In this conversation, the Manila-based housing activist Michael Beltran discusses with our editors (Hung-Ying and Ana) how political oppressions intensified during the pandemic and melded with the ongoing eviction, food, and public health crises. Michael shares with us how the pandemic changed ways of grassroots organizing and enabled the government to seize political opportunities to increase political crackdown and expand infrastructural projects. Michael also shares how people develop their voices and communal alternatives amid compounded crises of eviction, food, public health, and democracy.
The first issue of the Radical Housing Journal focuses on practices and theories of organizing as connected to post-2008 housing struggles. As 2008 was the dawn of the subprime mortgage and financial crisis, and as the RHJ coalesced ten years later in its aftermath, we found this framing apropos. The 2008 crisis was, after all, a global event, constitutive of new routes and formations of global capital that in turn impacted cities, suburbs, and rural spaces alike in highly uneven, though often detrimental, ways. Attentive to this, we hoped to think through its globality and translocality by foregrounding “post-2008” as field of inquiry. What new modes of knowledge pertinent to the task of housing justice organizing could be gained by thinking 2008 through an array of geographies, producing new geographies of theory?
The Issue 2.1 Editorial Collective has been hit by surprise by the Covid-19 pandemic in many complex ways. After taking time to acknowledge the rupture, we decided to go forward with this issue as a way of joining the urgent discussion about the present and future of housing organizing. With this issue, we bring past experiences of struggle into the present as a basis for rethinking the housing doomsday machine that we got stuck with while trying to handle the pandemic and disastrous national quarantine management. Together with articles that reflect on the past experiences of housing struggles, we also opened this issue up for collective reflections about the present and the post-pandemic futures of housing and home.
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