Contemporary Housing Struggles: A Structural Field of Contention Approach - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ioana Florea is a sociologist working on urban transformations and manifestations of uneven development in Eastern European cities. Her recent contributions on housing struggles are published in Radical Housing Journal (2020), Global Urbanism. Knowledge, Power and the City (Routledge, 2021), Radical Housing: Art, Struggle, Care (Institute of Network Cultures, 2021).

Agnes Gagyi is a sociologist working on Eastern European politics and social movements from the perspective of the region’s long-term world-economic and geopolitical integration. Her recent publications include The Political Economy of Middle Class Politics and the Global Crisis in Eastern Europe (Palgrave, 2021).

Kerstin Jacobsson is Professor of Sociology at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, working in the field of political sociology and social movements. She has edited several books on social movements and civil society in Central and Eastern Europe, including Civil Society Revisited: Lessons from Poland (Berghahn, 2017, co-edited with Elzbieta Korolczuk).

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This OA book provides a comparative study of housing contention in Budapest and Bucharest in 2008-2021. The financialization of housing and the resulting inequalities, expulsions and social contention are a central characteristic of today’s capitalist crisis. These two East European cities that fall outside the usual focus of urban movements research provide an illuminating case of similar structural conditions governed by different political constellations at the national and local scales. Instead of searching for unilinear narratives connecting structural tensions to politicized claims, the book offers an in-depth contextual analysis of multiple forms of contention, their (often unintentional) interactions, and their broader political-structural background, including tensions surrounded by political silence. The authors analyze the two cases and their comparative lessons through what they propose as a “structural field of contention” approach to the multiple, interconnected ways in which structural tensions become (or not) politicized in today’s social movements. The book will appeal to everyone interested in today’s urban tensions and social movements.