Community-led housing: Between ‘right to the city’, ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ and post-pandemic cities

Abstract

This paper examines the Self-Managed Housing Program (Law 341), in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This programme created 45 cooperative housing units between 2001 and 2020 in consolidated urban areas currently undergoing renewal processes. It investigates the conditions that the programme has generated for the realisation of the ‘right to the city’ in the context of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ and challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper analyses the origins of the process and mode of cooperative housing production, including tangible and intangible aspects and capacities acquired by the inhabitants. This study used a mixed quantitative and qualitative methodology. The analytical strategy focused on defining a set of dimensions that characterised the self-managed mode of production, conditions of social and urban insertion in the case studied and participants’ perceptions of the influence of material characteristics and organisational arrangements during the pandemic. This paper contributes to our understanding of the socio-economic dynamics in the production of urban space by elucidating the role of the state and specific tensions arising due to bottom-up policies, specific forms adopted by urban experiences of resistance and their contribution in the promotion of concrete conditions of urban life. Finally, this paper characterises an emergent self-managed urbanism and reflects on its possibilities of dialogue with the construction of alternative local policies that challenge growing territorial inequality caused by the subordination of policies to real estate financialisation and its deepening tendencies in the pandemic context.