Call for Papers Issue A37 Emancipatory Housing

Guest Editor: Dr. Jorge Minguet Medina (Escuela de Arquitectura, Universidad de Málaga)

The dwelling of the average citizen - not the palace or the convent - was not considered Architecture until the latter, subjected to the labour pressures of decommunalisation and the Industrial Revolution, became a mass of urban and overcrowded population. It was fear of this mass - as much or more than mercy for it - that drove the development of collective housing as an architectural discipline which, consequently, incorporates, from its very birth, a normalising aspiration conducive to the social conformity of its inhabitants. "If the working man has his own house, I have no fear of revolution", said Lord Shaftesbury, one of the first and most important philanthropists dedicated to the promotion and study of social housing.

Today, a revolution is not to be expected. Perhaps because of this, housing conditions and access to them are escalating to levels of hardship and misery unthinkable a few decades ago, without there being a reaction to match the problem on the part of public administrations on any scale. Decades of deregulation and insistence on individualism and the laws of the market have turned the housing market not only into one of the deregulated ones, but also into one of the preferred markets for international speculation, which is increasingly alien to the fact of inhabitation. The globalised influences that confront the forced migration of people with the free flow of financial capital and digital nomads, have come to incorporate previously inconceivable difficulties, which refer to scales far removed from the local and regional. The public administrations responsible for housing, which operate at these smaller scales, are either helpless in the face of these problems or, if they have a neoliberal ideology, they deliberately reinforce them. Thus, the housing market, transferred from local to global scale, gradually ceases to be accessible to the average citizen and inhabitant, not only as an owner, but even as a tenant.

However, Human Rights, numerous National Constitutions, and other often overlooked declarations of rights at all levels continue to recognize the Right to Housing as fundamental. This right is essential for the personal and social development of the individual, a cornerstone for both democracy and capitalism - though the latter, when taken to extremes, tends to contradict it. We need to think of housing as an element capable of making us gain autonomy and of consolidating our identity and sense of belonging, as well as the most basic relationships in our immediate social environment: it provides us with a place in the world. The democratisation of society is not possible without solving the most pressing housing problems. Housing is emancipatory, and this capacity can be developed at all scales: from the detailed design of housing, to policies at all scales, including international ones, for its regulation, promotion, control, etc. 

Papers are invited to reflect on these issues from any of these perspectives or scales: from the historical narrative of the related issues, globally or locally; to proposals for measures, policies, and systems of design and construction, as well as of tenure and management, aimed at understanding and promoting this emancipatory dimension of housing. This call expressly seeks to embrace the multidimensionality of the problem, and hopes to create links between very diverse but somehow convergent approaches to the broad idea being pursued.

Call for submissions: launch on 16 May 2024.

Deadline for submission of articles: 14 October 2024.

Communication to authors: 14 December 2024.