Emancipatory housing. A secular, operational and multidirectional utopia[1].

Minguet-Medina, Jorge¹

1. University of Malaga, Department of Art and Architecture, Architectural Projects Area, E.T.S. Architecture of Malaga, Spain, jminguet@uma.es https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6944-162X

https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/astragalo.2025.i38.01

Housing is the basis of stability and security for an individual or family. The centre of our social, emotional and sometimes economic lives, a home should be a sanctuary —a place to live in peace, security and dignity. (UN. Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing 2024).

Over the last few years, the housing problem in Spain[2] —and elsewhere— has become increasingly relevant, with not only data on the difficulty of access, but also unusually detailed descriptions of the different facets of the problem entering everyday public debate. The political debate for once went beyond the usual whataboutism, and the different factions put forward radically contrasting proposals for action, reflecting in an unusually clear and explicit way the opposition of their cosmologies (see, as an example Partido Socialista Obrero Español 2025; Partido Popular 2025; SUMAR 2024; (VOX) Ana Otamendi Fudio 2025)[3]. Although it is not our aim here to interpret these policies, as is to be expected, those more to the left propose different forms of regulation of the housing market, while those to the right advocate deregulation and free market stimulation. If almost all of them advocate for more housing creation, where the former sees public housing stock, the latter see mainly private developments.

Fig. 1. Flavita Banana's cartoon published in El País, 23 January 2024, shows the unusual sophistication and complexity of the citizen debate in the media, when it is perceived from the perspective of housing and its conditions of emancipation (or not).

The period also saw the approval of a Law on the Quality of Architecture and, later, the Law on the Right to Housing, whose name is unequivocally linked to the emancipatory aspect of the problem. Both of them are controversial, each on its own scale. It is in fact, that of the policies of scale (Sevilla and Brenner, Neil 2017) , the problem that, once again, allows the policies that are legislated to lack real application, as their competences fall to administrations in areas smaller than the legislator, in the hands of forces politically opposed to him that, autonomously, disable de facto the law, by not applying it, thus favouring the previous status quo, generally associated with deregulated capitalism. While Brenner proposes the application of policies at the appropriate (usually larger) scale to make enforcement feasible, our politicians pervert the system —and his theory— to circumvent regulation[4].

The possibility of a modification of the Land Law is one of the strategies of several parties to try to mobilise this blocked situation, but none of them has reached a sufficient consensus to move a proposal forward. Thus, while inaction continues for one reason or another, the housing situation is only worsening, under increasingly complex conditions. But, although it continues to be a major concern for citizens, it has been pushed to the background of public debate.

Since the appointment of Donald Trump as President of the United States, it is his constant and almost exclusive witticisms that have been at the centre of all the news and debates. It is not for nothing that, in the space of just a few months, his irrational attitude is already threatening the global stability built up since the end of the Second World War. His inappropriate school bully style, his staging, between spectacle and ridicule, his constant threats, his shameless lies and obliterations, have been calculated over years of evolution of propaganda and advertising manipulation (Minguet 2017) to attract the attention of all the world's media

But this elaborate communicative strategy is no longer limited to attracting attention; rather, from one term of office to the next, it has been gaining increasing strength as a proactive and political tool for action. Daniel Natoli talks in his gripping review of The Architect in this issue about the power of literary and cinematic dystopia to make us more compliant with a future in which the line of progress has been reversed. Indeed, Trump has transposed this strategy from the world of fiction to everyday politics, which he conceives as an indistinguishable amalgam of private profit and geopolitical interests. His numerous boutades foreshadow an immediate future that is strongly disruptive of the international consensuses on which we have felt established since the middle of the last century, from Bretton Woods to the UN in its various extensions and specificities.

Every time he proposes a scenario that, in the light of these consensuses, seems dystopian and impossible, he is simply measuring the distance between it and the current reality, and the level of exhaustion of response capacity reached by the institutions that support it, over which he often has not little control. Since this distance is only shortening and the exhaustion is widening, not without their help, the result of the operation is often that it is possible to get closer to the objective than was initially envisaged before the consultation.

This is how he comes to share[5] on his social network —called no less than Truth, Pravda in Russian, for those who still have a Soviet memory— a video of a touristified Gaza, to the greater glory of his double figure as a real estate and hotel businessman (he appears, among the many luxury buildings, one with his name in large illuminated letters, in his usual ostentatious style) and as an absolutist political leader, venerated via statues and products for sale such as children's balloons and statuette, , all of which are unfailingly gilded (Pérez 2025). This extreme public-private confusion, between private profit and geopolitics, a neoliberal paroxysm, is accentuated by the alternate appearances of his friends Musk and Netanyahu, as potential —at least the latter— executors of the occurrence.

And it works. The surprise is that this extreme insult to any semblance of international or humanitarian respect completely fulfils its function. Netanyahu expresses his immediate approval, and within days, Trump and Netanyahu are pictured together again, this time without AI, in the White House of the real world, discussing, deciding between them, the future of Gaza and its inhabitants, whom they invite to find themselves "... a nice new piece of beautiful land, and get some people to put up the money to build it and make it nice and liveable". This way "they won't get shot at or destroyed" (Trump, in BBC News World 2025 Newsroom). Only a few days later, and after consultation with the White House, Netanyahu breaks the ceasefire then in force and resumes his genocidal war in Gaza (Hameida 2025; UNRWA 2025) . Will this imaginary target be reached? Progress is being made towards it, with little to no international resistance and setting a precedent: what is achieved in Gaza will undoubtedly be applied elsewhere.[6]

This unacceptable situation is nothing but an elevation of touristification, as a realisable dystopia, to the scale of a genocidal war, but the displacement effects sought have been tried before in many, many cases and even by the same authors. What does touristification —and gentrification, of which it is nothing but a globalised version— produces but population displacement? The comparison brings to mind the graffiti in Barcelona that equated tourism with an occupying force (see Cheer 2018), but also the work of Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman, who wrote about the civilian occupation of Palestine —and the importance and illegality of it being civilian— before Israel's move towards open war (2003). It will be Weizman himself who will say, shortly afterwards:

The source of the term “urbicide” —the destruction of the condition of plurality that defines a city— did not originate in Belgrade, Mostar, Grozny, or Gaza, but in the regenerations and “hygienic” practices of American urban planning, such as those described by Marshall Berman after the aggressive “clean up” of the Bronx. (2004, 61)[7]

Touristification and gentrification as forces of population displacement have been at work for many years, with ever-increasing consequences, in areas of peace. Trump himself, who comes from the real estate market, is no stranger to these dynamics, which he has already put into practice in his own sphere. Elevated to almost omnipotent political power, which he understands not as representative but as personal, he applies it, without question, respect, humanity, or sense of scale, to his own usual interests.

Fig. 2. Trump Towers from Kuştepe, Istanbul (Turkey). Photos by the author. The sight of the Trump Towers (shopping centre, offices and 200 luxury homes) over the self-built neighbourhood of Kuştepe, which is inhabited by a large majority of Roma inhabitants, seems to herald a process of gentrification, traces of which are already visible.

In speaking of these procedures, we would then be talking about a kind of asymptotic dystopia, posited as a horizon of possibility towards which to tend, without establishing the need to reach it, but simply to measure the approximation to it. These asymptotic dystopias, which appear at one point and can be generalised to many others, do not always require Trump's action, but can be produced —as Weizman advanced— in any context where the market finds little regulation in its application to people.

In housing, one such dystopia was revealed to the world by a collection of photos published by Hong Kong- based photographer Benny Lam (2016). It shows how Hong Kong's underprivileged working classes live: "the waiters who serve you in the restaurants where you eat, the security guards in the shopping malls where you shop, the cleaners and delivery boys on the streets you pass" (Lam and Stacke 2017)[8]. The skyrocketing price of land in the city centre, combined with the need for service labour in the same location, has enabled a market for subdivided flats in which the homes of hundreds of thousands of people are reduced to the physical space in which they sleep, and little else. They are practically wardrobes for storing people while they are not in use. This reduction of space practically denies the existence of a life of their own, reducing them to the condition of slave labour, and demonstrating to the extreme the undoubtedly basic emancipatory condition of housing. Their stored, dormant bodies inevitably recall the state of the parasitised bodies of the people whose lives had been transplanted into the Matrix in the Wachowskys’ films (1999; 2003a; 2003b)

Fig. 3. Benny Lam's images of Hong Kong coffin-homes.

The images are terrifying, even more so if we remember that they predate the COVID-19 pandemic. It is shocking to think how these people were able to live through the pandemic in these circumstances, not to mention the number of their casualties, forced to live in minimal and poorly ventilated spaces, but neighbours and barely separated from each other, and with all the basic services shared. Submerged in the underground economy, there is a lack of studies that speak of their lives and vicissitudes

It is this extreme of limiting housing almost to the body itself, or to the immediate family —since the family is the inalienable element of the socialisation still desired (Donzelot 1998)— that we wanted to raise, as a cognitive dissonance by extreme contrast with the title, on the cover of our issue.

We cannot forget that this is not dystopia, but reality, in a very precise and extreme place in the global geography and economy. And yet it acts with the same asymptotic effect on a market eager to test the limits of tolerance of the population it subjugates. Impossible to pose head-on in a Western democracy[9], we are witnessing the emergence of attempts at rapprochement to it. The strategy is the same as Trump's: to see how far we can go; the methods, only slightly more devious.

In Spain, this approach is taking place through the so-called pod hotels. Inherited, in principle, from the Japanese hotel model, they do not ignore— when they do not make explicit— the possibility of a shift to the Hong Kong model, especially if the original, much more profitable business, does not work as expected. This is the case of a company operating in Malaga, the same city where this article is written, which offers sets of two luxury pods for small investors, with a very high profitability[10], in hotels that group several of these cabins under the management of the company[11]. El País revealed in an article that the documentation for investors suggested in December 2024 that, "due to the excessive demand for housing, [this project] makes it possible to occupy the empty units in lower seasons, in coliving mode", also offering "a guarantee of occupation in the face of another possible COVID", identifying as possible clients people who are in the process of looking for a home "due to the difficulty of finding housing (brochure for investors, quoted in Sánchez 2024) . In January 2025, in a local newspaper, they deny this possibility, limiting reservations to one month, because "it is simply much less profitable for us" (Pedrosa 2025).

In reality, this type of offer is already a tactical step backwards in the search for the limits of the possible. In 2018, a company from Barcelona proposed pod living without hotel facilities or pretensions. The article on the real estate portal idealista[12] that reported it referred to the Hong Kong model, clarifying that the Japanese model is for hotels and not for housing. Among the many mandatory rules it describes, it highlights that "it is not allowed to criticise the functioning of the pod rooms in public or social profiles, it will be considered a negative action against the community[13] and the resident will be expelled", or that all the members of the community can associate to expel one of them. In this case, it was openly acknowledged that the targets of the projects "are people at risk of exclusion, who, although they have a monthly income, are at the limit and do not have a flat to live in" (quotes included in Pareja 2018). These types of measures, which deliberately apply coercion and repression in an openly unequal manner, not only follow fictional dystopias —the closest one in this case being the film Anti-Squat (Silhol 2023)— but, in fact, are already anticipating them[14].

Fortunately, that project did not develop in Colau's Barcelona, and even in Martínez-Almeida's Madrid[15] one of these hotels (González 2025) has just been closed down, after the newspaper El País reported that it was being used as a permanent residence (Peinado 2024). Not everything seems lost, but it is essential that public administrations keep their guard up against these reality-testing processes that probe the limits of legality and rights, in order to expand capitalism and profitability beyond them. Let us not forget that "Spain is the country that has received the most condemnations for violating the right to housing by the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights" (Amnesty International Spain 2025).

The current problems of housing[16] are numerous and very complex, but they can be summarised without losing too much depth: most of the problems of housing stem from its conception as an exchange good[17] . This consideration implies a first phase, which is its consideration as property, and a second, deductible from the first, but not univocally, which is its consideration as a mere exchange good, beyond its use value, its alienation, as David Madden and Peter Marcuse rightly and accurately call it in their seminal and significant book In Defence of Housing(2018, 78-81) . It is this second twist that is at the root of the housing market's doom and gloom[18]. As a commodity, price speculation should not be allowed. It is easy to understand that speculation with basic foodstuffs and water is not permitted, is monitored and is punishable in our legislation. Even in situations of extreme scarcity (wars, catastrophes, etc.) it should be managed by the public administration as the regulator of the common good. However, we are unable to extend this treatment to a good that is almost as necessary, such as housing. For it, the market. Not only do naturally accept speculation, but investing in housing is the aspirational desire of the average citizen. The stock market, as a natural means of economic speculation, is reserved for professional investors. The average citizen wants to invest in real estate[19].

To minimise the impact of this small-owner investment culture, which historian Carmona Pascual estimates to be the majority of the rental market, "a political debate must be forced to question the 'right to speculate' that has been granted by default to private landlords. It is also about eliminating all the tax privileges that exist for this sector. And, of course, to look for public housing alternatives" (Carmona Pascual 2022, 192).

This original scenario, already complex and the cause of numerous housing crises throughout history, has only become more complicated, as has the market economy in general, since globalisation. The problems of a local housing market are enormously complicated when it progressively ceases to be a local market and becomes a global one. Again, it is a problem of scale. When the Monopoly game of real estate speculation changes its toponymy from city streets to cities on a global scale, and its banknotes change from local currency to transnational capital, the market becomes elitist, and housing becomes unaffordable for the local citizen, losing its capacity to satisfy its use value, much less its associated rights, and provoking displacement and social exclusion.

Under this brief description, many of the most recent housing problems can be encompassed. Gentrification, or the more or less progressive raising of the class and income levels of certain urban areas (see Smith [1996] 2012) involves the replacement of traditional inhabitants of a neighbourhood by more affluent fellow citizens, and the consequent expulsion of the former to less valued areas. When these areas come into the interest of the global market, as happens in the most significant of the large global cities, we begin to speak of hypergentrification, as the difference in purchasing power between the original inhabitants and foreign investors skyrockets, accelerating and exacerbating the process of segregation and expulsion.

Touristification is a specific variant of gentrification, in which the newcomer is not an inhabitant, but only comes on holiday. In addition to the potentially higher purchasing power of the visitor, there is the condition of holiday exceptionality, for which people are prepared to pay considerably more than for their usual home. A holiday rental property is therefore much more profitable than a holiday home, or long-term rental. Originally emerged as part of a "collaborative economy", supposedly outside of capital —as if that were possible— holiday rentals have not only extracted an enormous amount of housing from the rental market, reducing supply, but also replaced the commerce and local life of countless tourist cities with a repetitive and soulless model of franchised city, dominated by a restoration sector which is spatially aggressive in its occupation of public space, and often mean in its transactions, both with the consumer, and with its precarious employees.

Residential tourism is a very old phenomenon, which has been around as long as tourism has existed and was originally very elitist. Globalisation and the democratisation[20] of flights have made it much more widespread, making it easier for more and more social strata in the most economically advanced countries to decide to invest in tourist or retirement residences in areas that combine security with a good climate. This makes the local markets in these areas more expensive, and displaces the original inhabitants. The flipside of this would be the digital nomads. Initially they were identified with elite, highly immaterial tech company managers, whose jobs could be carried out from anywhere in the world, allowing them to choose their residence among all the global paradises— including, of course, tax havens[21]. Under the precariousness dominant in today's unleashed capitalism, they have ended up resembling more workers in these same industries, whose precarious wages allow them to live better in less developed countries, though perhaps sunnier and gentler than their own[22]. Both of these symmetrical deterritorialising mechanisms result in an expansion of displacement and expulsion of local inhabitants.

Financialisation, which does not only affect housing, refers to the increase in economic abstraction that it undergoes when it is transformed from a mere exchange value to a financial asset, and has serious consequences in at least two different ways.

On the one hand, it extends the global scope and market deregulation to small investors. Those popular rentiers (Carmona Pascual 2022, 91) who had rented a house to exploit their savings or small excess capital, no longer having the purchasing power to be independent owners, are now grouped together anonymously in investment funds, legal personalities that dilute the traceability of personal responsibility[23]. Thus, in the hands of professional operators, often transnational, these capitals are invested according to the sole directive of profitability, oblivious to any ethical approach or local sensitivity. Under their increasingly extensive mandate, the small landlord who was able to establish a relationship of trust with his tenant is replaced by anonymous companies with no regard for any special circumstances of the tenant, whom they do not hesitate to intimidate and overwhelm legally, and sometimes even physically, in order to increase the rent or force the eviction, when they understand that the profitability obtained is not optimal, or that the property can obtain higher profits through refurbishment, sale or demolition. The almost monopolistic extension of investment funds not only displaces tenants and small landlords, but also all the other minor players in the building and real estate process in general. From small developers to small architectural firms, all are displaced by a concentration of the business in a minority, constituted around the large investment funds, more financially stable —often part of the financing banks themselves— and their environment of large —or enlarged in their shadow since the context of the previous crisis— trusted architectural firms. Following the current capitalist trend, power and money are increasingly accumulating in fewer hands (see Minguet 2017, 133- 44)

On the other hand, the financialisation of housing, in areas already heavily deterritorialised and affected by the problems already mentioned and, consequently, with very high prices, refers to the almost total loss of the housing function of new residential buildings. These new constructions, generated solely from the perspective of profit (as shown by their forms, slender towers outside any constructive logic) are built with the sole function of fixing capital, of constituting investment, without the clear expectation that they will ever be inhabited, not even by great magnates in holidays, and taking the process of abstraction to the maximum degree, where housing is only financial exchange value, without any rest of use value (Soules 2021) .

All these issues and those we may have forgotten, or avoided for lack of space, occur simultaneously around the problem of housing, and on many occasions, in the tensest territories, all converging at the same time. Despite their variety and diversity, they all share a deterritorialising effect and accentuate the inclination of housing towards its exchange value, from which parameters it is increasingly produced, and a distancing of its use value, forgetting or ignoring that it is fundamental for the very subsistence of the local communities where these dwellings are located and to which they give meaning as such.

In this complex context, what does it mean to appeal to emancipatory housing? Why do so?

Firstly, emancipatory housing appeals, of course, to housing as a right, as stated in article 47 of the Spanish Constitution —and other articles of many other national charters. As a right that, if not fundamental[24], is the basis of almost every other right. Without a home —without a postal address, without a census— a person cannot acquire the status of citizen, nor can he or she have an adequate interlocution with the public administrations that can watch over his or her rights or provide assistance. But that is not all. The name of the highest representative position of the UN in this area is significant: the UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing. Because the right to be claimed is not only to housing, but to adequate housing which, according to the Rapporteur's formulation, must provide: security of tenure, availability of services, affordability, habitability, accessibility, cultural adequacy, and a suitable location (2024). Only in this way can housing be emancipatory. Housing that subjects you to the constant fear of losing it, enslaves you to pay for it, inflicts constant discomfort and health problems, isolates you from society, segregates you, or hinders your cultural identity, is more of a prison than a home, a bondage rather than a means of liberation. Thus, emancipatory housing appeals to an expanded, multifaceted right.

The polyhedral condition of the right to claim anticipates the scope of the movement to be convened. In opposition to the complex multiplicity of problems already described, emancipatory housing as a concept invites to approach the housing issue from a symmetrically polyhedral and multi-scalar perspective. From the smallest details of architectural design to the major political and fiscal guidelines on housing, and all the scales and areas in between, can be understood as faces of the same problem, if we approach it from the point of view of emancipation. This multiplicity is essential in order to be able to understand the global nature of the problem and provide fairly solid solutions. We cannot forget that, as Lefebvre said, "the established order has a great capacity for adaptation and integration; it assimilates that which opposes it"([1981] 2005, 106) , which in the case of capitalism, has reached levels of true virtuosity, to the point of not allowing us to imagine the possibility of an outside, as many authors have noted from very different perspectives (Boltanski and Chiapello [1999] 2002; Frank [1997] 2011; Debord [1988] 1990, and many others).

In order to confront the gigantic mechanism of housing commodification and its extensions in all spheres, we cannot reduce our approach to isolated disciplinary contributions that will certainly be incorporated as mechanisms of further commodification. It is enough to look at what collaborative economies such as Airbnb have become, or what community concepts such as co-living are turning into; or to imagine what suggestions supposedly originating from an emancipatory feminism, such as the house without a kitchen (Puigjaner 2014), could become if they do not permanently address the complexity of the global problem and the permanent threat of assimilation. For this reason, in the face of the commodification of global capitalism, driven only by ambition, but in extremely sophisticated choral forms, where each intervention in different spheres and scales contributes to the effectiveness of the whole[25], it is necessary to have no less chorality and connection between the scales of intervention for better housing. Emancipatory housing seeks an approach that is equal in its chorality and sophistication, as well as in the unity of its objectives, to the commodification mechanisms it seeks to confront.

This sought-after sense of chorality makes it coherent that the theme of this publication was approached, at least initially, as an open call. By placing emancipation at the centre, as this concept is both encompassing and precise, but opening up the possibility of reception to all the approaches or views —planned or not— , the aim was to find this choral panorama of approaches which, perhaps in later phases, could organise the tessituras of each voice well, grouping them into a more structured and effective choir, which simultaneously understands their complexity and their indissolubility. The possibility of providing viable solutions to the problem does not lie in any of the individual pieces, but in the complete puzzle that they build. Only with the whole imaginary in our heads at the same time, will we be able to design strategies that have any chance of resisting the great polyhedral monster of deregulated and dehumanised capital as it advances. Fortunately, the success of the call, both in quality and quantity of contributions, allows us to introduce today an issue of undoubted interest, a desirable possible start to new contributions and encounters between their voices, and at the same time, always open to new ones, who are willing to tune this same song[26].

The call for emancipatory housing is, finally, an insistence against the grain on utopia in the face of the recurrence of dystopias, which are becoming increasingly real and are beginning to place reality before fiction. In the context of the pessimism posed by the dystopian triumph, claiming something apparently so unattainable (so non-existent, or at least exceptional) as the emancipatory ability of housing, something so far removed from what seems possible, allows us to trace the horizon of a desire that does not accept imposed renounces. The old slogan of May '68, soyez realistes demandez l'impossible[27], seems to make sense in today's demoralised context of progressive acceptance of increasingly depressing and oppressive dystopias. To accept dystopian pessimism is to fulfil its first and most important programmatic premise. To demand an emancipatory housing means a global, polyhedral, complex and sophisticated refuse to this acceptance. It means claiming what nobody expects, but which goes to the core, to the marrow of what is expected, desirable, and gives it an imaginary, perhaps distant, but possible, or at least conceivable. It gives a precise name to a complex claim.

Emancipatory housing aims, aware as we say of the risk of its instrumentalisation by the mercantilist forces it opposes, to be what the philosopher Francisco Martorell calls a secularised utopia. Free from any hint of the absolute, aware of its contingency and incompleteness, but which attributes "the entire responsibility for progress to the desire for justice[28] (Martorell Campos 2020, 26).

Also, by symmetry with its opposite dystopias, we could say that it is an asymptotic utopia, which traces a limit to tend towards, without the imperious need to reach any precise and complete objective, but permanently measuring the distance to it, and spurring efforts in the right direction.

In coherence with all that has been written, emancipatory housing would be that which is imagined, conceived, designed and built thinking only of its use value. Of that extended use that cultivates fundamental rights, providing the firm ground and sustenance in which these can grow lush and free. This is not easy, it has never happened before, but only by imagining it, naming it, will we be able, not perhaps to make it possible, but at least to know where we do want to go, instead of allowing ourselves to be dragged along.

The choral condition of our issue becomes stronger precisely from those forms of knowledge that are less appreciated by the centrality of our capitalist and western society, as Sánchez Laulhé et al point out. Thus, we will discover that particularly powerful ideas come from knowledge somehow overshadowed by the hegemonic discourse[29]: from care feminism, in the case of Garrido et al., from the global south in the cases of Cicuto and Moreno, or Pérez and Pelegrín, from forgotten disciplinary traditions in the cases of Avilla and Barberá, or the reviews on the translation of Xenophon by Quetglas, or from the farthest east, in Capdevila et al.

Dystopian realism. Or how film production invites the acceptance of the present, the review of the Norwegian miniseries The Architect, by Daniel Natoli has already had enough presence in this editorial that aligns itself with its argument on dystopias and utopia when presenting the sense of The Emancipatory Housing, as a concept. The filmmaker reflects on the scope of fictional dystopia to configure our minds and undermine our resistance, a terrain that the series plays with not only in its discourse, but also in its meta-discourse, in the relationship that the spectator establishes with it, leaving several questions open, as Natoli warns, perhaps to a second season or, in any case, to our future, or rather, already, present reflections.

If this review goes to the limit of the future, the other two, in parallel, go to the foundational end of the discipline of architecture, no longer to the Renaissance, but even further back, to Classical Greece. Both deal with the translation and prologue that José Quetglas offers of Xenophon's Oikonomikos. He eludes any forced relationship with the much more modern word "economy" and entitles it Saber habitar (Knowing how to inhabit). Quetglas's interest in such an old reference —he is usually focused on modern and contemporary criticism— lies in a question that Roberto Fernández, our director and his first reviewer, soon rises: "Why did they have to make us read for centuries Vitruvius or about the temple of Solomon, which are things for building engineers[30] —the curious will say to himself, if he is somewhat exaggerated— and not Xenophon?"(2023, 10). Its translation and prologue therefore consist of exploring the possibility of an uchronia. What would become of the discipline of architecture if, instead of building on the work of Vitruvius, it had relied more on that of Xenophon? Roberto's review, whose title, Earlier and better than Vitrubius, leaves little doubt about his reception of Catalan critic's proposal, will escort us in our reading of Quetglas, making us understand that Xenophon proposed a key differentiation between two different kinds of knowledge —epistemes—: tektoniké, or construction, initially derived from carpentry, which is the type of knowledge on which Vitruvius will focus, and which Quetglas considers to be the work of building engineers; and oikonomikós, or the art of knowing how to inhabit, which in fact is, and should have been since Xenophon, recognised as the true art of architecture. In his stroll hand in hand with Quetglas, other themes that surprisingly connect Xenophon to our present day - austere dwelling, storage, and even a certain idea of feminism, necessarily translated, in turn - will appear in the delight of reading this translation of Xenophon that Fernández confesses. The Curious Architect, the other review of this translation, by the professor and translator of classical languages Alberto Marina, sticks less to the literal text, and approaches it from an exquisite sense of the meaning of translating, just as the curious Quetglas himself approaches it, and situating his introduction in a time in which, according to Gilbert Murray, "the manuals had not yet left, specialising, the realm of the Muses". He also contextualises it among a series of recent cultural references that accompany him in his search for connections between classical thought and our present; distancing himself from Michel Foucault, who comes off particularly badly.

Not so in the text by Sánchez, Gisbert and Nieto, Emancipation and architecture based on workers' housing. Genealogical notes on the concept of inhabiting in architecture, in which the work of Foucault, whose name is taken from the title only in the latest versions, plays a fundamental role —certainly works far removed from the interpretations of the classical period that offend Marina. Their understanding of inhabiting as the central knowledge of architecture does not depart from Xenophon either. Only that, in its Foucauldian meaning, they associate the foundation of the architectural discipline as an exclusivity —in opposition to all other knowledge— around its function as normalising human habitation, generated around the project of social housing, just as psychiatry had been erected around mental health, almost simultaneously, not mattering so much whether "it fulfilled the precepts of a science or not, but how science supported certain methodologies and exalted certain professionals as experts". From this normalising exclusivity, we can understand the difficulty of proposing elements of emancipation from within the discipline.

Perhaps for this reason, the following two interventions, both on South American issues, refer to forms of housing construction where the architect is not the exclusive technician, but rather, if he exists, is limited to accompanying and advising social and shared processes of creation.

Self-construction, collective effort, and self-management. A study of the debates in Brazil since the 1970s, by Cicuto and Moreno, is a history of collective and self-managed forms of habitat production in Brazil from 1970 onwards, from whose approach we have much to learn in supposedly more advanced societies, where these possibilities are now posed as more or less novel alternatives to capitalist commodification. Just to briefly engage the reader, without oversimplifying or spoilers, his discussion starts from the concept of super-work, coined by Francisco de Oliveira in the early 1970s. It refers to the work that the self-builder does in his time off from paid work, and which allows the latter to be reduced, as it is no longer expected to cover the costs of housing. Super-work, instead of benefiting the super-worker, would thus redound to the benefit of companies and institutions, removing not only their civil responsibility to provide access to housing for the worker-citizen, but also allowing them to reduce their remuneration by increasing their profits, or reducing their expenses respectively, as the case may be. Since it touches on issues already dealt with, such as alienation, or use value, its reading should be mandatory for those who work with these formulas, sometimes innocently, in the more capitalist north. Evolution and update of housing cooperatives in Uruguay. Collective ownership, self-management and technical assistance as a framework for creativity and innovation, by Pérez and Pelegrín contributes to the always interesting history of the Uruguayan housing cooperative movement, which is today one of the best examples of the possibility of a social, not predatory capitalism. An example for the world of collective and participatory housing production, supported and directed by the public administration for decades —even through a terrible dictatorship of almost twelve years— where the technicians, instead of insisting in the mass production of repetitive cells of housing, dedicate themselves to accompanying the cooperative members throughout the design and construction process —an exemplary model also in the distribution of work, which favours equitable distribution over competitive accumulation. The cooperatives will adapt to the different housing and urban needs, moving from new construction on the periphery to the rehabilitation of urban centres, always seeking ways to adapt the model to the changing needs of the present. The article ends by looking at possible ways of continuing this adaptation to the needs of the immediate future.

Capdevila, López and Marcos have gone all the way to Seoul to bring us their enthusiastic proposal: The Korean Bang between the public and the private: atomised dwelling as emancipation from normative. The bang —generic name for a room associated with a function— are spaces of very diverse uses scattered around the city that can be rented temporarily for a wide variety of activities, from bathing to karaoke, games or watching films, perhaps with a certain degree of intimacy. In contrast to the normative and macho rigidity of the culturally predominant neo-Confucianism —and perhaps overlooking the long American influence in Korea[31]— for our authors, "today's Bangs represent a witty, vital, fearless and, in many ways, bottom-up update. The Bangs blur the boundary between private and public space, and question the universal applicability, as well as the historical specificity, of Western ideas of modernity". Their appearance, as disaggregated elements of the house outside the house, both in the topological and hierarchical sense of the term, favour "the emergence of an alternative sense of belonging", which would give rise to a "new cartography of the emancipation of the contemporary Korean citizen". Whether one agrees more or less with the historical and contextual approach from which these bangs emerge and in which they make sense, what is definitely convincing about our authors —and what is most relevant in our emancipatory context— is that they represent a novel form capable of questioning the spatial concepts established in the no less normative West, proposing unforeseen forms of emancipation capable, at the very least, of opening up alternatives to the dominant thought —while trusting, or better still, being vigilant, once again, that the latter does not immediately instrumentalise them.

Perhaps the thought that has best resisted any instrumentalisation by capital, because it is particularly ungraspable in its approaches, is care feminism. By placing its attention and focus squarely on the non- productive part of life, this particular genre of feminism, aimed at everyone, has been at the forefront of resistance to capital in recent decades. Not least in the field of housing. Although we would have liked to have more, we have at least been able to count on one contribution that addresses emancipatory housing from this focus. On the shoulders of women. Transformation of a real estate space into a care neighbourhood, by Garrido, Martín and Urda tells, as its name suggests, the story of the evolution of El Naranjo, in Fuenlabrada (Madrid, Spain), one of the many neighbourhoods of the Franco dictatorship's liberalising period, from a quick and profitable real estate operation to a neighbourhood where care is possible and the identification of its inhabitants with their piece of the city is even more satisfactory than expected. All this on the shoulders of women. The solidity of the argument and its exportability to other similar circumstances —there are hundreds of housing estates and neighbourhoods similar to El Naranjo throughout Spain— rigidize it a little forcing us to overlook certain specific architectural qualities of the original designs, or the determined commitment of the city councils of democracy to provide services to those neighbourhoods that did not even have streets, perhaps oversimplifying the analysis of the specific place. However, the recognition of these women who, from the hidden privacy of their daily lives, have been silently and without fuss building the foundations over which today's cities can gradually become —the battle has only just begun— spaces of care, would probably deserve more entries than those we have managed to collect in this issue

The next two interventions come from a more disciplinary sphere, but they look to somewhat forgotten traditions and genealogies to rescue values that have not been adequately addressed and that may serve to improve or explain our present in some way. This is the case of Cellular Domesticities: Lessons from The City in Space and Its Relevance in Barcelona's Contemporary Debates on Flexible and Collective Housing, an article by Raül Avilla that explores The City in Space, the set of housing projects that made the Taller de Arquitectura directed by Ricardo Bofill relevant, before plunging into the postmodernist formal rhetoric of Abraxas, which would mark the rest of his career. In continuity with the themes of the previous article, Avilla points out the relevance of Anna Bofill, sister of Ricardo, whose thesis (1975) analysed and structured the arrangements of the habitable cells that made up those ensembles, whose forms of grouping allowed for unprecedented spaces and possibilities. The research on The City in Space coincides significantly with the period when Anna joined the Workshop and would be abandoned abruptly after her leaving the studio.

Revealing a utopian and highly innovative social concern with regard to social housing, these works of the Taller de Arquitectura —already in itself a multidisciplinary group then— attracted the support of numerous artists and thinkers linked to the political movements of Spanish 68, of which they ended up —particularly Walden 7— in becoming emblematic. If the transformation of the revolutionaries of the ‘68 movement into neoliberal leaders is perhaps the most recurrent and accepted example of assimilation in recent history, the passage of the Taller de Arquitectura from the militant research and experimentalism of The City in Space to the formalist and rhetorical postmodernism of Abraxas and subsequent projects is, perhaps, its perfect replica in the field of architecture.

And yet, the projects remain, and although they did not leave direct legacies either in the workshop itself or in other potential followers, they seem to regain a new relevance today. Avilla seems to glimpse in the way of prioritising the cell as opposed to the whole —although in a two-dimensional, flattened version of the idea— some rescuing of the Taller's proposals in the emerging forms of housing design of the most thriving architectural studios on the current Spanish scene. This puts Avilla's written article in relation to his visual article, a research by design experience in which he studies possible forms of cell aggregation, based on Robin Evans' reflections on the frictions in the spaces of the dwelling ([1978] 2005). Partly confirming Avilla's proposal, we can see how Marta Peris, perhaps the best known of these potential heirs, uses the same reference to Evans to explain the cells and their aggregations in her housing projects (Peris, in Fundación Arquia and Fernández Galiano 2025), although she makes no express reference to the Bofill Workshop. In any case, Avilla's double task is as illuminating in terms of examples and salvageable intentions as it is enlightening in terms of understanding the new trends of the present.

Unit A and Unit B in Berlin Masque. Housing for a Cultural Transformation, by Carlos Barberá also leads us along paths, nowadays somewhat overshadowed, in the history of recent architecture. In his case, the architect to be rescued is John Hejduk, on whose work Barberá is a recognised expert. These units, and other related projects, would, according to the author, offer an artistic possibility of making social inequalities in the city visible. Intended to be inhabited by the homeless, and designed as freely mobile elements in the city, and with the capacity to interact with the public space, these small-scale interventions would allow not only the integration, but also the visibility and participation in the collective space of people less favoured by society, simultaneously granting them a set of rights that would otherwise be difficult to obtain.

Perhaps, as in the Korean case, and despite Barberá's meticulous research and the evidence associated with similar projects, someone might question the author's hypotheses with respect to these specific projects. However, once again, the emancipatory potential of the proposal and the potential of the reflections to which it leads are more relevant, from our emancipatory perspective, than their precise authorial identification as Hejduk's original intentions. The author's original intentionality is irrelevant to the creative or suggestive capacity of his work.

The second intervention by Pelegrín and Pérez —the same authors of the article on Uruguayan cooperatives, who here alter their order of authorship— Research and practice at the margins of the normative regulation of the post-war Siedlungen in the Rhine-Main region, combines a first part of analysis with a subsequent part of proposal. Convinced that "it is not the project or the space of the dwelling that in itself becomes emancipatory, but the processes by which they are conceived, occupied and used", the first part is a very serious and attentive study of the multidisciplinary complexities of the mechanisms of production, acceptance and redesign of German siedlungen from the post-war period to the present day. In-depth knowledge of this inherited heritage should be useful in solving its problems of obsolescence, which are repeated, with different nuances, in at least the whole of Europe, heir to the Modern Movement[32] . Not limiting itself to analysis and moving on to action, the second part of the article proposes intervention in a precise set of these siedlungen "a project process that could be intuited as emancipatory: a set of simple spatial tools that, as they are implemented, transcend the domestic and environmental surroundings, and summon the inhabitants to reconfigure the space of the dwelling together". Perhaps this second part requires even more development and exhibition space to match the depth and complexity of the previous analysis. Nevertheless, the commitment to be coherently on both sides of the issue: the analysis and the proposal, is surprisingly rare in this research and its value must be unequivocally extolled.

More common is the approach of the next two articles in the issue, which compile recent projects and achievements in a narrative that structures them as a current trend or an emergence of the present. More housing, less architecture: five paradoxes of the contemporary habitat as a frugal emancipation strategy, by Francisco Muñoz, offers us "More housing with less architecture. Without additives. A participatory strategy that redefines the relationship between the inhabitant and the space he or she occupies, promoting a frugal, sustainable and therefore emancipatory housing model". In his article he reviews some recent strategies that deal with scarcity of resources to continue to offer greater flexibility in uses in both space and time and other advantages that can be obtained by reducing architectural determinism. Most of them are widely recognised and valuable, taught as design strategies in the most attentive and evolved schools of architecture. However, the approach is based on the unquestioned assumption of austerity conditions whose causes are outside the picture, and the headings repeat the structure of the inescapable Miesian "less is more" oxymoron: less x, more y. One can imagine a real estate developer, or a seasoned politician, trying to take economic advantage of each of these less. After the overwhelmingly conclusive proposal of Druot, Lacaton and Vassal, with their Plus, couldn't we simply talk about more? (2013).

Along similar lines, From productive tool to living machine: strategies for the reconversion of disused industrial heritage into public housing, by Gual and García, opens up a new avenue of exploration, in this case the possibilities of abandoned industrial heritage for emancipatory social housing proposals. Through the structured compilation of a series of illustrative projects or good practices, they elaborate a series of intervention strategies: prolonging the street, fractioning the space, articulating the voids, liberating the floor plan, and generating centralities, somehow systematising ways of intervening in the industrial heritage of our cities, as windows of opportunity.

The last two interventions focus on the histories of social housing in two Spanish cities, Barcelona and Granada. In Housing in Barcelona: a long-standing structural problem, Maribel Rosselló and Manel Guàrdia, aware that "the topicality and urgency of the housing problem often conceal its structural nature", propose "a long-term view [...] to better understand to what extent the past weighs on the present and, consequently, on the options for the future". Their analysis of the history of social housing in Barcelona, specific and detailed, could be transferred, despite this, to many other Spanish cities that follow the same history, especially under a centralist and homogenising dictatorship such as Franco's. And yet, based on previous studies by their own research team, they point out some paradoxes of great interest, not so contrasted with other cities yet. The first housing movements that arose during the decline of the dictatorship in Barcelona were in working class areas, but where most of the housing was owned. "So access to property, contrary to expectations, did not domesticate the population of the peripheral neighbourhoods that were created in the second half of Franco's dictatorship"[33], but rather the opposite: "housing stability and rootedness in the neighbourhood were the ferment of progressive protest action and the emergence of an unexpected political force with solid social capital". This only confirms the inescapable strength of the emancipatory capacity of housing. Even housing with a large number of deficiencies constitutes a base from which the inhabitant can become a citizen and, finding a social fabric to belong to, articulate his or her own voice in the consolidation of the timid rights that it provides. The expected conclusion of the article is that the historical legacies and inertias of Francoism place Spain in a situation quite different from the rest of Europe, which requires "decisive and sustained action in the long term, in the knowledge that the effects will be neither immediate nor completely foreseeable".

In Social housing in the Northern Zone of Granada and its possibilities in the face of the current housing problem, Rafael de Lacour agrees with his predecessors that "the situation has an inertia that is difficult to overcome and the solutions are not immediate". His historical analysis is conciliatory in generalising the motivations for urban growth in Granada around demographic emergencies in the rural-urban relationship, which are organised in a centre-periphery relationship, avoiding other possible social or economic conflicts. More daring in his proposals than his Catalan counterparts, de Lacour assesses some proposals without opting for them— more land supply, easier land management, facilitating credit for young people[34]. His final proposal favours the recovery of the built heritage, particularly the most obsolete, "as they are far from real estate speculation, precisely because of their state of deterioration"; through rehabilitation aimed spatially at young people "primarily with generations who have been born and raised in these places, with whom to strengthen the notion of rootedness, necessary to articulate socio-spatial coexistence". This intervention must be aware that "it is an integral process of urban and social revitalisation", and not just an architectural one. "By reorienting these interventions towards an emancipatory perspective, housing goes from being an object of speculation to an instrument of autonomy, identity and community cohesion"

If in the case of Barcelona there is a lack of concrete solutions, in the more daring case of Granada they are not entirely convincing. There are already many cases that show that for years now speculation has been taking hold in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods with almost as much force as in the most profitable ones[35] . On the other hand, the Decree regulating the demand for public housing of the Junta de Andalucía[36] establishes, with good criteria, that the demand for housing in Andalusia must be governed by the Municipal Registers of Applicants, under equal conditions, which limits the orientation of solutions to age groups.

Solutions are indeed difficult and need to be carefully tested with all previous experience and at all levels. What seems right in one discipline or scale may fail in another, and the threat of assimilation is constant. However, only by keeping one's eye on a goal such as emancipation which, while ambitious, rejects any aspiration to totality, and assumes its contingency; and only by keeping the range of scales and approaches permanently open and testing, is it possible to illuminate solutions of the complexity necessary to counter the enormous mercantilist inertias. There is a good range of them here, some valid on their own, and others that could well be coordinated to rise to a higher level.

The definition of the right target should achieve the political will. Complex solutions should achieve, or at least bring us as close as possible to, the desired and necessary goal.

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[1] This research is part of the project "The housing issue: market tensions, socio-spatial inequalities and residential vulnerability in southern Spanish cities" (PID2023-151195OA-I00), funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by FEDER/EU, and had its origin in the Research Project: B1-2021_19: "Emancipatory Housing. For a more democratic and socially sustainable European housing towards the 2030 horizon" of the Research Plan of the University of Malaga

[2] This period coincides significantly with implementation of the project that finances this issue, which proved to be particularly timely.

[3] Through a search with the words "housing problem" followed by the acronym of each party and then searching for the first relevant result at the national level, these references are selected as a very first approximation of the different approaches and biases of each party.

[4] It is not the first time that we have been confronted with this twisted form of immobilism that favours the capitalist status quo in the face of its attempts at regulation (Minguet Medina 2022).

[5] It is impossible to attribute the authorship directly to him, but difficult to imagine that it is completely alien.

[6] As this article is being written, the highly prestigious World Press Photo competition for the year 2025 is being judged, won by an image that should be kept in mind as you read these paragraphs that hastily narrate an extreme tragedy and cruelty in full public view, which this text insists on not glossing over. The image is that of a nine-year-old Palestinian boy with both arms amputated very close to the shoulders, as a result of an Israeli attack in March 2024.

[7] He continues: "Planning’s pretence to facilitate the social and economic improvement of an abstract ‘public’ has long been ignored, and physical development now largely manifests itself as the executive arm of a geopolitical strategic or market-driven agenda"(2004, 61).

[8] They are not, according to the author himself, and as one might initially think, beggars, or people in social exclusion, exceptional or minorities, but workers who in order to carry out their trades must live relatively close to the most central and expensive urban spaces and who at the time of publication numbered more than 200,000.

[9] Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region of the Republic of China and therefore, although it has greater degrees of freedom than mainland China, it cannot be considered a democracy. It is, however, a capitalist free market area, and it is there, rather than in the more intervened mainland, that these cases occur (or from where they become known to us).

[10] Around 20%, on investments between €43,000 and €48,000, a supposed bargain that aims to increase the democratisation of investment towards increasingly smaller (and unprotected) investors. More on this later.

[11] It would be of interest, from a legal perspective, to analyse the timeshare formulas on which these investments are based, and their security and guarantees

[12] Not at all suspicious of the slightest opposition to the real estate market, its reason of existence.

[13] In original Spanish, they refer to the hive, and to hive dwelling, in an interesting biomimetic way.

[14] The film comes after the article mentioned above.

[15] For readers who are not very familiar with Spanish local politics, Ada Colau was mayor of Barcelona between 2015 and 2023. Coming from a background of housing associations, her mayoralty was characterised by taking this concern to the institution, promoting numerous innovative initiatives that were also controversial for their distance from the interests of the market. At the other extreme, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, the conservative mayor of Madrid since 2019, was till now renowned for his inaction, in regulatory terms, on the Spanish capital's complicated housing market.

[16] We apologise for potential over-simplicity of the following paragraphs, but it seems appropriate to illuminate, albeit quickly, the complexity of the combined problems we face today in order to better understand the conceptual appropriateness of Emancipatory Housing.

[17] "To properly understand the housing crisis in which we are currently immersed, it is necessary to understand its commodification. And to make real progress on housing issues it will be necessary to develop concrete alternatives to this commodification" (Madden and Marcuse 2018, 73).

[18] The much more radical approach of aiming for a propertyless society goes far beyond the already very ambitious aspirations of this issue.

[19] These conditions, surely shared in many other countries, are, in Spain, a deep-rooted culture, fire-marked by the Spain of the owners formula, coined by the first housing minister of the regime, José Luis Arrese (1959), and insistently applied by the Franco regime.

[20] We emphasise this term in order to express our disagreement with it, as it has nothing to do with democracy, but with a mere lowering of prices and qualities in the unsustainable pursuit of business expansion.

[21] In Spanish, the word paradise (paraíso) is also used to refer to tax havens (paraíso fiscal).

[22] And often with much worse health and safety systems that sometimes cause a scare for the young adventurers of the international precariat.

[23] Other alternatives to investment funds for small investors would be timeshare investments, such as those we have seen, in cabins, or rooms that are offered for sale both as investment and, particularly the latter, for inhabitants of the same (Martin 2023) . This jibarisation of the property and real estate investment market is not only legally questionable, but probably leads to a further complication of existing problems. See https://habitacion.com/ (According to the website, the company is -certified as an emerging company by the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism).

[24] The classic terminological and legalistic discussion about whether it is a fundamental right or not is used as a digression to simply ignore it. Is a right on which others are based, or without which others are not possible, not fundamental?

[25] Always through a large number of casualties, investors who fail and go bankrupt, sometimes dramatically, and who are not part of any of capital's narratives of success.

[26] To take up here the quote from Marina Garcés that Pelegrín and Pérez give us in this issue: "Emancipation is learning to live together, on condition that each one can think about this life for himself" (Garcés 2021, 28).

[27] Be realistic, ask for the impossible.

[28] I would call them 'secularised utopias', insofar as they attribute the entire responsibility for progress to the desire for justice [...] The follower of the secularised utopia [...] envisages future utopias flowing from the accumulation of ambitious specific proposals, without ruling out the appearance of discontinuities, leaps or involutions along the way. [...] it is an assumable dream, compatible with more radical dreams (Martorell Campos 2020, 26-27).

[29] It is worth warning that, possibly, they are also those which, because they are more different and novel, are more appetizing to be reversed and instrumentalised by capitalism itself, in its favour. It is important to be vigilant about this, and it cannot be repeated often enough.

[30] Quetglas uses the Spanish term “aparejador”, to refer to a specific technician in the construction works on site that helps the architect, dealing only with technical and economical, but never creative matters.

[31] Discussion appeared in the reviews, which the authors have managed with determination and boldness.

[32] The quality of this often misunderstood heritage varies widely in different countries, but in the chosen case, under the recurrent influence of Ernst May, we would be referring almost to its canon.

[33] We extend the quotation to this final clarification, clearly intentional in its division into two periods of Francoism, without which it can't be correctly understood.

[34] Some of the main ingredients of the previous housing and economic crisis.

[35] Elsewhere we have even discussed cases where negligent or intentional deterioration can be used as a preparation for an even more irresistible and profitable speculative surge (Minguet Medina 2022, see also Benach 2021). In the specific matter of comprehensive rehabilitation, the case of Park Hill in Sheffield (UK) is particularly clear, where symbolic dwellings of urban marginality have been converted, through rehabilitation, into a trendy neighbourhood.

[36] Decree 1/2012, of 10 January, which approves the Regulatory Regulations of the Municipal Public Registers of Applicants for Subsidised Housing and modifies the Regulations on Subsidised Housing of the Autonomous Community of Andalusia. The Junta de Andalucía is the regional government of the region in which Granada is included.