Ana Vilenica is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow for the ERC project ‘Inhabiting Radical Housing’ at the Polytechnic of Turin’s Inter-university Department of Regional & Urban Studies and Planning (DIST). She is a member of the Radical Housing Journal editorial collectve. She edited four books, among which Radical Housing: Art, Struggle, Care is the most recent with the Institute of Networked Culture in Amsterdam. She is a long-term housing and feminist activist in Serbia, the UK and on the European level. She was a winner of the prestigious Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship for the project focusing on housing deprivation and citizen initiatives for change in Serbia and the UK.
City Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action , 2023
The paper outlines the causes, unfolding and outcomes of the boom and bust of Swiss franc (CHF) l... more The paper outlines the causes, unfolding and outcomes of the boom and bust of Swiss franc (CHF) loans in Serbia with a focus on their relation to class mobility in the setting of a transition to the market economy that transformed the methods of housing acquisition. This process resulted in an extreme housing precarity and declassing for segments of the post-Yugoslav middle and working classes, which has manifested in their dispossession of secure housing, savings, pensions, and the sense of having social security, working towards one's own house and building a family. We demonstrate how besides contributing to declassing, housing precarity played a significant role in rendering CHF-indexed housing debt an opening that activated individual and collective strategies of resistance. Resistance by debtors, and its articulation in the public sphere, relied on multiple logics and tactics-from appeals for existing laws to be respected, to demands for a legal codification of the right to home, to the physical prevention of evictions. These sometimes contradictory and competing logics reflected varied social and economic positions of debtors with their related moralities as well as corresponding different reasonings on acquiring housing, social mobility, and approaches to the financialization of everyday life. By combining the analysis of debtors' personal narratives, public discourses, and the political economy of dependent financialization in Serbia, we flesh out the connection between financialization, housing, ideas about social mobility, post-socialist transformation and declassing. The article reveals how and why predatory loans in post-socialist conditions lead to declassing through precarity and new forms of collective action.
In this paper, we follow Jelena Savić, the only Romani critical race theoretician, poet, and deco... more In this paper, we follow Jelena Savić, the only Romani critical race theoretician, poet, and decolonial activist in Serbia in her call for unpacking the colonial legacy and whiteness behind the feminist politics. Accordingly, we trace the historical trajectory through which whiteness has been introduced into and became paradigmatic of specific post-Yugoslav Serbian feminist activism and theories. In line with Savić's critique of the feminist politics in Serbia, we identify two types of gadji (non-Roma European) feminism(s): gadji saviorism and gadji performative solidarity. In the first section we outline the notion of gadji saviorism as an optics perceiving Roma women as victims of the purportedly backward Romani way of life and the supposed inherent poverty from which Roma women need to be "saved" or "uplifted" by the enlightened Eurocentric culture(s). We point both to similarities and differences between colonial-state antiziganist subjugation of Roma women and children in the Austro-Hungarian empire/kingdom and the contemporary Serbian feminist "savior politics" aligned with transnational European and national Serbian policies. In the second section, we look at the (post)socialist genealogies behind the concept which Savić identified as white feminist "performative solidarity" and its race-blind approach to both feminism and solidarity based on its (self)conflation with the ideology of "sisterhood and unity". Our research shows how these ideas nested in the Serbian feminist scene following the fall of socialism and the end of Cold War.
In Issue 2.1 (May 2020), our editorial collective published ‘Covid-19 and housing struggles: The ... more In Issue 2.1 (May 2020), our editorial collective published ‘Covid-19 and housing struggles: The (re)makings of austerity, disaster capitalism, and the no return to normal’. The paper ended with the following provocation: ‘It is imperative to make the impossibility of returning to normal a praxis: a terrain of inquiry and a terrain of struggle. This means that we need to think about what to do next with what we have at hand’ (RHJ Editorial Collective, 2020, p. 25). Two years later, we reflect on this question through this collective editorial with new clarity. We are writing at a point in which there are old and new wars further degrading the living conditions of many, bolstering the power of fascist regimes. Further, there is a widespread urgency to declare the pandemic over and as an episode of the past, thereby paving the way for a return to ‘normal’. What is this normal that too many seem to be longing for? It seems especially clear now that normal simply means the reproduction of a racial capitalist machine that continues to accumulate profit through violence and dispossession. The state has continued to consolidate power, enact violence, and inflict harm upon those who need protection. Rather than safeguard people’s homes and communities, the state extends its protection and power to landlords, private property, and capital. This is the context in which we, in collaboration with the Unequal Cities Network, have decided to focus our 4.1 Radical Housing Journal issue on the nexus of continuous crisis, carcerality, housing precarity, and abolition.
The COVID-19 pandemic added a new layer of consequences to a care crisis that was already harsh i... more The COVID-19 pandemic added a new layer of consequences to a care crisis that was already harsh in "post-socialist" Serbia. This paper examines the failures of the care infrastructure in Serbia during the pandemic and the resulting intensification of temporary networks of care. We look at housing as a key care infrastructure in the pandemic and discuss how care thrives across the urban space. To conceptualise how housing is sustained as a care infrastructure in the post-Yugoslav context, we introduce the notion of infra-commoning. We discuss how infra-commoning generates dynamic social and economic reproduction patterns that are the foundation of social organisation. Finally, we analyse anti-eviction struggles as an infracommoning practice and explain how collective efforts of solidarity, mutual aid, and self-care are thwarted and rendered legally impossible.
This paper discusses the role of artists engaged in live-work property guardian schemes and their... more This paper discusses the role of artists engaged in live-work property guardian schemes and their potentials to act in a dignifying way at sites of struggle over the regeneration of council housing in London. To gain this understanding, I will describe how artists are embedded in this context by looking at the interaction between artists and property guardian enterprises working on housing estates in London. I will critically examine the artist role through the lance of artwashing critical method, namely allyship of the art world with the real estate industry in the process of social cleansing of housing estates in the UK. Following this, I will discuss the potential of artists to act in a dignified way, drawing on interviews with artists that have lived as property guardians. I will talk about the frustration of artists that stems from their circumstances, namely torn between the necessity to survive within an unaffordable housing market in London and the wish to make art in an uncompromised way. Studying the instrumentalization of artists employed by real-estate industry property guardian enterprises and the artists' attempts to resist this instrumentalization is vital for any understanding of the recent mutations in the capitalist management of housing and art and vital for the attempt to establish new sites of artistic urban struggle for housing justice.
In Balkans region, uneven development under global capitalism has led to significant differences ... more In Balkans region, uneven development under global capitalism has led to significant differences in housing commodification patterns, related (social and housing) policy and associated inequalities. In this article we describe commodification patterns in Slovenia, Serbia and Greece by considering the diversity existing in the semiperiphery. We do this by comparing processes of privatisation of housing, development of the rental sector, strategies to homeownership and legal frameworks of protection of property and housing rights. We find some similarities in specific individual and familial commodification patterns and also pronounced inequalities but also semiperiphery diversity, which has been produced and maintained by the presence (or absence) of policies and state care provided for certain vulnerable groups. These diverse aspects arise from specific local, regional and global histories of housing struggles that mean the responses to them have varied. In this research, we show that Balkans semiperipheral territories must not be regarded as a passive background but as a landscape in which active agents participate in creating and transforming commodification patterns.
During the pandemic, anti-eviction and food solidarity work has continued to be an important self... more During the pandemic, anti-eviction and food solidarity work has continued to be an important self-organised, social, political, peopleactivist and radical infrastructure. Although the catastrophic effects of the so-called "funniest virus in history" in Serbia are gaining momentum, the State not only does not have mechanisms to counter them but systematically hinders and criminalizes self-organized mutual aid efforts. The Roof, a self-organized anti-eviction direct-action collective, has had to be more active than ever. While evictions were temporarily put on hold during the first lockdown, the collective shifted its focus to solidarity with the most socially deprived individuals, collecting and redirecting (mutual) aid, especially in the form of food, hygiene products, and pharmaceuticals. However, after the curfew and lock-down came to an end, public-private bailiffs resumed orchestrating evictions. Although solidarity played an essential role in survival through the pandemic, the criminalization of anti-eviction activities also intensified during this period. An additional burden on a socially deprived, already pandemically-devastated people is the suddenly announced transfer of almost a million old debt cases to public-private bailiffs over the course of the next two years.
This issue 3.1 of the Radical Housing Journal is very rich in content. Embedded within it, we pre... more This issue 3.1 of the Radical Housing Journal is very rich in content. Embedded within it, we present two special issues, one on tenant organizing and resistance, and a second on urban and scholar activism. Further, our Conversations section centers on COVID-19 and housing struggles in the Global South. Within such diversity of content, this editorial aims to discuss past and present housing struggles, as well as the alternative, multidimensional and foundational knowledge they produce. Along with our authors, as editors of this issue, we have grappled, both personally and collectively, with multiple questions related to collaborative knowledge production at a unique time in which a global pandemic has arguably placed housing struggles under a global microscope.
The Issue 2.1 Editorial Collective has been hit by surprise by the Covid-19 pandemic in many comp... more 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.
Edited by Alejandra Reyes, Ana Vilenica, Claire Bowman, Elana Eden, Erin McElroy and Michele Lancione
Seemingly overnight, the use value of housing as a life-nurturing, safe place is at the center of... more Seemingly overnight, the use value of housing as a life-nurturing, safe place is at the center of political discourse, policy-making, and new governmentalities. The right to suitable and secure shelter has shifted from the “radical” margins to the object of unprecedented public policy interventions worldwide. Writing collectively from the relative privilege of our (often precarious) homes, we sketch out a space to reflect on the centrality of housing and home to the Covid-19 crisis, to disentangle the key nexus between housing, the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, austerity, and the current pandemic, and connect current responses to longer-term trajectories of dispossession and disposability, bordering, ethno-nationalism, financialization, imperialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and racism. We argue that much is to be learned from collective organizing and mutual aid in the context of previous moments of disaster capitalism.
The RHJ Editorial Collective are Ana Vilenica, Erin McElroy, Mara Ferreri, Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, Melissa García-Lamarca and Michele Lancione.
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019
This article tackles contradictions of social housing in contemporary Serbia. It shows how residu... more This article tackles contradictions of social housing in contemporary Serbia. It shows how residualised social housing does not bring justice to marginalised groups affected by capitalist expropriation. In this article, the term (anti-)social(ist) housing will be introduced to describe the historically grounded, incomplete, and contradictory solutions that social housing is currently offering in Serbia, as well as its antisocial nature. By focusing on a particular case study, the Kamendin project situated in Zemun Polje, one of the very few social housing projects in Belgrade, the article explores debt crises produced by mechanisms of social housing; the production of racism, segregation, and responsibilisation; and mechanisms of passing responsibility on all levels in an attempt of the state to spend as little money as possible. (Anti-)social(ist) housing is further assessed as a space of struggle that includes different survival and resistance tactics that are used in order to oppose social housing violence. Following that, the article will focus on the possibilities of the activist art project Kamendynamics and the theatre peace How does fascism not disappear? Zlatija Kostić: I sued myself to confront the racialisation and culturalisation of problems by introducing collaborative visual, class-based, and historical-materialist analyses. By documenting and conceptualising mechanisms of social housing and reflecting on the role of activist art within housing struggles, I aim to contribute to anti-segregation and anti-racist housing struggles in Eastern European cities and beyond.
This article examines Western Balkans/EU bordering and debordering practices through a borderscap... more This article examines Western Balkans/EU bordering and debordering practices through a borderscape method in the context of the geopolitical positionality and (de)institutionalization of migrant housing in Serbia. From this perspective, a new ‘border variation’ can be seen emerging after the securitarian turn, transforming the external borderscape of the EU into a space of circular movement. The article sheds light on discourses, practices and places that constitute these spaces of circular movement within the EU external borderscape. In particular, the Western Balkans borderscape is investigated with reference to Serbian migrant housingscapes emerging at the intersection of state-run camps and migrant collective self-organized squatted housing. The focus on migrant housingscapes points to the interconnectedness of camps and squats in the process of facilitating circular movement by the state, the production of mobile commons as a debordering practice, and the production of visual representations of the external border as stabilized ‘scape’ for the EU.
The first issue of the Radical Housing Journal focuses on practices and theories of organizing as... more 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?
Interface: journal for and about social movements, 2017
This paper aims to provide a provisional map of contemporary housing activism in Serbia. It is pa... more This paper aims to provide a provisional map of contemporary housing activism in Serbia. It is part of a broader effort to politicise the housing issue in Serbia, bringing it back to the political arena and facilitate connections between existing, atomised struggles in the field of housing. The paper is based on action research, informed by collective discussions with housing activists. The current housing situation in Serbia will be conceptualised in terms of the neoliberal post-socialist condition on the European periphery. The defining characteristics of housing regimes in Serbia and the conflicts around them will be identified by focusing on concrete situations. These include: elite housing mega-developments, spiralling mortgage debts, evictions, a dysfunctional social housing system and energy poverty, along with emerging housing alternatives. In the concluding chapter, we will reflect on the current state of housing activism in Serbia, setting out a framework for debate around the potential of housing activism and challenges it faces in the future.
Publikacija 'Fragmenti za studije o umetničkim organizacijama' je deo dugoročnog istraživačkog pr... more Publikacija 'Fragmenti za studije o umetničkim organizacijama' je deo dugoročnog istraživačkog projekta 'Umetnička organizacija' koji je osmišljen kao uvod u istraživanje načina (samo) organizovanja, grupnog delovanja i uslova rada (kolektivne produkcije i kolektivne proizvodnje) „vaninstitucionalnih“ umetničkih praksi u jugoslovenskom i postjugoslovenskom prostoru. Naše interesovanje za umetničku organizaciju prevazilazi umetničke okvire. Ono što nas zapravo interesuje jeste kako da kolektivno delujemo u društvu danas.
The publication Fragments for Studies on Art Organisation is part of the project Art Organisation... more The publication Fragments for Studies on Art Organisation is part of the project Art Organisation which has been conceived as an introduction to the research of the ways of (self) organisation, group action and working conditions (collective production and collective generation) of ‘non-institutional’ artistic practices in the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav space. Our interest in art organisation goes beyond artistic frameworks. What we are really interested in is how to act collectively in society today.
During 2017, our work on the project began with interviewing participants and protagonists of the Contemporary Art Scene in Yugoslavia. This work continued in 2018 and 2019, when the respondents were theoreticians and art historians, as well as artists who realized their practice through group art work.
With texts by Ana Vilenica, Lina Džuverović, Milica Pekić, Stevan Vuković, Andrej Mirčev, Leila Topić, and Ana Peraica.
The book is accompanied by an online archive of interviews and seminars with artists, historians and theoreticians involved in ex-Yugoslav art scenes.
Editorial team: Ana Vilenica, Darija Medić, Stevan Vuković & kuda.org Publisher kuda.org, Novi Sad, 2021 Open access ISBN 9788688567220 151 pages
City Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action , 2023
The paper outlines the causes, unfolding and outcomes of the boom and bust of Swiss franc (CHF) l... more The paper outlines the causes, unfolding and outcomes of the boom and bust of Swiss franc (CHF) loans in Serbia with a focus on their relation to class mobility in the setting of a transition to the market economy that transformed the methods of housing acquisition. This process resulted in an extreme housing precarity and declassing for segments of the post-Yugoslav middle and working classes, which has manifested in their dispossession of secure housing, savings, pensions, and the sense of having social security, working towards one's own house and building a family. We demonstrate how besides contributing to declassing, housing precarity played a significant role in rendering CHF-indexed housing debt an opening that activated individual and collective strategies of resistance. Resistance by debtors, and its articulation in the public sphere, relied on multiple logics and tactics-from appeals for existing laws to be respected, to demands for a legal codification of the right to home, to the physical prevention of evictions. These sometimes contradictory and competing logics reflected varied social and economic positions of debtors with their related moralities as well as corresponding different reasonings on acquiring housing, social mobility, and approaches to the financialization of everyday life. By combining the analysis of debtors' personal narratives, public discourses, and the political economy of dependent financialization in Serbia, we flesh out the connection between financialization, housing, ideas about social mobility, post-socialist transformation and declassing. The article reveals how and why predatory loans in post-socialist conditions lead to declassing through precarity and new forms of collective action.
In this paper, we follow Jelena Savić, the only Romani critical race theoretician, poet, and deco... more In this paper, we follow Jelena Savić, the only Romani critical race theoretician, poet, and decolonial activist in Serbia in her call for unpacking the colonial legacy and whiteness behind the feminist politics. Accordingly, we trace the historical trajectory through which whiteness has been introduced into and became paradigmatic of specific post-Yugoslav Serbian feminist activism and theories. In line with Savić's critique of the feminist politics in Serbia, we identify two types of gadji (non-Roma European) feminism(s): gadji saviorism and gadji performative solidarity. In the first section we outline the notion of gadji saviorism as an optics perceiving Roma women as victims of the purportedly backward Romani way of life and the supposed inherent poverty from which Roma women need to be "saved" or "uplifted" by the enlightened Eurocentric culture(s). We point both to similarities and differences between colonial-state antiziganist subjugation of Roma women and children in the Austro-Hungarian empire/kingdom and the contemporary Serbian feminist "savior politics" aligned with transnational European and national Serbian policies. In the second section, we look at the (post)socialist genealogies behind the concept which Savić identified as white feminist "performative solidarity" and its race-blind approach to both feminism and solidarity based on its (self)conflation with the ideology of "sisterhood and unity". Our research shows how these ideas nested in the Serbian feminist scene following the fall of socialism and the end of Cold War.
In Issue 2.1 (May 2020), our editorial collective published ‘Covid-19 and housing struggles: The ... more In Issue 2.1 (May 2020), our editorial collective published ‘Covid-19 and housing struggles: The (re)makings of austerity, disaster capitalism, and the no return to normal’. The paper ended with the following provocation: ‘It is imperative to make the impossibility of returning to normal a praxis: a terrain of inquiry and a terrain of struggle. This means that we need to think about what to do next with what we have at hand’ (RHJ Editorial Collective, 2020, p. 25). Two years later, we reflect on this question through this collective editorial with new clarity. We are writing at a point in which there are old and new wars further degrading the living conditions of many, bolstering the power of fascist regimes. Further, there is a widespread urgency to declare the pandemic over and as an episode of the past, thereby paving the way for a return to ‘normal’. What is this normal that too many seem to be longing for? It seems especially clear now that normal simply means the reproduction of a racial capitalist machine that continues to accumulate profit through violence and dispossession. The state has continued to consolidate power, enact violence, and inflict harm upon those who need protection. Rather than safeguard people’s homes and communities, the state extends its protection and power to landlords, private property, and capital. This is the context in which we, in collaboration with the Unequal Cities Network, have decided to focus our 4.1 Radical Housing Journal issue on the nexus of continuous crisis, carcerality, housing precarity, and abolition.
The COVID-19 pandemic added a new layer of consequences to a care crisis that was already harsh i... more The COVID-19 pandemic added a new layer of consequences to a care crisis that was already harsh in "post-socialist" Serbia. This paper examines the failures of the care infrastructure in Serbia during the pandemic and the resulting intensification of temporary networks of care. We look at housing as a key care infrastructure in the pandemic and discuss how care thrives across the urban space. To conceptualise how housing is sustained as a care infrastructure in the post-Yugoslav context, we introduce the notion of infra-commoning. We discuss how infra-commoning generates dynamic social and economic reproduction patterns that are the foundation of social organisation. Finally, we analyse anti-eviction struggles as an infracommoning practice and explain how collective efforts of solidarity, mutual aid, and self-care are thwarted and rendered legally impossible.
This paper discusses the role of artists engaged in live-work property guardian schemes and their... more This paper discusses the role of artists engaged in live-work property guardian schemes and their potentials to act in a dignifying way at sites of struggle over the regeneration of council housing in London. To gain this understanding, I will describe how artists are embedded in this context by looking at the interaction between artists and property guardian enterprises working on housing estates in London. I will critically examine the artist role through the lance of artwashing critical method, namely allyship of the art world with the real estate industry in the process of social cleansing of housing estates in the UK. Following this, I will discuss the potential of artists to act in a dignified way, drawing on interviews with artists that have lived as property guardians. I will talk about the frustration of artists that stems from their circumstances, namely torn between the necessity to survive within an unaffordable housing market in London and the wish to make art in an uncompromised way. Studying the instrumentalization of artists employed by real-estate industry property guardian enterprises and the artists' attempts to resist this instrumentalization is vital for any understanding of the recent mutations in the capitalist management of housing and art and vital for the attempt to establish new sites of artistic urban struggle for housing justice.
In Balkans region, uneven development under global capitalism has led to significant differences ... more In Balkans region, uneven development under global capitalism has led to significant differences in housing commodification patterns, related (social and housing) policy and associated inequalities. In this article we describe commodification patterns in Slovenia, Serbia and Greece by considering the diversity existing in the semiperiphery. We do this by comparing processes of privatisation of housing, development of the rental sector, strategies to homeownership and legal frameworks of protection of property and housing rights. We find some similarities in specific individual and familial commodification patterns and also pronounced inequalities but also semiperiphery diversity, which has been produced and maintained by the presence (or absence) of policies and state care provided for certain vulnerable groups. These diverse aspects arise from specific local, regional and global histories of housing struggles that mean the responses to them have varied. In this research, we show that Balkans semiperipheral territories must not be regarded as a passive background but as a landscape in which active agents participate in creating and transforming commodification patterns.
During the pandemic, anti-eviction and food solidarity work has continued to be an important self... more During the pandemic, anti-eviction and food solidarity work has continued to be an important self-organised, social, political, peopleactivist and radical infrastructure. Although the catastrophic effects of the so-called "funniest virus in history" in Serbia are gaining momentum, the State not only does not have mechanisms to counter them but systematically hinders and criminalizes self-organized mutual aid efforts. The Roof, a self-organized anti-eviction direct-action collective, has had to be more active than ever. While evictions were temporarily put on hold during the first lockdown, the collective shifted its focus to solidarity with the most socially deprived individuals, collecting and redirecting (mutual) aid, especially in the form of food, hygiene products, and pharmaceuticals. However, after the curfew and lock-down came to an end, public-private bailiffs resumed orchestrating evictions. Although solidarity played an essential role in survival through the pandemic, the criminalization of anti-eviction activities also intensified during this period. An additional burden on a socially deprived, already pandemically-devastated people is the suddenly announced transfer of almost a million old debt cases to public-private bailiffs over the course of the next two years.
This issue 3.1 of the Radical Housing Journal is very rich in content. Embedded within it, we pre... more This issue 3.1 of the Radical Housing Journal is very rich in content. Embedded within it, we present two special issues, one on tenant organizing and resistance, and a second on urban and scholar activism. Further, our Conversations section centers on COVID-19 and housing struggles in the Global South. Within such diversity of content, this editorial aims to discuss past and present housing struggles, as well as the alternative, multidimensional and foundational knowledge they produce. Along with our authors, as editors of this issue, we have grappled, both personally and collectively, with multiple questions related to collaborative knowledge production at a unique time in which a global pandemic has arguably placed housing struggles under a global microscope.
The Issue 2.1 Editorial Collective has been hit by surprise by the Covid-19 pandemic in many comp... more 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.
Edited by Alejandra Reyes, Ana Vilenica, Claire Bowman, Elana Eden, Erin McElroy and Michele Lancione
Seemingly overnight, the use value of housing as a life-nurturing, safe place is at the center of... more Seemingly overnight, the use value of housing as a life-nurturing, safe place is at the center of political discourse, policy-making, and new governmentalities. The right to suitable and secure shelter has shifted from the “radical” margins to the object of unprecedented public policy interventions worldwide. Writing collectively from the relative privilege of our (often precarious) homes, we sketch out a space to reflect on the centrality of housing and home to the Covid-19 crisis, to disentangle the key nexus between housing, the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, austerity, and the current pandemic, and connect current responses to longer-term trajectories of dispossession and disposability, bordering, ethno-nationalism, financialization, imperialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and racism. We argue that much is to be learned from collective organizing and mutual aid in the context of previous moments of disaster capitalism.
The RHJ Editorial Collective are Ana Vilenica, Erin McElroy, Mara Ferreri, Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, Melissa García-Lamarca and Michele Lancione.
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019
This article tackles contradictions of social housing in contemporary Serbia. It shows how residu... more This article tackles contradictions of social housing in contemporary Serbia. It shows how residualised social housing does not bring justice to marginalised groups affected by capitalist expropriation. In this article, the term (anti-)social(ist) housing will be introduced to describe the historically grounded, incomplete, and contradictory solutions that social housing is currently offering in Serbia, as well as its antisocial nature. By focusing on a particular case study, the Kamendin project situated in Zemun Polje, one of the very few social housing projects in Belgrade, the article explores debt crises produced by mechanisms of social housing; the production of racism, segregation, and responsibilisation; and mechanisms of passing responsibility on all levels in an attempt of the state to spend as little money as possible. (Anti-)social(ist) housing is further assessed as a space of struggle that includes different survival and resistance tactics that are used in order to oppose social housing violence. Following that, the article will focus on the possibilities of the activist art project Kamendynamics and the theatre peace How does fascism not disappear? Zlatija Kostić: I sued myself to confront the racialisation and culturalisation of problems by introducing collaborative visual, class-based, and historical-materialist analyses. By documenting and conceptualising mechanisms of social housing and reflecting on the role of activist art within housing struggles, I aim to contribute to anti-segregation and anti-racist housing struggles in Eastern European cities and beyond.
This article examines Western Balkans/EU bordering and debordering practices through a borderscap... more This article examines Western Balkans/EU bordering and debordering practices through a borderscape method in the context of the geopolitical positionality and (de)institutionalization of migrant housing in Serbia. From this perspective, a new ‘border variation’ can be seen emerging after the securitarian turn, transforming the external borderscape of the EU into a space of circular movement. The article sheds light on discourses, practices and places that constitute these spaces of circular movement within the EU external borderscape. In particular, the Western Balkans borderscape is investigated with reference to Serbian migrant housingscapes emerging at the intersection of state-run camps and migrant collective self-organized squatted housing. The focus on migrant housingscapes points to the interconnectedness of camps and squats in the process of facilitating circular movement by the state, the production of mobile commons as a debordering practice, and the production of visual representations of the external border as stabilized ‘scape’ for the EU.
The first issue of the Radical Housing Journal focuses on practices and theories of organizing as... more 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?
Interface: journal for and about social movements, 2017
This paper aims to provide a provisional map of contemporary housing activism in Serbia. It is pa... more This paper aims to provide a provisional map of contemporary housing activism in Serbia. It is part of a broader effort to politicise the housing issue in Serbia, bringing it back to the political arena and facilitate connections between existing, atomised struggles in the field of housing. The paper is based on action research, informed by collective discussions with housing activists. The current housing situation in Serbia will be conceptualised in terms of the neoliberal post-socialist condition on the European periphery. The defining characteristics of housing regimes in Serbia and the conflicts around them will be identified by focusing on concrete situations. These include: elite housing mega-developments, spiralling mortgage debts, evictions, a dysfunctional social housing system and energy poverty, along with emerging housing alternatives. In the concluding chapter, we will reflect on the current state of housing activism in Serbia, setting out a framework for debate around the potential of housing activism and challenges it faces in the future.
Publikacija 'Fragmenti za studije o umetničkim organizacijama' je deo dugoročnog istraživačkog pr... more Publikacija 'Fragmenti za studije o umetničkim organizacijama' je deo dugoročnog istraživačkog projekta 'Umetnička organizacija' koji je osmišljen kao uvod u istraživanje načina (samo) organizovanja, grupnog delovanja i uslova rada (kolektivne produkcije i kolektivne proizvodnje) „vaninstitucionalnih“ umetničkih praksi u jugoslovenskom i postjugoslovenskom prostoru. Naše interesovanje za umetničku organizaciju prevazilazi umetničke okvire. Ono što nas zapravo interesuje jeste kako da kolektivno delujemo u društvu danas.
The publication Fragments for Studies on Art Organisation is part of the project Art Organisation... more The publication Fragments for Studies on Art Organisation is part of the project Art Organisation which has been conceived as an introduction to the research of the ways of (self) organisation, group action and working conditions (collective production and collective generation) of ‘non-institutional’ artistic practices in the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav space. Our interest in art organisation goes beyond artistic frameworks. What we are really interested in is how to act collectively in society today.
During 2017, our work on the project began with interviewing participants and protagonists of the Contemporary Art Scene in Yugoslavia. This work continued in 2018 and 2019, when the respondents were theoreticians and art historians, as well as artists who realized their practice through group art work.
With texts by Ana Vilenica, Lina Džuverović, Milica Pekić, Stevan Vuković, Andrej Mirčev, Leila Topić, and Ana Peraica.
The book is accompanied by an online archive of interviews and seminars with artists, historians and theoreticians involved in ex-Yugoslav art scenes.
Editorial team: Ana Vilenica, Darija Medić, Stevan Vuković & kuda.org Publisher kuda.org, Novi Sad, 2021 Open access ISBN 9788688567220 151 pages
[...] Zbornik je posvećen savremenom gradu kao paradigmatičnom mestu delovanja neoliberalnih kapi... more [...] Zbornik je posvećen savremenom gradu kao paradigmatičnom mestu delovanja neoliberalnih kapitalističkih strategija, ali i mesto različitih praksi otpora, pokušaja preuzimanja grada i stvaranja društvenih alternativa. [...]
Naslov zbornika: Na ruševinama kreativnog grada urednici: Ana Vilenica & kuda.org dizajn i prelom: Demian Bern izdavač: Centar za nove medije_kuda.org, Novi Sad jun 2012. godine broj stranica: 312 prevod sa engleskog jezika: Đorđe Čolić, Branka Ćurčić, Ana Vilenica prevod sa slovenačkog jezika: Zoran Gajić, Savo Romčević lektura: Predrag Rajić
štampa: Daniel print tiraž: 500 ISBN 978-86-88567-03-9
Zbornik tekstova sadrži sledeće eseje: - Ana Vilenica & kuda.org: Uvodnik – „Prendiamoci la città“ („Preuzmimo grad“)! Kako? - Neil Smith: Da li je džentrifikacija prljava reč? - Alberto Toscano: Fabrika, teritorija, metropola, Imperija - David Harvey: Umetnost rente: Globalizacija, monopol i komodifikacija kulture - Matteo Pasquinelli: Kreativna sabotaža u fabrici kulture: umetnost, džentrifikacija i metropola - Stevphen Shukaitis: Od procesa rada u metropoli do umetničkog štrajka - Josephine Berry Slater & Anthony Iles: Skučeni prostor: radikalna umetnost i regenerisani grad - Lidija Radojević: Borba za javni prostor kao klasna borba - Vida Knežević & Marko Miletić: Beograd 2020 – grad čuda, Nova kulturna politika u Srbiji i prostori borbe - Marina Vishmidt: Kontrapolis; ili, ograđivanje, zajedničko dobro i kreativnost u gradovima
Kada je savremeni grad u pitanju, procesi urbanih regeneracija predstavljaju glavni model sprovođenja agresivnih procesa neoliberalizma kao aktuelnog stadijuma kapitalističkog razvoja. Urbana regeneracija se predstavlja kao vizija reinvencije grada za budućnost, kojom se obećava dobrobit za sve, dok se konstantno potvrđuje njen neuspeh. Optimizam urbanih vizija koji se razvija u bliskoj vezi sa simboličkim kapitalom koji proizvode umetnost i kultura, materijalizovane u mašineriji kreativnih industrija, direktno je povezan sa nasiljem i revanšizmom prema svim onim stanovnicima grada koji ne odgovaraju merilima novog projekta savršenog sveta za savršene stanovnike. Fikcija kreativnog grada želi da prikrije vlastite ruševine, ruševine koje konstantno proizvodi u svojoj kreativnoj destrukciji.
Postavlja se pitanje da li je „kreativnost“ prihvatljiva samo kao roba, da ne bi postala kanal otpora, polaganja prava na grad i „preuzimanja grada“? Ono što se nazire kao potencijalni put jeste insistiranje na klasnoj kritici urbanizma, manje kroz iznošenje alternativnih planova, zahteva i agendi održivosti, a više kroz potenciranje povezanosti teorijske proizvodnje i političke militantnosti u budućem bavljenju gradom.
The Commonist Horizon Futures beyond Capitalist Urbanization,, 2022
In this chapter, I show how postwar commons-making and commoning in East Europe has been disregar... more In this chapter, I show how postwar commons-making and commoning in East Europe has been disregarded, while stressing that commoning here requires a more nuanced analysis. Understanding postwar histories of commoning and commons asks for a complex decolonial approach that would include these questions: how do we simultaneously address the legacies of East Europe’s colonial past and the fact that East Europe has been colonized within the capitalist modern world system? How do we reckon with the limited nature of self-managed societal housing and the simultaneous existence of informal housing solutions in Yugoslavia? How do we build a left decolonial approach from the East when the right loudly articulates an anticolonial position? How do we move away from “saving the poor” approaches and toward learning lessons from alternative practices of the struggle for homes. What remains clear is that ignoring the complex (post) Yugoslav housing histories, the classed, racialized, and gendered contradictions of activists, and the informal networks of commoning in illegalized spaces will only result in missed opportunities to inscribe counter-histories, based in experience, into the insurgent path towards another future.
Housing as a basic means of social reproduction came into focus during the COVID-19 crisis in an ... more Housing as a basic means of social reproduction came into focus during the COVID-19 crisis in an unprecedented way in Serbia as well as everywhere else. The “stay at home” instruction exposed existing housing injustices* resulting from privatization, restitution, housing financialization, social housing residualization, homelessness, and gender-based violence and racism against Roma and migrants. Those living in collective centers, but also in informal, insecure, unsafe and unhealthy conditions, found themselves hyper-exposed to risks not only from infection but also from further impoverishment, and from the violence of quarantine managers. Those privileged enough to be staying-at-home have been facing the hyper-exploitation of domestic space**, alongside the continued expectation of free reproductive labour. Homes became schools, day cares for our children, our offices, but also hospitals where we are supposed to care for sick family members or for ourselves. This situation provoked organised reactions throughout society including a grassroots answer from the housing movement. Housing struggles during the pandemic in Serbia could be roughly talked about as going through three phases starting from march 2020; organising militant aid during lockdown, struggles against state repression during the mass protests, and ongoing struggles not to return to normal.
GLOBAL URBANISM Knowledge, Power and the City, 2021
Ana, Ioana, Veda and Zsuzsi are scholars and activists based in Belgrade, Bucharest and Budapest.... more Ana, Ioana, Veda and Zsuzsi are scholars and activists based in Belgrade, Bucharest and Budapest.They kindly agreed to perform this interview collectively, working together to bring to the fore the powerful text that follows. Ana is active in urban movements in Serbia, as well as within the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and the City (EAC). She is also one of the editors of the Radical Housing Journal and the Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements. Ioana is a researcher at the University of Gothenburg focusing on urban policies, urban power structures and related inequalities, as well as a housing activist based in Bucharest, Romania. Veda is an activist and engaged theorist based in Bucharest too, where she has been involved in resisting evictions, organising occupations and building community around collective space. Veda currently works as the facilitator of the EAC. Both Ioana and Veda are involved as militant researchers and organisers with The Common Front for Housing Rights and with the national housing justice confederation BLOCK for Housing, active in several cities and villages in Romania. Last but not least, Zsuzsi is a member of Rákóczi Collective, a group working on establishing rental-based housing cooperatives in Hungary. She is also a founding member of Periféria Policy and Research Center, an independent, critically engaged organisation working on issues of spatial justice and housing based in Budapest. Her work revolves around political economy, with an emphasis on understanding macro-scale dependencies, with a thematic focus on housing.
Nikolić, G., Tatlić, Š. (eds.), The Gray Zones of Creativity and Capital. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2015. ISBN: 978-94-92302-03-8
What is the correlation among the creative industries, creative industry policies, new media para... more What is the correlation among the creative industries, creative industry policies, new media paradigms and capitalism as colonial relations of dominance? What is the role of these industries in the prioritization of the interests of capital at the expense of those of society and how can these paradigms be criticized in the context of the actual, neoliberal, flexible regime of reproduction of capital? To what measure is this regime ‘flexible’ and to what measure it is just an extension of rigid, feudal and racial logics that underline (post)modern representational discourses? To what measure do the concepts of creativity, transparency, openness and flexibility conceal the hegemonic nature of modern hierarchies of exploitation?
This publication brings together six essays that offer a critique of the relationship between the creative industries and capital. It treats ‘the networked world’ — its democracies, cognitivities, its attention and its paradigmatic cultural discourses — as one of the domains wherein and by which capitalism and its colonial relations of dominance are being reproduced, reorganized, perpetuated and ‘modernized’.
The Gray Zones of Creativity and Capital (eds. Gordana Nikolić and Šefik Tatlić) consists of works from a diverse range of authors from around the globe: Jonathan Beller, Josephine Berry Slater, Marc James Léger, Ana Vilenica, Sandi Abram & Irmgard Emmelheinz. The book first appeared in Serbian in 2015.
Colophon Editors: Gordana Nikolić and Šefik Tatlić. Copy-editing: Josip Batinić, Inte Gloerich, Léna Robin, Nina Živančević. Translation: Novica Petrović. Design and EPUB development: Josip Batinić, Léna Robin. Printer: ‘Print on Demand’. Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2015. ISBN: 978-94-92302-03-8.
In February 2014 Bosnia and Herzegovina became a new focal point of protest in Europe, opening an... more In February 2014 Bosnia and Herzegovina became a new focal point of protest in Europe, opening anew the question of the future. It started with workers protesting in the north-eastern, proletarian and formerly socialist city of Tuzla; after clashes with the police culminated in protestors setting institutional buildings on fire it spread all over the country, involving many bigger and smaller cities. Protestors blocked the streets, reclaiming public space for a new politics focusing no longer on national but instead on socio-economic issues. They articulated their demands though plenums – people’s assemblies. One social network comment at the time said the demonstrations were not something out of order, but rather something that brings order. Our aim in this text is to analyse the emergence of the February urban social movement against the background of its causes in the violent transformation from socialism to capitalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina as an ex-Yugoslav republic and the emergence of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a state(less) colony on the periphery of Europe. Our approach is based on analytical reflections and contextualization of the February events and on observations in the field (or very close to it) during active involvement in the events that shaped our everyday life in the days of the uprising.
Brošura će vam u najkraćim i pojednostavljenim crtama predočiti razvoj, stagnaciju ili degradacij... more Brošura će vam u najkraćim i pojednostavljenim crtama predočiti razvoj, stagnaciju ili degradaciju stambenih preovlađujućih politika u jednom delu Beograda tokom XX veka. Pokušaćemo da te tokove prikažemo hronološ-ki, dok je na samoj lokaciji čija je mapa priložena, trasa slična putanji nekog pokvarenog vremeplova. Ona je nužda ove pešačke ture u razbijenom istorijskom pejsa-žu dela beogradske opštine Zvezdara u blizini Vukovog spomenika (najvećim svojim delom poznatim pod nazi-vom Bulbuder). Ovaj deo grada nije po tome izuzetan, sličnim "pokvarenim vremeplovima" može se putovati i u drugim krajevima grada. Ovaj deo kao i bilo koji drugi iz zone koja je pre Drugog svetskog rata smatra-na predgrađem može da služi kao teren za istraživanje istorije stanovanja u Beogradu. Vođenje i publikacija su tek predložak za istraživački ili aktivistički pristup ovoj tematici i načinu na koji takav heterogeni gradski pejsaž može da se posmatra i razume. Publikacijom ćemo se osvrnuti na različite stambene politike u 20. veku u Beogradu sa fokusom na rubne delove grada. U kategorizaciji svrhe izgradnje stavova rukovodićemo se neformalnom šemom (str. 8) koja na pojednostavljen način predstavlja principe i modele stanovanja/stanogradnje u 20. veku kroz podelu na dva ključna tipa i tri perioda: kapitalistički pre Drugog svet-skog rata u Kraljevini Jugoslaviji, socijalistički i kapitali-stički nakon raspada Jugoslavije. U ovoj šemi ključni poj-movi su profitno orijentisana stanogradnja, individualna stanogradnja i socijalna/javna/društvena stanogradnja. Primeri individualne stanogradnje:-za sopstvene potrebe-za profit POGLED NA BEOGRADSKA PREDGRAĐA U 20 VEKU ILI UPUTSTVO ZA POKVARENI VREMEPLOV * Ovo je tura gde pokušavamo da posmatramo i razumemo istoriju grada na osnovu stambene arhitekture a bazirana je više na aktivističkim nego na naučnim principima. Pripadam malom procentu vrlo bogatih ljudi u Beogradu. Živim sa svojom porodicom u ovoj prostranoj vili. Je li to ono, činjenice su iste samo su zaključci drugačiji? U Kraljevini Jugoslaviji sredstva za individualnu gradnju i pristojno stanovanje (u standardima svog doba) bila su dostupna isključivo najvišim društvenim klasama: industrijskoj buržoaziji, bankarima, višim državnim služ-benicima, krupnijim trgovcima, rentijerima itd (oko 10% građana). U zavisnosti od različitih uslova gradili su za ličnu upotrebu, za izdavanje ili kombinovano. U ovom periodu ubedljivo preovlađuje individualna i stanograd-nja za profit. Deo fabričkih postrojenja često je bio i neuslovni masovni radnički smeštaj, dok je manji broj bogataša ulagao u izgradnju smeštaja za radništvo i za siromašne, što je sve zajedno bio ubedljivo najmanji deo ukupne stanogradnje. U savremenoj mejnstrim kulturi ovaj period je idealizo-van kao "zlatno doba srpskog građanstva". Ovaj tipični istorijski mit javlja se na mestu uspostavljanja kapitali-stičke tradicije i kontinuiteta, a gradi se kroz satanizo-vanje socijalističkog perioda i idealizaciju patrijarhalne Kraljevine SHS zasnovane na nacionalno-teritorijalnim mitovima, duboko klasno raslojenoj tvorevini u kojoj je više od 90 posto stanovništva bilo bez ikakvih moguć-nosti za socijalnu pokretljivost i onima koji su živeli u bedi i neimaštini. Mit o "zlatnom dobu" uključuje i ide-alizaciju "srpskih dobrotvora" i zadužbinarstva iz doba Kraljevine Jugoslavije i ponovno ustoličenje ovog huma-nitarnog modela kao rešenja za sveopšte osiromašenje i obespravljenost u savremenoj kapitalističkoj Srbiji. Mi smo stara beogradska porodica. Treća generacija. Nekada je ovo bio miran kraj, a sada se gomila nepoznatog sveta mota po ulicama. Ja sam viši činovnik u uspešnom preduzeću. Zaslužujem moderan i zdrav stan. Plaćam rentu sa oko 30% posto svojih prihoda. U Kraljevini Jugoslaviji ogroman procenat stanovnika Beograda živeo je u neadekvatnim i sa stanovišta ba-zičnih standarda življenja neprihvatljivim uslovima. Za njihove kuće onovremeni istraživači su upotrebljavali izraze poput: "ćumez", "jazbina", "šupa", "sirotinjska štenara", "golubarnik", "teskobne sobice", "čatrlja", "naj-bednija krovinjara" itd. Većina siromašnog stanovništva je bila prinuđena da rentira ili da sama gradi male i skro-mne jednoporodične kuće. Stvarnost života beogradskih nižih klasa je bila konstantna džentrifikacija i njihovo potiskivanje na periferiju usled brzog rasta Beograda nakon Prvog svetskog rata. Između dva rata u Beogradu se javlja i potpuno novi fenomen skvotiranih naselja koje gradi beogradska sirotinja. Državna i gradska administracija tretirala je ova naselja kao ilegalna čineći živote ovih ljudi dodatno nesigurnim. Upravo su ovakva naselja bila i prva mesta na kojima se definisao kolektivni zahtev za pravo na stanovanje od strane onih koji su se našli u nezavidnoj situaciji usled džentrifikacijskih kretanja. Rentijersko-podstanarski odnos se uspostavljao i u si-romašnim slojevima. Bolje stojeći među njima su bili prinuđeni da na svojim placevima grade improvizovane partaje da bi dopunili svoj budžet izdavanjem. I naj-manja stanarina u ovakim neuslovnim prostorijama je međutim držala u krajnjoj bedi podstanare jer su za nju morali da izdvajaju i do 90% svojih prihoda. Tako visoka stanarina za zakupce, sa druge strane često nije bila dovoljna ni za ulaganje u objekte vrlo lošeg kvaliteta od strane vlasnika, zbog čega se život u ovim naseljima odvijao u vrlo nehigijenskim uslovima, gde je često na desetak stanara dolazila samo jedna česma i zajednički toalet. (Beograd se karakterisao visokim stepenom obo-ljenja kao što je tuberkuloza). Struktura novogradnje na osnovama partaja Haotični izgled današnjih dvorišta u delovima grada koji nisu zahvaćeni radikalnim urbanističkim planovima, potiče iz ove parcelizovane osnove placa sa partajama, gde su mnogi stanari razvijali razne modele rekonstrukcije, dogradnje ili novogradnje. Živimo nas trojica u 10 kvad-rata, kad platimo stanarinu jedva nam ostaje za hranu... U početku, tu žive ljudi koji su izgubili stanove prilikom ratnih razaranja u Beogradu (gde je oko 800 zgrada srušeno ili demolirano prilikom bombardovanja i tokom borbi za oslobođenje), izbeglice iz svih krajeva zemlje, službenici i zvaničnici novih vlasti. Kasnije se stanovi opredeljuju prema kriterijumima za korišćenje stambe-nog fonda. Mnogi od ovih stanova su tokom devedese-tih otkupljeni i postali su privatno vlasništvo nekadaš-njih nosilaca stanarskog prava. Danas su mnogi stanovi i čitave zgrade predmet restitucionih procesa i sporova. Stambena politika u kojoj su se obespravljene mase odjednom našle u zgradama i stanovima predviđenim za buržoaziju predmet je brojnih kulturrasističkih ispada i podsmeha u reakcionarnoj političkoj propagandi i kul-turnoj produkciji ali on je uspešno zaživeo i imao funk-ciju u političkim i kulturnim stavovima i obračunima u oburžoazenim slojevima jugoslovenskih elita. Nakon Drugog svetskog rata naj-veći deo viška stambenog prostora predratnih bogatih stanovlasnika i rentijera je konfiskovan ili nacionali-zovan (u zavisnosti od toga da li su vlasnici na neki način sarađivali sa okupatorima). To je moje, to su izgradili moji dedovi! A otkud im pare u vreme kada radnik nije mogao da plati ni stanarinu? Jesu li bili ratni liferanti dok je sirotinja krvarila u ratu ili su možda opsluživali kolonijalne agenture? (oko 75% industrije predratne Jugoslavije bilo je u rukama stranih vlasnika) Partaje, niz neuslovnih dvorišnih stanova 1920-e i 30-e... Moj biznis plan uključuje ulaganje u izgradnju višespratnica sa salonskim stanovima za izdavanje ekonomski stabilnijim građanima. *"pokvareni vremeplov"-referiše na raspored objekata iz različitih istorijskih perioda na turi; Dobri stari Beograd NAPOMENA: Crteži su inspirisani postojećim građevinama ali samo su ilustracija tipova gradnje, istorijskih konteksta i tipiziranih društvenih položaja pretpostavljenih vlasnika ili stanara. Tekst nema činjenične veze sa stvarnim objektima. Buržoaski stan sa tzv. "devojačkom sobom" (9) Ja sam životno bila zavisna od poslodavca. Kada bih izgubila posao gubila sam i stan i hranu. Zato nisam mogla da se bunim zbog mizerne plate. Milikic predgradja traka 1.indd 1 3/3/17 9:56 AM
The transnational racialized financialization of the housing has been increasingly expanding worl... more The transnational racialized financialization of the housing has been increasingly expanding worldwide in recent decades including the emergence of big transnational landlords with the negative impacts such as, the accumulation of debt, rise of housing prices, the housing precarity, houslessnes and eviction crises. In parallel, the pandemic and the current energy crises paired with the crises of costs of living has only worsened living conditions for many including those for whom housing crises has been a permanent homing environment. These transnational racialized capital accumulation occurrences have a variegated geographical and special effects due to “world system” capital, colonialism, racism and patriarchy nexus that underpin logic of housing, home and homemaking. Tenants unions, right to housing groups, anti-eviction, squatters, houseless people movements, landless, cooperative and autonomous housing movements worldwide have been articulating an internationalist response to this transnational “domestic” violence from the grassroots and beyond the local scale. This session aims to outline research trajectories that take seriously radical housing internationalism from below across geographies, temporal scales, theoretical and empirical perspectives. Topics could include: politics of translocal, transnational and transcontinental radical housing networks, collective actions as a means of internationalism in RH movements, politics of language in translocal, transnational and transcontinental radical housing movements, anti-colonialism, anti-racism and anti-patriarchal transnational politics in RH organising, radical care politics in transnational RH movements, politics of commons and transnational RH organising, obstacles and problems of grassroots radical housing internationalism(s).
Send titles and abstracts to Ana Vilenica (ana.vilenica@polito.it) by October 15, 2022 for consideration.
Ovaj tekst u kolažnoj formi, koji objavljujemo u dva dela kolektivni je pokušaj promišljanja isto... more Ovaj tekst u kolažnoj formi, koji objavljujemo u dva dela kolektivni je pokušaj promišljanja istorijskog trenutka u kojem smo se našli, promišljanja van ustaljenih i dobro poznatih pogleda na datu situaciju.
Pitanje socijalne reprodukcije i reproduktivnog rada direktno se tiču stanovanja. Ipak, u aktivis... more Pitanje socijalne reprodukcije i reproduktivnog rada direktno se tiču stanovanja. Ipak, u aktivističkim i teorijskim razmatranjima ova pitanja često ostaju razdvojena. Pitanje stanovanja kompleksno je pitanje koje se veoma često u analizama pojednostavljuje i svodi na razmensku vrednost stana.Iako rodno zasnovano porodično nasilje nije prva asocijacija kada se razmišlja o stambenim borbama, ono je neraskidivo vezano sa pitanjem stanovanja i socijalne reprodukcije. Ono što razlikuje savremeni trenutak od prethodnih istorijskih perioda jeste premeštanje polja borbe iz područja rada u područje socijalne reprodukcije. Glavne borbe danas se vode za stanovanje, vodu, zdravstvo, obrazovanje i zdravu životnu sredinu. Upravo ova situacija omogućava rekonceptualizaciju polja borbe za stanovanje koje je teorijski, konceptualno i na nivou svakodnevnog života neodvojivo od problema vezanih za socijalnu reprodukciju i reproduktivni rad. Namera mi je da u ovom eseju povežem pitanja koja se tiču implikacija krize socijalne reprodukcije u stanovanju i stambenim borbama sa posebnim fokusom na rodno zasnovanom porodičnom nasilju protiv žena. Kroz konkretan primer biće pokazano na koji način država upotrebljavajući kazneno-popravni režim i režim privatnog vlasništva razdvaja različite aspekte borbe za stanovanje i učestvuje u reprodukovanju fizičkog i ekonomskog nasilja na mikro i na makro nivou. Na samom kraju biće razmotrena pitanja vezana za transformaciju stambenog sistema u svetlu mogućih novih politika socijalne reprodukcije i stanovanja.
Rasprave o surogat materinstvu i statusu trans osoba na srpskoj političkoj sceni otvorile su pita... more Rasprave o surogat materinstvu i statusu trans osoba na srpskoj političkoj sceni otvorile su pitanja tretmana roda. Posrijedi su tri pravca: jedan desni i dva lijeva.
Ni granice Europske unije i Srbije o kojoj se u posljednje vrijeme manje piše nije ništa mirnija ... more Ni granice Europske unije i Srbije o kojoj se u posljednje vrijeme manje piše nije ništa mirnija od one između Hrvatske i Bosne i Hercegovine. Nasilne racije, paljenje tuđe privatne imovine, zastrašivanje volontera i nametanje situacije nesigurnosti, odraz su dvosmislenih politika Srbije prema izbjeglicama.
The privatization of the bailiff system in Serbia has led to a surge in evictions — a new organiz... more The privatization of the bailiff system in Serbia has led to a surge in evictions — a new organization has formed to fight for housing justice.
Počev od 2016, Evropska unija intenzivira napor u cilju sprečavanja i filtriranja migranata koji ... more Počev od 2016, Evropska unija intenzivira napor u cilju sprečavanja i filtriranja migranata koji žele da zatraže azil u zemljama Evropske unije. Takvu politiku migrantske krize treba razumeti kao reorganizovanje odnosa između zapadnih sila i njihovih istorijskih predvorja. Cilj takve politike jeste da se migranti, opaženi kao opasnost, drže na odstojanju po svaku cenu. Zato je Evropska unija eksternalizovala svoje granice i proizvela teritorije u kojima migranti cirkulišu na sigurnoj udaljenosti od željenog odredišta. Takve teritorije proizvedene su na primer u zemljama Zapadnog Balkana i u zemljama Severne Afrike, gde se svakodnevno odvijaju opasne borbe za slobodu kretanja protiv sistemskog napada tvrđave Evrope.
Teorijska i politička razmatranja praksi skvotiranja moraju uzeti u obzir sve veći broj ljudi koj... more Teorijska i politička razmatranja praksi skvotiranja moraju uzeti u obzir sve veći broj ljudi koji ostaje bez krova nad glavom zbog nemogućnosti otplate stambenih kredita, preniskih plaća te vrtoglavog rasta cijena najma, kao i historijske borbe za stanovanje te organiziranje u lokalnim zajednicama. Izostanak adekvatne socijalne raspodjele stambenog prostora i sve učestalije deložacijske prijetnje u Srbiji su pokrenule val recentnih borbi koje ukazuju na važnost uspostavljanja saveza militantnih i drugih oblika skvoterskih praksi te politički snažnog stambenog pokreta.
Usporedno s otvaranjem tržišta nekretnina bilo je nužno suziti pravo na siguran i neotuđiv dom. P... more Usporedno s otvaranjem tržišta nekretnina bilo je nužno suziti pravo na siguran i neotuđiv dom. Posljednjih godina u Srbiji, od kada je uveden sustav privatnih izvršitelja i prošireno pravo ovrhe, sužavanje tog prava poprimilo je dimenzije terora.
Stanovanje je u Srbiji danas postalo poprište borbi za pravo na krov nad glavom. U ovoj borbi sta... more Stanovanje je u Srbiji danas postalo poprište borbi za pravo na krov nad glavom. U ovoj borbi stanovanje, kao osnovno sredstvo za reprodukciju života, mesto pripadanja, emotivnih veza, sigurnosti i dostojanstva, osporavaju interesi kapitala i države.
In this conversation, the Manila-based housing activist Michael Beltran discusses with our editor... more 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.
In this conversation RHJ Editors Solange and Ana met with the Argentine researchers and organiser... more In this conversation RHJ Editors Solange and Ana met with the Argentine researchers and organisers, Lucia Cavallero, Verónica Gago and Florencia Presta to learn about the increase in housing violence and struggles for housing and home in Argentina during the pandemic. They describe the intensification of ‘landlord violence’ and land seizures as well as an ‘implosion of home’ as a result of accelerated indebtedness and impoverishment. We tackle issues of feminist spatiality and femicide in the pandemic including how housing and feminist struggles intersect.
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019
This article tackles contradictions of social housing in contemporary Serbia. It shows how residu... more This article tackles contradictions of social housing in contemporary Serbia. It shows how residualised social housing does not bring justice to marginalised groups affected by capitalist expropriation. In this article, the term (anti-)social(ist) housing will be introduced to describe the historically grounded, incomplete, and contradictory solutions that social housing is currently offering in Serbia, as well as its anti-social nature. By focusing on a particular case study, the Kamendin project situated in Zemun Polje, one of the very few social housing projects in Belgrade, the article explores debt crises produced by mechanisms of social housing; the production of racism, segregation, and responsibilisation; and mechanisms of passing responsibility on all levels in an attempt of the state to spend as little money as possible. (Anti-)social(ist) housing is further assessed as a space of struggle that includes different survival and resistance tactics that are used in order to op...
This article examines Western Balkans/EU bordering and debordering practices through a borderscap... more This article examines Western Balkans/EU bordering and debordering practices through a borderscape method in the context of the geopolitical positionality and (de)institutionalisation of migrant housing in Serbia. From this perspective, a new 'border variation' can been seen emerging after the securitarian turn, transforming the external borderscape of the EU into a space of circular movement. The article sheds light on discourses, practices and places that constitute these spaces of circular movement within the EU external borderscape. In particular, the Western Balkans borderscape is investigated with reference to Serbian migrant housingscapes emerging at the intersection of state-run camps and migrant collective self-organised squatted housing. The focus on migrant housingscapes points to the interconnectedness of camps and squats in the process of facilitating circular movement by the state, the production of mobile commons as a debordering practice, and the production of visual representations of the external border as stabilised 'scape' for the EU.
"Ono što radnička klasa može kroz iznenadni prekid rada da pokaže klasi posednika, jednom kada iz... more "Ono što radnička klasa može kroz iznenadni prekid rada da pokaže klasi posednika, jednom kada izraste u konsolidovanu organizaciju, jeste da se celokupna socijalna struktura zasniva na njihovom radu; da je imovina drugih apsolutno bezvredna bez aktivnosti radnika, da su takvi protesti i štrajkovi inherentni sistemu privatne svojine i da će se ponavljati dok god se cela stvar ne napusti – a kada se to dogodi, efektivno će se nastaviti ka eksproprijaciji."
Naša je prošlost uvek ukorenjena u sadašnjosti i borbama u kojima učestvujemo. Prošlost je uvek u... more Naša je prošlost uvek ukorenjena u sadašnjosti i borbama u kojima učestvujemo. Prošlost je uvek u sadašnjosti, a ako se ispriča sa dovoljno istorijsko-materijalističke preciznosti, može da proizvede tektonske poremećaje.
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journal articles by Ana Vilenica
housing commodification patterns, related (social and housing) policy and associated inequalities.
In this article we describe commodification patterns in Slovenia, Serbia and Greece by considering
the diversity existing in the semiperiphery. We do this by comparing processes of privatisation of
housing, development of the rental sector, strategies to homeownership and legal frameworks of
protection of property and housing rights. We find some similarities in specific individual and familial
commodification patterns and also pronounced inequalities but also semiperiphery diversity, which
has been produced and maintained by the presence (or absence) of policies and state care provided
for certain vulnerable groups. These diverse aspects arise from specific local, regional and global
histories of housing struggles that mean the responses to them have varied. In this research, we
show that Balkans semiperipheral territories must not be regarded as a passive background but as a
landscape in which active agents participate in creating and transforming commodification patterns.
Edited by Alejandra Reyes, Ana Vilenica, Claire Bowman, Elana Eden, Erin McElroy and Michele Lancione
The RHJ Editorial Collective are Ana Vilenica, Erin McElroy, Mara Ferreri, Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, Melissa García-Lamarca and Michele Lancione.
Books by Ana Vilenica
During 2017, our work on the project began with interviewing participants and protagonists of the Contemporary Art Scene in Yugoslavia. This work continued in 2018 and 2019, when the respondents were theoreticians and art historians, as well as artists who realized their practice through group art work.
With texts by Ana Vilenica, Lina Džuverović, Milica Pekić, Stevan Vuković, Andrej Mirčev, Leila Topić, and Ana Peraica.
The book is accompanied by an online archive of interviews and seminars with artists, historians and theoreticians involved in ex-Yugoslav art scenes.
Editorial team: Ana Vilenica, Darija Medić, Stevan Vuković & kuda.org
Publisher kuda.org, Novi Sad, 2021
Open access
ISBN 9788688567220
151 pages
housing commodification patterns, related (social and housing) policy and associated inequalities.
In this article we describe commodification patterns in Slovenia, Serbia and Greece by considering
the diversity existing in the semiperiphery. We do this by comparing processes of privatisation of
housing, development of the rental sector, strategies to homeownership and legal frameworks of
protection of property and housing rights. We find some similarities in specific individual and familial
commodification patterns and also pronounced inequalities but also semiperiphery diversity, which
has been produced and maintained by the presence (or absence) of policies and state care provided
for certain vulnerable groups. These diverse aspects arise from specific local, regional and global
histories of housing struggles that mean the responses to them have varied. In this research, we
show that Balkans semiperipheral territories must not be regarded as a passive background but as a
landscape in which active agents participate in creating and transforming commodification patterns.
Edited by Alejandra Reyes, Ana Vilenica, Claire Bowman, Elana Eden, Erin McElroy and Michele Lancione
The RHJ Editorial Collective are Ana Vilenica, Erin McElroy, Mara Ferreri, Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, Melissa García-Lamarca and Michele Lancione.
During 2017, our work on the project began with interviewing participants and protagonists of the Contemporary Art Scene in Yugoslavia. This work continued in 2018 and 2019, when the respondents were theoreticians and art historians, as well as artists who realized their practice through group art work.
With texts by Ana Vilenica, Lina Džuverović, Milica Pekić, Stevan Vuković, Andrej Mirčev, Leila Topić, and Ana Peraica.
The book is accompanied by an online archive of interviews and seminars with artists, historians and theoreticians involved in ex-Yugoslav art scenes.
Editorial team: Ana Vilenica, Darija Medić, Stevan Vuković & kuda.org
Publisher kuda.org, Novi Sad, 2021
Open access
ISBN 9788688567220
151 pages
Naslov zbornika: Na ruševinama kreativnog grada
urednici: Ana Vilenica & kuda.org
dizajn i prelom: Demian Bern
izdavač: Centar za nove medije_kuda.org, Novi Sad
jun 2012. godine
broj stranica: 312
prevod sa engleskog jezika: Đorđe Čolić, Branka Ćurčić, Ana Vilenica
prevod sa slovenačkog jezika: Zoran Gajić, Savo Romčević
lektura: Predrag Rajić
štampa: Daniel print
tiraž: 500
ISBN 978-86-88567-03-9
Zbornik tekstova sadrži sledeće eseje:
- Ana Vilenica & kuda.org: Uvodnik – „Prendiamoci la città“ („Preuzmimo grad“)! Kako?
- Neil Smith: Da li je džentrifikacija prljava reč?
- Alberto Toscano: Fabrika, teritorija, metropola, Imperija
- David Harvey: Umetnost rente: Globalizacija, monopol i komodifikacija kulture
- Matteo Pasquinelli: Kreativna sabotaža u fabrici kulture: umetnost, džentrifikacija i metropola
- Stevphen Shukaitis: Od procesa rada u metropoli do umetničkog štrajka
- Josephine Berry Slater & Anthony Iles: Skučeni prostor: radikalna umetnost i regenerisani grad
- Lidija Radojević: Borba za javni prostor kao klasna borba
- Vida Knežević & Marko Miletić: Beograd 2020 – grad čuda, Nova kulturna politika u Srbiji i prostori borbe
- Marina Vishmidt: Kontrapolis; ili, ograđivanje, zajedničko dobro i kreativnost u gradovima
Kada je savremeni grad u pitanju, procesi urbanih regeneracija predstavljaju glavni model sprovođenja agresivnih procesa neoliberalizma kao aktuelnog stadijuma kapitalističkog razvoja. Urbana regeneracija se predstavlja kao vizija reinvencije grada za budućnost, kojom se obećava dobrobit za sve, dok se konstantno potvrđuje njen neuspeh. Optimizam urbanih vizija koji se razvija u bliskoj vezi sa simboličkim kapitalom koji proizvode umetnost i kultura, materijalizovane u mašineriji kreativnih industrija, direktno je povezan sa nasiljem i revanšizmom prema svim onim stanovnicima grada koji ne odgovaraju merilima novog projekta savršenog sveta za savršene stanovnike. Fikcija kreativnog grada želi da prikrije vlastite ruševine, ruševine koje konstantno proizvodi u svojoj kreativnoj destrukciji.
Postavlja se pitanje da li je „kreativnost“ prihvatljiva samo kao roba, da ne bi postala kanal otpora, polaganja prava na grad i „preuzimanja grada“? Ono što se nazire kao potencijalni put jeste insistiranje na klasnoj kritici urbanizma, manje kroz iznošenje alternativnih planova, zahteva i agendi održivosti, a više kroz potenciranje povezanosti teorijske proizvodnje i političke militantnosti u budućem bavljenju gradom.
march 2020; organising militant aid during lockdown,
struggles against state repression during the mass protests,
and ongoing struggles not to return to normal.
European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and the City (EAC). She is also one of the editors of the Radical Housing Journal and the Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements. Ioana is a researcher at the University of Gothenburg focusing on urban policies, urban power structures and related inequalities, as well as a housing activist based in Bucharest, Romania. Veda is an activist and engaged theorist based in Bucharest too, where she has been involved in resisting evictions,
organising occupations and building community around collective space. Veda currently works as the facilitator of the EAC. Both Ioana and Veda are involved as militant researchers and organisers with The Common Front for Housing Rights and with the national housing justice confederation BLOCK for Housing, active in several cities and villages in Romania. Last but not least, Zsuzsi is a member of Rákóczi Collective, a group working on establishing rental-based housing cooperatives in Hungary. She is also a founding member of Periféria Policy and Research Center, an independent, critically engaged organisation working on issues of spatial justice and housing based in Budapest. Her work revolves around political economy, with an emphasis on understanding macro-scale dependencies, with a thematic focus on housing.
This publication brings together six essays that offer a critique of the relationship between the creative industries and capital. It treats ‘the networked world’ — its democracies, cognitivities, its attention and its paradigmatic cultural discourses — as one of the domains wherein and by which capitalism and its colonial relations of dominance are being reproduced, reorganized, perpetuated and ‘modernized’.
The Gray Zones of Creativity and Capital (eds. Gordana Nikolić and Šefik Tatlić) consists of works from a diverse range of authors from around the globe: Jonathan Beller, Josephine Berry Slater, Marc James Léger, Ana Vilenica, Sandi Abram & Irmgard Emmelheinz. The book first appeared in Serbian in 2015.
Colophon Editors: Gordana Nikolić and Šefik Tatlić. Copy-editing: Josip Batinić, Inte Gloerich, Léna Robin, Nina Živančević. Translation: Novica Petrović. Design and EPUB development: Josip Batinić, Léna Robin. Printer: ‘Print on Demand’. Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2015. ISBN: 978-94-92302-03-8.
Urban and Regional Social Movements
Aπρίλιος 2016, Θεσσαλονίκη, σ. 488, ISBN 978-618-82533-0-8
April 2016, Thessaloniki, 488 p., ISBN 978-618-82533-0-8
Επιµέλεια/ Editors
Κρίστη (Χρυσάνθη) Πετροπούλου / Christy (Chryssanthi) Petropoulou
Αθηνά Βιτοπούλου / Athina Vitopoulou
Χαράλαµπος Τσαβδάρογλου/ Charalampos Tsavdaroglou
Ερευνητική Οµάδα / Research Group
Αόρατες Πόλεις / Invisible Cities
Νο Copyright
Αναφορά ∆ηµιουργού
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poleisaorates@gmail.com
http://aoratespoleis.wordpress.com
Our aim in this text is to analyse the emergence of the February urban social movement against the background of its causes in the violent transformation from socialism to capitalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina as an ex-Yugoslav republic and the emergence of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a state(less) colony on the periphery of Europe. Our approach is based on analytical reflections and contextualization of the February events and on observations in the field (or very close to it) during active involvement in the events that shaped our everyday life in the days of the uprising.
Send titles and abstracts to Ana Vilenica (ana.vilenica@polito.it) by October 15, 2022 for consideration.
Zato je Evropska unija eksternalizovala svoje granice i proizvela teritorije u kojima migranti cirkulišu na sigurnoj udaljenosti od željenog odredišta. Takve teritorije proizvedene su na primer u zemljama Zapadnog Balkana i u zemljama Severne Afrike, gde se svakodnevno odvijaju opasne borbe za slobodu kretanja protiv sistemskog napada tvrđave Evrope.