Overcoming hyper-localism: How global corporate landlords shape their own opposition

Abstract

Housing movements often form at the hyper-local level whereas their opponents, financialised housing companies, are increasingly global actors. This article asks how housing movements are able to shift scale. It uses the case of Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen (DWE), a campaign seeking to socialise financialised housing in Berlin that managed to unite the city’s fragmented housing movement. It argues that scale shift cannot only be explained through the movements’ own agency, but equally with structural conditions. The emergence of global corporate landlords as super–landlords has led to the roll-out of similar valorisation strategies in a spatial–temporal condensed way, resulting in landlord-based city-wide tenant networks, which united in the campaign for socialisation. Apart from this organisational scale shift, DWE also upscaled its demands into a coherent vision of affordable, decommodified, democratic and environmentally just housing provision.