CfP AAG 2025: Exploring Class Through Housing

Organizers: 

Chiara Valli, Malmö University

Ismael Yrigoy, University of Santiago de Compostela

Housing displacement has emerged as one of the key loci for social conflict across the Globe in the 21^st century, as tenants, homeowners and other dwellers have faced multilayered challenges to their right to housing (Rolnik 2019). Rent increases, inflation in mortgage interests, social change in neighborhoods have led to renewed displacement pressures (Baeten et al, 2020; Soederberg, 2018; 2020). A wide variety of strategies to resist urban displacement and housing unaffordability have blossomed both in the Global North and the Global South, illustrating the relevance of housing-based social conflicts (Martínez & Gil, 2024). Indeed, the financialization of housing has created new forms of accumulation by dispossession, and new forms of socio-political subjectification (Fields 2017), making housing a crucial frontline of class conflict.

From political economists to radical geographers, there is an emerging consensus that a major social faultline in contemporary societies is between those who own housing assets and those who do not (Adkins et al 2020; 2021; Cleaver, 2000; Karakilic, 2022). Adkins et al. (2021) have spearheaded class-based approaches to housing, by arguing that class positionality is nowadays mainly shaped not only by employment conditions, but by the ownership of housing assets. However, the extent to which social stratifications at large are reshaped by housing financialization, and the ways in which housing assettization intersects with labor relations is a contested terrain (Christophers 2021). Urban and housing scholars have called for the need to incorporate the generalization of housing- related indebtedness into our theorizations of class (Kallin 2021). Again, feminist scholars have brought attention to the gendered and racialized dimensions of debt, and the need to further nuance economist perspectives on housing and class (Federici 2018; Wolifson et al 2023).

There is, therefore, an urgent need to grasp the social inequalities generated by housing-based rentierism from a class perspective, in its gendered and racialized aspects. 

In this session, we welcome empirical as well as conceptual contributions that address social conflicts around housing from the perspective of class relations. We welcome papers on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Political readings of housing-centered approaches to class
• Intersections between housing-centered and employment-centered approaches to class
• Class readings of urban displacement 
• Class, Housing, and Social Reproduction
• Readings of class through housing-related indebtedness
• Tenancy regimes and class mobility 
• Historical Perspectives on Housing and Class
• Intersectional, feminist, postcolonial perspectives on housing and class
• Cross-tenures and cross-class housing solidarity struggles
• Contradictory class locations and housing rentierism

If you are interested in participating in the session, please send an abstract to Chiara Valli chiara.valli@mau.se and Ismael Yrigoy ismael.yrigoy@usc.es by October 15, and we will notify shortly after, giving session participants time to meet the October 31 abstract deadline.

Adkins, L., Cooper, M., Konings, M. (2020). The asset economy. John Wiley & Sons.

Adkins, L; Cooper, M; Konings, M (2021). Class in the 21^st century: Asset inflation and the new logic of inequality. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space , 53(3), 548-572. 

Baeten, G., Listerborn, C., Persdotter, M., & Pull, E. (Eds.). (2020). Housing displacement: conceptual and methodological issues. Routledge.

Christophers, B. (2021). Class, assets and work in rentier capitalism. Historical materialism, 29(2), 3-28.

Cleaver H (2000) Reading Capital Politically. Texas: University of Texas Press.

Federici, S. (2018). Women, money and debt: Notes for a feminist reappropriation movement. Australian Feminist Studies, 33(96), 178-186.

Fields, D. (2017). Unwilling subjects of financialization. International journal of urban and regional research, 41(4), 588-603.

Kallin, H. (2021). In debt to the rent gap: Gentrification generalized and the frontier of the future. Journal of Urban Affairs, 43(10), 1393-1404.

Karakilic, E. (2022). Rentierism and the commons: A critical contribution to Brett Christophers’ Rentier Capitalism.  Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 54(2), 422-429.

Martínez, M. A., & Gil, J. (2024). Grassroots struggles challenging housing financialization in Spain. Housing Studies, 39(6), 1516-1536.

Rolnik, R. (2019). Urban warfare: Housing under the empire of finance. Verso Books.

Soederberg, S. (2018). Evictions: A global capitalist phenomenon. Development and Change, 49(2), 286-301.

Soederberg, S. (2020). Urban displacements: Governing surplus and survival in global capitalism. Routledge.

Wolifson, P., Maalsen, S., & Rogers, D. (2023). Intersectionalizing housing discrimination under rentier capitalism in an asset-based society. Housing, Theory and Society, 40(3), 335-355.