not know one another before CMMM, but together we not only saw through this project successfully from beginning to end but also saw two master theses get completed, a doctoral dissertation defended, and welcomed four babies to the world. Looking back, we are grateful not only for what we succeeded in producing collectively but equally and maybe even more so for the personal and professional exchanges that we had in our monthly meetings via video calls, for the new insights and lessons learned from one another, for the patience with constantly changing targets and schedules, and for the humor and solidarity with one another.
Figure 14.3
A mural stating: “Many small people who in many small places do many small things, can alter the face of the world” (German: Viele kleine Leute die in vielen kleinen orten viele kleine Dinge tun, können das Gesicht der Welt verändern). At the East-Side Gallery which is located on remainders of the wall that separated east and west Berlin. Picture by Natasha Aruri, 2012.
[1] EC Housing Partnership. The Housing Partnership Action Plan. Brussels: Urban Agenda for the European Union, 2018. Accessed May 5, 2023.
[2] Angela Merkel, CDU, served as Chancellor of Germany for four consecutive terms between 2005 and 2021. While the CDU is a conservative party, her center and in some instances progressive politics had her often described as “chairing the wrong party.” With the long history of joint ruling by the CDU and SPD (current Chancellor Olaf Scholz was her Vice Chancellor and Federal Minister of Finance), many observers regard the coalition of SPD, Greens, and FDP that succeeded her as a continuation of her political discourse.
[3] Red-Red-Green: Social Democratic Party (SPD), The Left, The Greens.
[4] While developing the Commoning Berlin map we had several discussions with Christoph Trautvetter who led the development of the “Who Owns Berlin?” (Wem gehört Berlin?) map and supporting research which is focused on the structure of real estate ownership and indirectly scandalizes the consequences of contemporary real estate policies. Those exchanges helped form the community organizing aspect in the Commoning Berlin map, and in thinking about ways to connect those two thematically interlinked maps.
[5] The text of the law has not been published yet (4 May 2023) and therefore we are limited to information published in media e.g. Catalan News. “Spain passes new housing law capping rent increases: all you need to know.” Catalan News. April 27, 2023.
