Introduction to special issue: “Urban Movements within and against Racial Capitalism: Housing as a Site of Oppression and Resistanceâ€

This special issue seeks to unpack key mechanisms and processes at the intersections of mobilizations around homelessness, excessive policing, evictions, public housing, and vacant building occupations. Three questions drive its contributions: (1) How are the rising tide of housing movements—as well as their repression—around the world (re)shaping urban politics today? (2) What insights have social, urban, and housing movement scholars brought to produce a better understanding of housing under racial capitalism? (3) How does the Black Radical Tradition provide a generative framework for expanding our understanding of housing movements around the world? We build on work that views these processes as systemic and spatial, wherein practices of white supremacist capital accumulation and anti-Black and Indigenous dispossession are embedded and reproduced through individual transactions, such as the purchase and sale of real estate, which are then subsumed into a system of racialized spatialization. In the reproduction of urban space through new iterations of racialization, perceptions of individual outcomes become naturalized as consequences of a colorblind and democratic society that allots success and failure based on individual adherence to the system’s core tenets. We therefore urge housing researchers and organizers to look to the Black Radical Tradition, the role of women tenant organizers, the spatial divergence of the encampment, and the deployment of care as a means of resistance. These frameworks are critical to the remaking of urban space against public and private policies, institutions, and agents who continue to deploy violence to maintain the oppressive structures of commodified housing.