The Argentine and Spanish housing cooperativism: two cases to think about alternatives for the reappropriation of urban commons

Abstract

The process of global extractivism imposed by the capitalist restructuring of the last decades finds in the cities favorite possibilities for accumulation through real estate speculation and, at the same time, dispossession of large sectors of the population. Both in Argentina and Spain, this process led to a huge number of families having to solve their housing inaccessibility situations through alternative processes of habitat production, detached from the mercantile or state logic. In some cases, it enabled the creation of cooperatives that promoted gaps for the reappropriation of urban commons that implied a dispute in productive, community and cultural matters.

Based on a qualitative methodology that recovers fieldwork in cooperatives in the City of Buenos Aires, Madrid and Barcelona, this article reflects on the characteristics assumed by these alternative habitat experiences, paying attention to the effects of the deployment of alternative productive practices and the forms assumed by community life. The extent to which these productive habitat practices question the current neoliberal urban model will be discussed, disputing new forms of re(ex)sistences based on new practices of communitization created from below.