Introduction to special issue: “Urban Movements within and against Racial Capitalism: Housing as a Site of Oppression and Resistance”

Abstract

This special issue seeks to unpack key mechanisms and processes at the intersections of mobilizations around homelessness, excessive policing, evictions, public housing, and vacant building occupations. Three questions drive its contributions: (1) How are the rising tide of housing movements—as well as their repression—around the world (re)shaping urban politics today? (2) What insights have social, urban, and housing movement scholars brought to produce a better understanding of housing under racial capitalism? (3) How does the Black Radical Tradition provide a generative framework for expanding our understanding of housing movements around the world? We build on work that views these processes as systemic and spatial, wherein practices of white supremacist capital accumulation and anti-Black and Indigenous dispossession are embedded and reproduced through individual transactions, such as the purchase and sale of real estate, which are then subsumed into a system of racialized spatialization. In the reproduction of urban space through new iterations of racialization, perceptions of individual outcomes become naturalized as consequences of a colorblind and democratic society that allots success and failure based on individual adherence to the system’s core tenets. We therefore urge housing researchers and organizers to look to the Black Radical Tradition, the role of women tenant organizers, the spatial divergence of the encampment, and the deployment of care as a means of resistance. These frameworks are critical to the remaking of urban space against public and private policies, institutions, and agents who continue to deploy violence to maintain the oppressive structures of commodified housing.

Tenants, race, and mobilization

Recent events, from pandemics to the increased frequency of disasters induced by climate change, have reinforced several enduring crises in the city: the hollowing out of the welfare state and needed public goods and services, the private sector not only creating, but also hired by, austere governments to solve urban problems, and the overwhelming precarity of safe and stable housing within the context of growing global and urban inequality. Race, class, and gender inequalities have worsened following the last four decades of political economic restructuring that created a global class of austere policy makers, leaving little opportunity and recourse for progressive and equitable policy making (Fields and Raymond, 2019). Under these conditions, housing justice movements are gaining greater momentum within and against racial capitalism. This special issue seeks to unpack key mechanisms and processes at the intersections of mobilizations around homelessness, excessive policing, evictions, public housing, and vacant building occupations. Three questions drive its contributions: (1) How are the rising tide of housing movements—as well as their repression—around the world (re)shaping urban politics today? (2) What insights have social, urban, and housing movement scholars brought to produce a better understanding of housing under racial capitalism? (3) How does the Black Radical Tradition provide a generative framework for expanding our understanding of housing movements around the world?

This special issue contextualizes housing movements within racial capitalism through the Black Radical Tradition. First, drawing on Robinson’s provocation in Black Marxism (1983) to challenge absolute categorical abstractions, we suggest tracing them as living categories in space and time. The contributing authors grapple with what a housing movement is, and how it transforms over time and space. Second, Woods (1998) advocated a generative framework—what he calls the blues epistemology—wherein scholars make visible often invisible struggles by challenging the regionalization of racial regimes, analyzing power structures by assembling local voices, and challenging categories that neutralize race. Finally, as Pulido (2006) writes, this approach means looking beyond uneven racial outcomes, to trace the processes underpinning racial capitalism and the forms resistance takes (California Economists Collective, 2021). In this special issue, the editors and authors privilege a commitment to ethnographic and other qualitative methods that highlight these processes in conversation with new media, archival, and historically-informed cases.

Housing movements serve as an illuminating site to reconsider the classical sociological, political science, geographical, and urban planning analyses of social movement formation, strategies, sequencing, and impact. Critical interpretations identify that tenant movements are often women-led (Hamann and Türkmen, 2020; Leavitt and Saeagert, 1984; Marcuse, 1999; Rodriguez, 2021; Williams, 2004), multi-racial (Card, 2018, 2022), cross-scalar (Dreier, 1984), nature-attentive (Cohen, 2022), and from the ground up, seeking to reconstitute market-dominated systems around the world (Feldman and Stall, 2004; Orleck, 2005). As is common in much social science, social movement scholarship converges and diverges around questions of structure and agency. Some approaches give primacy to the workings of individuals, groups, and classes, while others stress macro forces and institutional dynamics. Two dominant approaches within social movement studies are political process theory and resource mobilization theory.

Political process theory assembles structures as a set of ideas, policies, institutions, and governmental entities that restrain and limit transformation. In this view, social movements are composed of individuals with various claims, strategies, and resources that are mobilized to challenge the forms that structures take (McAdam, 1999). They are considered challengers to the system, and as social movements, operate outside the legitimate political processes via strikes, marches, disruptions, and violence. Castells (1983) argues that individuals coalesce as movements when struggling against place-based issues, such as inequitable distribution of quality housing, public goods, and services. For Castells, the fundamental characteristics of what makes urban movements urban social movement were collective consumption, identity of a given territory, and mobilization against the local state. The urban social movement, for Castells, must strive to fundamentally transform the capitalist state. These contributions to urban social movements have been useful to understand the dialectic between agency and structure (also see Brenner et al., 2011), but have yet to take on some of the intersecting complexities of race, gender, technology, policing, capital, and legal structures that emerge when focusing specifically on housing crises around the world. One exception is the recent special issue in Antipode (see Fields et al., 2024.).

The Black Radical Tradition serves as a generative bridge between structure and agency approaches to housing movements, by linking space, temporality, and politics. The global financialization of the housing market has led to the remaking and re-spatializing of capital and racialization (Wyly et al., 2012). As Bledsoe and Wright (2018) note, “anti-Blackness remains a necessary precondition for the perpetuation of capitalism, as the perpetual expansion of capitalist practices requires ‘empty’ spaces open for appropriation—a condition made possible through the modern assumption of Black a-spatiality” (p. 8). Housing, besides functioning as a place for shelter, also constitutes a space to reproduce capital, and a space to reproduce anti-Black politics. This special issue examines liberatory struggles on the ground that challenge how housing is defined and provided, as well as structural changes that shape and react to those struggles.

Women have consistently led tenant movements. ¹ For example, the Women’s Labor League and Glasgow Women’s Housing Association led the vision, tactical strategy, and physical confrontations with police during eviction blockades, where, Mary Barbour recounts, women attacked police “with pagemeal, flour, and whiting” (quoted in Castells, 1983, 30). The implications of their rent strikes have been significant: Castells suggested the Glasgow Rent Strike led to the first public housing strike in the UK, and Gold (2009, 388) argued that women-led struggles in NYC advanced Second Wave Feminism. Nonetheless, early scholarship on housing movements frequently overlooked the important role of care and race in bringing about those changes.

One exception was Leavitt and Saegert (1984, 1990), whose work traced the internal processes of intergenerational organizing tactics like listening, patient communication, and conflict resolution in the occupation and collaborative development of cooperative housing in New York City. Care is a type of unpaid affective relation—like love and solidarity (Lynch et al., 2021)—that creates connections, mobilizes empathy, shares resources, and produces new ways of collectively being that can challenge and transcend neoliberal, patriarchal, and racialized ideologies and practices (see Fields et al., 2024). Mayer and Boudreau (2012, p. 14) have advocated for closer, on-the-ground analysis within urban movements on “individual political subjectivity,” referencing micro- and infra-politics (see Mayer, 2014). More recent research has aimed to address this gap: for example, Fernández Arrigoitia et al. (2023) examination of care as work and the production of feminist housing commons. The internal dynamics of tenant movements—such as care and women leadership—remain under researched, even as they are fundamentally transformative in struggles for housing justice.

Liberation and housing justice

In housing movement literature and practice, the role of race and racialization in sustaining capitalism has become increasingly central to framing and analyzing movement visions and practices. This perspective, which has become known as “racial capitalism,” views capitalism as an ongoing process of racialization, wherein key components of capitalism (such as accumulation, alienation, and determination of exchange value) hinge on the making and remaking of racial difference. “Racialization,” for Omi and Winant (1986, p. 13), is “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group.” Capitalism, and thus capital, propel themselves exclusively by extracting value, through exploiting and deepening differences across and within the social, political, and economic markers of “race.”

Within the context of racial capitalism, scholars have determined that places such as cities are racialized in a way that renders individual household ethnicity invalid (Dantzler, 2021; Dantzler et al., 2022; Ebner, 2020; Fields and Raymond, 2021; Kreichauf, 2023; Pulido, 2017; Rucks-Ahidiana, 2021). As Pulido describes in her work on the intersection of environmental racism and racial capitalism in Flint, Michigan, “Although there are white Flint residents, they suffer a fate similar to their Black neighbors insofar as the entire city is racialized as Black. The situation in Flint is of concern to all of us … because as a racially devalued, surplus place, it is a testing ground for new forms of neoliberal practice that will become increasingly common” (2016, p. 2).

This special issue aims to extend this notion of racialized places to housing markets and politics, which have experienced historical trajectories of disinvestment and reinvestment across the long 20^th century, with particular attention to the periods post-Great Migration (Lake, 2017; Teresa, 2022; Wyly et al., 2009).

The core tenets of racial capitalism, with its inextricable and codependent linkage of race and capital, push risk and dispossession into nonwhite bodies, properties, and neighborhoods, and redistribute safety and profit into white bodies, properties, and neighborhoods. From the birth of the polis to contemporary cities, political institutions reproduce various racial hierarchies and regimes (Hanchard, 2018). Nonwhite individuals, thus, can benefit from extractive investment in Black neighborhoods, while white individuals can face dispossession and devaluation through their inability to escape proximity to Blackness. The systemic contradictions of, and individual exceptions to, racial capitalism in the housing market can sometimes weaken efforts to resist and restructure through traditional modes of housing activism.

Activist housing organizations in the United States, for example, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) in Oakland, have occasionally weakened their effectiveness when they separate Latinx from Black anti-eviction struggles. For years, an anti-displacement chapter within ACCE Oakland had both Latinx and Black Americans struggle together against ongoing gentrification and displacement, until in 2019 some Black ACCE members founded a Black Housing Union. The anti-displacement chapter and the Black Housing Union have since been carrying out the same struggle, but in two separate organizational spaces, with separate strategy meetings—which has ended up weakening the unity and effectiveness of the movement. Comparable struggles in Spain placed no such limits on ethnic or migrant solidarity; the ideology of black unity is not as potent in Spanish activist circles as it is in the United States (Flierl, 2025). The Black Lives Matter movement, while achieving one of the largest social movement mobilizations in U.S. history, and thereby generating a national reckoning over racism and systemic inequality, has also left in its wake a view of Black exceptionality that has sometimes contributed to divisiveness and competition within nonwhite communities, and distracted from solidarity among all ethnic groups in the face of shared adversaries (Mayer, 2022, 77–99). Yet racial discrimination, and marginalization of nonwhite perspectives in left organizing remains an obstacle to this solidarity in the United States.

While much of the scholarship on racial capitalism looks at the nonwhite victims of this system, Hackworth and Dantzler (2024) urge scholars to focus equally on the predominantly white beneficiaries of this system of exploitation. In the last four decades, urban housing markets have restructured in violent booms and busts, producing new dynamics through which to accumulate capital and hoard revenues, as well as novel types of dispossession and victimization. The authors in this special issue pay particular attention to the following transformative processes: the ways racial capitalist housing systems accelerate inequality through home foreclosures and homelessness; the efforts to privatize public housing and its management; and the specter of increasingly militarized policing strategies that undergird the processes of dispossession and accumulation through slow and indirect (i.e., harassment) and fast and direct (i.e., eviction) violence. We upend the focus on victimization by engaging directly with the Black Radical Tradition of resistance through reclamation, reappropriation, and other practices of redefining (urban housing) space by centering race (Kelley, 2017; Robinson, 1983; Rodriguez, 2021).

Contributions

The authors in this special issue highlight movements involved in anti-racist housing organizing against social relations, processes, and structures of racial capitalist economies and states. Local case studies focus on São Paulo, New York City, Barcelona, Pôrto Alegre, Miami, Oakland, and Los Angeles. The authors’ contributions draw on national housing campaigns and political horizons, contesting tenant and policymaking visions around housing, mutual-learning, placemaking, women leadership, multiracial coalition formation, challenges to top-down renewal, as well as court and police repression and restraints experienced by counter-movements. Respatialized housing struggles are forged in particular places or communities, where they reclaim land shaped by years of local struggle, resist police around local incidents, and respond to legal barriers enacted to evict vulnerable households; often they prefigure collective self-management or determination. These place-based struggles shift from local spaces to multi-sited, national, and international campaigns thanks to the rise of digital social movements, which have expanded capacity and challenged traditional modes of participation in planning.

In “Racial capitalism and self-organized houseless encampments,” Alex Farrington (2025) reconstructs two historical case studies: Dignity Village in Portland, OR, and Umoja Village in Miami, FL. He employs interviews, archives, newspapers, and other online materials to examine how houseless individuals coalesced into mobilizations that employ the village model toward liberation. The vision for Dignity Village in Portland emerged out of a Street Roots article—a publication written by and about houseless individuals—imagining a self-governed, safe place to sleep and store things. This led to the seizure of land by eight individuals: a mechanism to create communal space and pressure government to intervene in the problem. In Miami, organizers of Umoja Village developed a law-informed strategy from the 1998 ACLU v. City of Miami ruling and created the campaign “Take Back the Land,” inspired both by the American slave rebellions and the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil. The campaign of 25 people occupied land, cleaned up the lot, and developed infrastructure for managing waste and eating. When police arrived to evict them, activists deterred them by sharing the 1998 court ruling in their favor. “Encampments constitute,” Farrington argues, “a self-organized alternative to the failures of local shelter systems.” To explain this, he draws on Caldera’s transversive logics, or the interaction between compliance and opposition with the state—wherein the self-organized encampments occupied land, drew attention of the media and local government, and ultimately challenged a racialized housing system. Reflecting on these victories, activists questioned how to prevent cooptation and to parlay “wins into more radical wins.” For them, this meant to fight for more decommodified and publicly-owned housing models. In both cases, groups of houseless succeeded in circumventing police repression by employing the collective village model to counter racial banishment.

In “The long shadow of the repressive state,” Flierl (2025) dives deeper into policing and the courts. Finding that these institutions reproduce racial and gendered hierarchies in the housing system, she argues they should be central to critical housing studies. She examines how the Oakland Housing Authority Police Department and the Catalan autonomous police force (mossos d’esquadra) and private eviction services (such as Desokupa) in Barcelona harass, surveil, and criminalize residents and tenant activists. Drawing on interviews, police file archives, and media analysis, Flierl examines the expansion and militarization of policing to control housing by looking at budgets (including growing expenditures on tanks, drones, helicopters, and assault rifles), and the new roles taken on by police officers. She finds that policing has expanded beyond implementing judicial rules. Her data show how police increasingly harass and criminalize residents for mundane acts such as protest or anti-eviction activism, how they encourage evictions, and how, in Barcelona, they stood by to allow private eviction services to illegally evict tenants during the COVID-19 lockdown. Furthermore, they “variously coerce people to abandon their homes before the judicial fact, acting as de facto judge and evictor.” Flierl argues police exploit “legal grey zones” in the housing authorities and the eviction process, to the overwhelming detriment of communities of color, women, and single mothers, which perpetuates the “historical role [of the police] in racial capitalism of protecting the nexus of whiteness, property and privilege.”

Stahl’s (2025) piece on housing publics introduces the framework of “situated resistance” by New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) tenants to challenge the poor living conditions and the increasing role of private actors. Stahl employs participant observation, interviews, and archival media material with a pragmatist approach to planning to unravel how various publics—centering Black women tenant organizers—deliberate and challenge the housing status quo in racial capitalism. Federal austerity policies have decreased public housing authority (PHA) budgets across the United States, forcing NYCHA and other PHAs to establish public–private partnerships to address renovation and management issues. “Resistance is situated,” Stahl argues: in this context, tenants reacted against lead paint, pest infestations, and numerous repair needs to “keep public housing public.” The case study illustrates how planners ought to integrate tenants into governing bodies around their own housing, and how planners need to push for redirecting resources towards innovative funding models advocated for by bottom-up organizations. For example, NYCHA’s funding shortfalls could be met by cutting executive pay, taxing the rich, or transferring funds from bloated police and carceral budgets toward public housing.

D’Ottaviano’s (2025) contribution—“Brazilian housing movements and the right to the city”—examines how housing mobilization in Brazil since the 1970s strengthened the voice of poor people, provided a set of strategies of resistance, and facilitated the interaction with government officials that led to concessions. “Housing movements have become,” D’Ottaviano writes, “essential players in the struggle for low-income households’ rights.” Drawing on interviews, archives, and Miraftab’s concept of insurgent citizenship, the case illustrates how peripheral urbanization in the 1970s and 1980s institutionalized through government recognition, which extended through numerous tenant movement organizations across the country. At the national level, coalitions helped pass laws to curtail private property rights and increase public participation in urbanization. Focusing on São Paulo, D’Ottaviano highlights how the strategy of occupation of over 150 buildings served to exert pressure, draw public attention, and gain concessions like resources and renovations. However, the wins were sometimes temporary, leading to repression through funding cuts, delegitimating actions, and criminalizing leaders. D’Ottaviano shows how the case improves our understanding of alternative resistances and practices that can support the survival of the most marginalized, while it simultaneously expands our understanding of the planning and policy process. She ends by citing an activist reflecting on their background: “I didn’t go to college. Everything I learned was in practice … the movement’s day-to-day life.”

The concluding article by Vestal (2025) explores the historic water flows of the Los Angeles River and how the prior construction of collective water infrastructure provided the opportunity to accumulate communal land. However, the communal usage of the land in Skid Row was criminalized by the city through its Housing Commission, which weaponized racial differentiation to attack collective living and working practices. Employing a racial capitalist analysis, Vestal shows how this attack was part of a larger process of the changing modes of racialization during the early decades of the 20^th century. This allows him “to reimagine the unimagined subjects of political struggle as a recovery of historical erasure.”

In different ways, these contributions demonstrate the critical role of a racial capitalism perspective in generating new insights and directions in housing movement research and practice. Specifically, how we can reframe traditional understandings of housing as a site of oppression and resistance for individuals, into one that is inextricably linked to the production of racial difference and capital accumulation. From historical practices of redlining to ongoing racialized disparities in home appraisals, real estate agents, industries, and policies have worked in concert to ensure that predominantly non-white neighborhoods sustain property values (and thus, the public goods and services) that are systemically lower than comparable properties in predominantly white neighborhoods (Dantzler, 2021; Fluri et al., 2022; Markley et al., 2020). These practices have embedded themselves into permanent structures that reproduce capitalist accumulation and circulation, as well as into local structures, such as the municipal tax system (Gonzalez, 2021; Henricks and Seamster, 2017; Taylor, 2012).

We build on work that views these processes as systemic and spatial, wherein practices of white supremacist capital accumulation and anti-Black and Indigenous dispossession are embedded and reproduced through individual transactions, such as the purchase and sale of real estate, which are then subsumed into a system of racialized spatialization. In the reproduction of urban space through new iterations of racialization, perceptions of individual outcomes become naturalized as consequences of a colorblind and democratic society that allots success and failure based on individual adherence to the system’s core tenets. We therefore urge housing researchers and organizers to look to the Black Radical Tradition, the role of women tenant organizers, the spatial divergence of the encampment, and the deployment of care as a means of resistance; these frameworks are critical to the remaking of urban space against public and private policies, institutions, and agents who continue to deploy violence to maintain the oppressive structures of commodified housing.