project

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This website is about collective responses to residential precariousness and displacement pressures in cities from the Global North and the Global South, namely Montreal (Canada), New York City (USA), and Santiago (Chile). Based on a 5-year project (2022-2027) funded by the Insight Program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, it builds on previous research on Barcelona and Madrid (Spain) and addresses the following questions: Why do so few people faced with the possibility of losing their home or being displaced engage in collective action? How come, sometimes, some people do manage to act together to address housing problems? How do problem-solving strategies and mobilizations interact? How do activists sustain collective action over time? More broadly, how can we explain the scope and dynamics of housing justice struggles?

This project tries as much as possible to collaborate with housing groups and produce information that will be useful to their work. We will thus define some aspects of the data collection process with them and produce user-friendly knowledge packages that will facilitate their use and diffusion. We will also try to foster transversal, collaborative relations among housing groups involved in the project, be it in Montreal, New York City or Santiago. So far, we have been collaborating with three housing groups in Montreal. We hope to expand our collaborations to groups in other cities in the coming months.