Contents viii List of contributors 1 PART I Introduction to the Handbook on Urban Social Movements Anna Domaradzka and Pierre Hamel 1 THE RIGHT TO THE CITY IN FRONT OF CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION AND STATE PLANNING 2 Beyond the localism of urban social movements Pierre Hamel 14 3 A structural field of contention approach to urban struggles Ioana Florea, Agnes Gagyi and Kerstin Jacobsson 28 4 Urban battlegrounds: strategies of action and drivers of participation in radical movements in Italy Carlo Genova 43 Urban social movements and regulation theory: tenant protest in Berlin Lisa Vollmer 58 5 PART II 6 7 8 9 FIGHTING SOCIAL INEQUALITIES, RACISM, EXCLUSION, AND POVERTY IN CITIES AROUND THE WORLD Spatial segregation during ‘financial apartheid’: Reclaim the City and its struggle for housing in Cape Town, South Africa Antje Daniel 81 Tenants’ movements in Europe: from working-class struggles to marginalization Dominika V. Polanska 97 Anti-eviction mobilizations in Barcelona, Montreal, and New York City Marcos Ancelovici and Montserrat Emperador Badimon 114 Hands up, don’t shoot: safety and the city in the twenty-first century Mary Bernstein and Jordan McMillan 131 v Anna Domaradzka and Pierre Hamel - 9781839109652 Downloaded from https://www.elgaronline.com/ at 02/15/2024 05:33:20PM by ancelovici.marcos@uqam.ca via Marcos Ancelovici vi Handbook on urban social movements 10 Rural–urban migration and the right to the city: urban social movements in the informal settlements of Namibia and Ghana Eric Yankson and Ada Adoley Allotey PART III 11 URBAN MOVEMENTS AND CITY LIFE IN RETROSPECT Brazil’s urban social movements and urban transformations in perspective Abigail Friendly 12 Squatting, a SWOT analysis Hans Pruijt 13 Building real utopias: urban grassroots activism, emotions and prefigurative politics Tommaso Gravante 14 Gentrification, resistance, and the reconceptualization of community through place-based social media: the future will not be Instagrammed S. Ashleigh Weeden, Kyle A. Rich and @ParkdaleLife PART IV 148 168 185 199 214 IN SEARCH OF URBAN CITIZENSHIP THROUGH EXPERIENCING VARIOUS MODELS OF SOLIDARITY 15 Claiming urban citizenship: rights and practices Maciej Kowalewski 16 Beyond co-optation and autonomy: the experience of two Argentinean social organizations in the face of the left turn Francisco Longa 248 The rise of urban resistance movements and spatialized oppression: the Gezi legacy Aysegul Can 265 17 PART V 18 19 232 COLLECTIVE ACTION, URBAN POLITICS AND/ OR URBAN POLICIES The everyday politics of the urban commons: ambivalent political possibilities in the dialectical, evolving and selective urban context Iolanda Bianchi The 2019–2020 Chilean protests: the emergence of a movement of urban memories Alicia Olivari and Manuela Badilla 284 300 Anna Domaradzka and Pierre Hamel - 9781839109652 Downloaded from https://www.elgaronline.com/ at 02/15/2024 05:33:20PM by ancelovici.marcos@uqam.ca via Marcos Ancelovici Contents vii 20 21 22 23 Index Rage against the machine: how twenty-first century political machines constitute their own opposition Stephanie Ternullo and Jeffrey N. Parker 315 Neoliberal urban redevelopment and its discontents: rising urban activism in Seoul Chungse Jung 330 Political engagement of urban social movements: a road to decolonization or recolonization of urban management? Tomasz Sowada 344 Neoliberal urban governance and slum dweller movements: the mutual fragmentation of policies and community-based organizations in the city of Buenos Aires Joaquín Andrés Benitez, María Cristina Cravino, Maximiliano Duarte and Carla Fainstein 364 381 Anna Domaradzka and Pierre Hamel - 9781839109652 Downloaded from https://www.elgaronline.com/ at 02/15/2024 05:33:20PM by ancelovici.marcos@uqam.ca via Marcos Ancelovici 8. Anti-eviction mobilizations in Barcelona, Montreal, and New York City Marcos Ancelovici and Montserrat Emperador Badimon INTRODUCTION With the global financial crisis of 2008 (Martin and Niedt 2015), the intensification and spread of gentrification (Albet and Benach 2018; Lees et al. 2016), and the financialization of real estate (Rolnik 2019), housing insecurity and affordability have become central issues in the public debate in the Global North. Some authors speak of a “global capitalist phenomenon” (Soederberg 2018; Brickell et al. 2017; Baeten et al. 2021), whereas some international organizations mention a genuine “global crisis” (UN-Habitat 2011: VIII). Forced displacement and, more specifically, evictions are the most brutal manifestation of such phenomena. Despite temporary eviction moratoria adopted in several countries during the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, the latter deepened this trend. As a result, ‘eviction studies’ have grown dramatically in the last ten years and today one can no longer argue that “Eviction is perhaps the most understudied process affecting the lives of the urban poor” (Desmond 2012: 89).1 However, the study of evictions often alternates between, on the one hand, macro-level structural analysis stressing market forces, urban planning, and public policy, and, on the other hand, micro-level individual analysis looking closely at interactions as well as residential choices and trajectories. Even though “evictions are also collective events that impact whole neighborhoods and communities” (Weinstein 2021: 13), the collective dimension is often neglected and “few studies in this area touch on questions of collective action at all” (Weinstein 2021: 15). There is thus a growing number of studies of eviction processes, but few studies of mobilization dynamics against this pernicious social problem (for an exception, see Pasotti 2020). While the urban studies and geography literatures do sometimes analyse opposition to evictions and displacement, they often boil down this opposition to instances of ‘resistance’ (see Annunziata and Rivas 2018; Brickell et al. 2017; González 2016; Lees et al. 2018; Newman and Wyly 2006). According to Brown-Saracino (2016: 223), “systematic examination of these acts of resistance remains limited, with more attention devoted to sentiments of resistance than to protests and organizing”. Similarly, as Lees et al. (2018: 347) point out: “Urban scholars have sought to conceptualize the right to the city … but they have spent less energy on conceptualizing the actual fight to stay put in the face of gentrification”. Hence Brown-Saracino’s call 114 Marcos Ancelovici and Montserrat Emperador Badimon - 9781839109652 Downloaded from https://www.elgaronline.com/ at 02/15/2024 05:21:24PM by ancelovici.marcos@uqam.ca via Marcos Ancelovici Anti-eviction mobilizations in Barcelona, Montreal, and New York City 115 “for the application of a social movements framework to this sphere of gentrification studies” (2016: 223). This chapter answers this call. It will first draw a general picture of evictions as a social problem and outline the main characteristics of anti-eviction mobilizations. It will then present the repertoire of action of anti-eviction mobilizations with examples from recent campaigns and struggles in Montreal, New York City, and Barcelona. EVICTIONS, OPPORTUNITIES, AND REPERTOIRES In its most basic understanding, an eviction refers to “the act of expelling tenants from rental property” (Soederberg 2018: 286). This act is the outcome of a very codified legal process that begins with the landlord terminating the tenancy of the property and then filing a lawsuit to have the tenant evicted. It requires a judge to make an order and a person empowered by the court, sometimes with the help of the police, to enforce said order. Although the reality and experience of this process vary across institutional contexts (even within a single country like the United States2), without these steps, there is no eviction in the strict sense. However, some scholars challenge such restrictive use of the category ‘eviction’ and point out that tenants can be expelled from their home without going through the entire legal process of eviction (Hartman and Robinson 2003: 463). Others stress that the threat of eviction is actually way more prevalent than evictions as such3 and that, although it does not necessarily lead to displacement, it constitutes a critical factor exacerbating financial and housing precarity and can even become an ordinary instrument of property management (Leung et al. 2021: 317; see also Garboden and Rosen 2019). Brickell et al. (2017: 1) go even further and use the definition proposed by Amnesty International, namely, “when people are forced out of their homes and off their land against their will, with little notice or none at all, often with the threat or use of violence”. Here, tenants are no longer the only category considered and evictions can affect small landowners or homeowners as well, as it has happened in Spain and the United States since the 2008 financial crisis for example (foreclosures should thus be included in the study of evictions; see Martin and Niedt 2015). Such perspectives entail looking beyond the formal, terminal step of the eviction process and taking into account a broader range of events and phenomena. Although they face many problems in terms of data gathering because of the informality they attempt to grasp (Hartman and Robinson 2003: 466), they have the merit of emphasizing the fact that evictions are not static or even discrete events but processes. Some prefer thus to talk of evicting rather than eviction (Baker 2021; Garboden and Rosen 2019). Once we think of evictions in terms of legal and extra-legal processes, it becomes obvious that they involve a chain of decisions and events unfolding over time and that, therefore, tenants and activists can intervene at different moments and in different ways to try to stop the eviction process. They can intervene upstream, by providing information and accompanying people facing an eviction. This stage can involve providing legal assistance in housing court. They can also use disruptive Marcos Ancelovici and Montserrat Emperador Badimon - 9781839109652 Downloaded from https://www.elgaronline.com/ at 02/15/2024 05:21:24PM by ancelovici.marcos@uqam.ca via Marcos Ancelovici 116 Handbook on urban social movements tactics to put pressure on powerholders – sometimes small landlords, but above all corporate landlords, banks, hedge funds, and public authorities – to either negotiate a compromise or gain more time to find a viable housing alternative for the people affected. They can also intervene downstream, when the eviction process is ending and the person is about to be physically expelled from their home, and engage in blockades and other forms of civil disobedience. And finally, they can act alongside, or after, the eviction process to find alternative accommodations (through squatting, for example) or campaign for reforms that would alter the institutional context. These different modes of action during the eviction process are conditioned by the institutional context and a corresponding structure of opportunities – that is, a set of unequally distributed pathways for action (Merton 1996)4 – as well as a repertoire of action – that is, a historically situated set of learned routines on which actors rely when they act collectively (Tilly 1995, 2008). These two conditioning factors – the institutional context and the repertoire of action – are closely intertwined insofar as the repertoire stems from the interaction between actors and the structure of opportunities over time. The more actors engage along a given pathway, the more they are socialized into using it, and the more they turn to it spontaneously when they need to make claims or achieve certain goals. Tactical innovations are rather rare and generally take place at the margins (Tilly 1995). As a result, in each institutional context, certain modes of action are taken for granted whereas others are ignored or ruled out. In this sense, repertoires of collective action both enable and constrain collective action and they are more context-specific than movement-specific. In the following sections, we outline some tactics and strategies of anti-eviction mobilizations in three different settings: Montreal, New York City, and Barcelona. Although these cities are by no means homogeneous and cannot be boiled down to a single mode of action or strategy (we can obviously find a diversity of tactics and strategies in each one), we focus on emblematic or prevailing tactics to contrast different logics at play in the struggle against evictions. MONTREAL, BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL SERVICES AND THE COLLECTIVE DEFENCE OF RIGHTS Long considered an affordable renters’ city by North American standards, Montreal is the Canadian city with the greatest proportion of renters. In 2016, the latter made up 63.3 per cent of the population, compared to 47.2 per cent in Toronto, 53.1 per cent in Vancouver, 38.6 per cent in the province of Quebec, and 31.8 per cent in Canada.5 Although there are no exact data about the number of actual evictions – because many instances of forced displacement simply take place off the radar and are thus invisible – the Quebec Housing Court (Tribunal administratif du logement, TAL) collects data about eviction filings (which may end up, or not, in actual evictions). These data are thus approximative and should be considered the tip of the iceberg. According to Gallié (2016), each year the TAL receives between 30,000 and 50,000 eviction filings for unpaid rent or rent arrears in Quebec. Moreover, each year about Marcos Ancelovici and Montserrat Emperador Badimon - 9781839109652 Downloaded from https://www.elgaronline.com/ at 02/15/2024 05:21:24PM by ancelovici.marcos@uqam.ca via Marcos Ancelovici Anti-eviction mobilizations in Barcelona, Montreal, and New York City 117 1 per cent of the tenant population of Quebec has to deal with either a repossession claim from the landlord (reprise de logement) or an eviction (Gallié et al. 2017). This trend seems to be deepening. According to the Coalition of Housing Committees and Tenants Associations of Quebec (RCLALQ), which includes most tenant unions in the province, the number of tenants contacting housing committees because they are facing eviction threats increased by 46 per cent in 2021.6 Insofar as most renters in Quebec are concentrated in Montreal, we can assume that Montreal is more affected than other parts of the province. This pattern is closely associated with the growth cycle of the Montreal real estate market. According to Gaudreau et al. (2020), in Montreal the 2000–2020 period ended with a housing crisis illustrated by a very low vacancy rate as well as steep rent and sale price increases. To face this increase in rents, housing insecurity, and evictions, Montrealers can lean on a solid housing rights movement. In the city of Montreal, there are more than 15 active housing committees (comités logement) which were created in the 1970s and 1980s (Comité Logement Petite Patrie 2020). Initially created as part of civic struggles against urban development projects that had led to the destruction of thousands of housing units in several of the city’s working-class neighbourhoods in the 1960s and 1970s (see Bergeron-Gaudin forthcoming),7 housing committees obtained access to public funding in the 1980s and gradually institutionalized and professionalized. As a result, they partly lost their mobilization potential (Breault 2017). Although housing committees primarily organize at the neighbourhood level, they also participate in broader mobilizations at the city level and at the provincial level often led by two provincial-level coalitions: the Popular Action Front for Urban Redevelopment (Front d’action populaire en réaménagement urbain, FRAPRU), which focuses primarily on social housing, and the Coalition of Housing Committees and Tenants Associations of Quebec (Regroupement des comités logement et des associations de locataires du Québec, RCLALQ), which focuses on tenants in the private rental market. Significant portions of housing committees’ resources are dedicated to providing individual assistance to tenants to help them deal with abusive landlords, rent hikes, or eviction threats. Paid staff members offer information, legal advice, and accompaniment. Insofar as Quebec civil law establishes the right of remain of tenants (maintien dans les lieux), the conditions under which a landlord can formally evict a tenant or significantly increase the rent are limited. In theory, if there are no major repairs and the tenant is in good standing, the risk of eviction is supposedly very low (unless the owner wants to repossess the unit for a family member). But this positive picture requires that housing law actually be enforced and that the city follows up on claims and contentious cases. Therefore, one of the central tasks of housing committees is to try and make sure that housing law and municipal regulations are respected. Rather than aiming at subverting institutions, housing committees rely on them and channel claims and discontent accordingly, working with the housing court and district-level authorities as much as possible. Alongside professionalized individual assistance, housing committees engage in the collective defence of rights (Breault 2017) through street demonstrations Marcos Ancelovici and Montserrat Emperador Badimon - 9781839109652 Downloaded from https://www.elgaronline.com/ at 02/15/2024 05:21:24PM by ancelovici.marcos@uqam.ca via Marcos Ancelovici 118 Handbook on urban social movements and protests. These protests do not aim at protecting individual tenants or stopping a specific eviction. Although they sometimes aim at preventing the eviction of an entire building which has been recently bought by a corporate landlord, most of the time these demonstrations and protests target the borough or district, that is, the local administrative division of the city (arrondissement). Borough-level authorities are targeted because the municipal governance system of Montreal is quite decentralized and several competencies are distributed between the City and borough councils. More specifically, some dispositions that regulate the conditions under which landlords can divide, extend, or reassign the use of their property are decided at the borough level and have a concrete impact on tenants’ likelihood of being evicted. Housing committees pressure boroughs to either block or slow down regulations that would facilitate such transactions and advocate for more stringent protections of the tenants’ right to remain. Therefore, the particular configuration of the structure of opportunities at the local level involves a pathway for action that housing committees keep using over time and toward which they turn almost mechanically. They adjust their privileged modes of action accordingly and rarely engage in transgressive contention. They essentially rely on a repertoire of contained contention, that is, which “takes place within a regime’s prescribed and tolerated forms of claim making, even if it pushes the limits” (Tilly and Tarrow 2015: 236). This repertoire has constraining effects. For example, in contrast to cities like Barcelona where, as we will see later on in this chapter, tenant unions mobilize to block evictions whether the tenant violated their lease or not, in Montreal housing committees assume that tenants in breach of their lease are unlikely to avoid eviction and, therefore, do not really invest resources in trying to stop it. Different pathways for action imply thus not only different repertoires but also different conceptions of what is worth fighting for. In addition to local protests targeting borough councils, housing committees organize city-level and provincial-level campaigns in favour of tenant rights, rent control, and social housing. These campaigns primarily aim at making housing issues more salient in the public debate and include street marches and occupations of vacant lots and buildings and sometimes also denounce real estate projects associated with gentrification (Guay and Megelas 2021). Although these occupations can occasionally last for a few days or weeks, as with the occupation of housing units on Overdale Avenue in 2001 or of a vacant lot in the Saint-Henri neighbourhood by the collective À qui la ville? (Whose City?) in 2013 (Saillant 2018), they are generally temporary, as in May 2017 when a march organized by the FRAPRU ended up occupying for a few hours an abandoned hospital in downtown Montreal to demand that it be transformed into social housing. These marches and occupations are rarely defensive in the sense that they do not try to block evictions. They are offensive in the sense that they aim essentially at securing new rights and demanding more investment in social housing as well as the development of new, better housing policies. The struggle against evictions and urban displacement is thus envisioned as a long-term policy goal. As a matter of fact, in 2020 the Montreal City Council voted a new municipal regulation known as right of first refusal (droit de préemption) that gives priority to the City over private interests to acquire buildings and lots for sale Marcos Ancelovici and Montserrat Emperador Badimon - 9781839109652 Downloaded from https://www.elgaronline.com/ at 02/15/2024 05:21:24PM by ancelovici.marcos@uqam.ca via Marcos Ancelovici Anti-eviction mobilizations in Barcelona, Montreal, and New York City 119 in order to decommodify them and turn them into social or affordable housing. It also requires that new residential projects of 450 m2 (4,843 ft2) or more include at least 20 per cent of affordable housing units, 20 per cent of social housing units, and 20 per cent of family housing units (but real estate developers generally prefer to pay fines rather than comply, on grounds that abiding by such criteria would devalue the new properties). Although they have the potential to yield some benefits, these reforms have contributed to channelling even more the Montreal housing rights movement inside institutions. COALITION-BUILDING AND THE EXPANSION OF RIGHTS IN NEW YORK CITY Although it is branded as the “Real Estate Capital of the World” by the city’s tourism agency (Angotti 2008: 6) and associated with images of high-end skyscrapers and real estate tycoons like Donald Trump, New York City is a city of renters. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, rentals represented between 66 per cent and 69 per cent of the city’s occupied housing units compared to approximately 36 per cent in the country.8 Whereas the proportion of renters is stable, the (average) percentage of household income spent on rent – what is commonly called the rent burden – has increased from 26.6 per cent in 2000 to 32.2 per cent in 2016.9 The rent burden is particularly heavy for low-income families. According to Angotti (2008: 47): “Most New Yorkers cannot afford even a fraction of the rents in the city’s upscale neighborhoods … About one-third of all households in the city are paying more than 50 per cent of their gross incomes for housing (which means 60 per cent or more of take-home pay)”. Such burden reflects both an increase in the cost of rent and a decline of real wages affecting working-class and middle-class families.10 The rent burden directly contributes to the nonpayment of rent and rent arrears, which constitute in turn the vast majority of eviction cases filed each year in the housing courts of New York City.11 According to the NYU Furman Center (2019: 10), in 2011 there were 200,809 cases filed in the city; by 2017, this number had slightly decreased to 176,590.12 Unsurprisingly, the majority of filings concerned the poorest neighbourhoods of the city where racial minorities are concentrated, particularly southwest Bronx and, to a lower extent, central and eastern Brooklyn. Although the majority of cases filed do not result in executed warrants for eviction, they can still have tremendous negative effects on tenants, who may, for example, end up blacklisted. The New York City housing rights movement has a long tradition of fighting against such residential oppression. The tactics used in the past were quite contentious. In addition to street protests, they consisted in community-wide rent strikes, from the Lower East Side rent strike of 1904 to the Harlem rent strikes of 1958–1964 (Jackson 2006; Lawson 1983; Schwartz 1983). In the 1930s, they also included “unevictions”, in which tenant organizers “would move evicted tenants’ furniture back into their apartment and block marshals from taking it back out” (Mironova 2019: 141). In the 1970s, they took the form of large-scale squatting, as carried out Marcos Ancelovici and Montserrat Emperador Badimon - 9781839109652 Downloaded from https://www.elgaronline.com/ at 02/15/2024 05:21:24PM by ancelovici.marcos@uqam.ca via Marcos Ancelovici 120 Handbook on urban social movements in the Upper West Side, Morningside Heights, Chelsea, and the Lower East Side in 1970 with Operation Move-In, when activists close to the Metropolitan Council on Housing and the Young Lords moved low-income Black and Latino families into vacant buildings that the city was planning to destroy. This tactic is perhaps best summarized by Operation Move-In’s leader Bill Price, who claimed that the tenants’ most effective organizing tool was a crowbar (Gold 2009: 397). However, these days of transgressive contention seem long gone. Today, many housing groups receive public and/or private funding and have a formal nonprofit status. Although there are still many street protests, occasional sit-ins, and sporadic small-scale rent strikes, the main tactics and strategies are now contained within institutions and are led by large coalitions such as the national Right to the City Alliance, founded in 2007, and the New York State Housing Justice for All coalition, founded in 2017. But contained contention does not necessarily imply an absence of significant progress. As a matter of fact, the New York housing rights movement scored significant victories in the late 2010s, particularly the Right to Counsel (Intro 214-B), adopted by the New York City Council in August 2017, and the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, adopted by the New York State Congress in June 2019. We now turn to the campaign that made the drive for the right to counsel – the first of its kind in the United States – successful. When New York City’s Housing Court was created in 1973, it was supposed to contribute to the enforcement of housing law in a fair and just manner. However, it soon became clear that the court worked in the interests of landlords partly because in New York City the great majority of landlords – between 90 and 97.6 per cent – were represented by lawyers in eviction proceedings whereas only a small proportion of tenants – between 11.9 and 15 per cent – did (Hartman and Robinson 2003: 477). This made a big difference, as “only 22 percent of represented tenants had final judgements against them, compared with 51 percent of tenants without legal representation” (Seron et al. 2001: 419). Ensuring the legal representation of tenants appeared thus as a relatively straightforward measure that could have a significant impact on eviction rates. In the 2000s, several voices spoke up in favour of a right to counsel in Housing Court, but it was only in 2012 that mobilization really started to pick up. In 2012, Southwest Bronx tenant organizers from the nonprofit Community Action for Safe Apartments (CASA) decided to launch a campaign to reform the Bronx Housing Court in order to bring down the strong eviction rate hurting the borough.13 Their first action was to produce, in partnership with the Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center, a research report titled Tipping the Scales on the experience of the Housing Court from the standpoint of tenants (see RTCNYC 2013). The report pinpointed the dire experience of the approximately 2,000 individuals, mostly low-income people of colour, who go through the Bronx Housing Court every day and recommended to hold the Office of Court Administration (OCA) accountable and pass a city-wide legislation that would grant tenants a right to legal representation. Following the report, the OCA made slight improvements, such as offering better and bilingual information, but it was far from enough and CASA Marcos Ancelovici and Montserrat Emperador Badimon - 9781839109652 Downloaded from https://www.elgaronline.com/ at 02/15/2024 05:21:24PM by ancelovici.marcos@uqam.ca via Marcos Ancelovici Anti-eviction mobilizations in Barcelona, Montreal, and New York City 121 continued to campaign. In March 2014, Democratic New York City Councilmembers Mark Levine (District 7, Northern Manhattan) and Vanessa Gibson (District 16, Southwest Bronx) introduced Intro-214 to make the City responsible for providing legal representation to low-income residents facing eviction. Although CASA welcomed this initiative, it also decided to form and lead a non-partisan, independent coalition with more than 25 tenant rights, community, and legal organizations that would advocate not only for increased funding for representation but also to establish a right to counsel (RTC). And thus was born the Right to Counsel NYC Coalition.14 Although between 2013 and 2016, New York City increased funding for tenant legal representation from $6 million to $62 million (Whitlow 2019: 1115), the coalition engaged in multiple and varied actions to advance Intro-214. First, it continued to produce information under a variety of formats, from a report to videos and toolkits for organizers. It also organized a series of town halls that attracted more than 500 participants as well as a forum at the New York Law School that drew over 450 people and high-profile figures like a Chief Judge and the NYC Human Resources Administration Commissioner. It developed a logistical plan to implement the RTC and gave presentations to community boards throughout the city, which resulted in community and borough boards passing resolutions in support of RTC. In addition, it collected close to 7,000 signatures for a petition in favour of RTC and held several press conferences and public hearings with a strong presence on social media. All these actions contributed to a strong media coverage and thus made the issue of RTC salient in the public debate. But the turning point was arguably the report commissioned by the New York City Bar Association in 2016, which concluded that the RTC “would not only pay for itself but also save the city an additional $320 million/ year” (RTCNYC 2017: 3). Henceforth, major players such as the New York Times started to endorse the RTC (see Cavadini 2020) and on 11 August 2017, Mayor Bill de Blasio signed a bill Intro-214, making New York City the first jurisdiction in the United States to formally grant a right to counsel to low-income residents facing eviction. The central demand of the campaign as well as the strategy elaborated by the RTCNYC Coalition were directly shaped by the Housing Court system and the municipal institutional configuration. While evictions are far from disappearing and many problems persist, the passage of the RTC has had a significant impact. According to a report by TakeRoot Justice and RTCNYC (2022: 3), four years after the law passed, “more than 71 percent of tenants facing eviction have an attorney … and 84 percent of tenants who fight their case with a Right to Counsel attorney stay in their homes”. The right to counsel not only expands the range of options available to tenants but also fosters their confidence and power and, thereby, alters the power dynamics of the tenant–landlord relation. In this respect, it is worth pointing out that beyond individual benefits and an overall reduction in the number of evictions, the RTC campaign has strengthened the New York City housing rights movement by creating an organizational infrastructure that has survived the initial legislative campaign. The RTC campaign has made tenants more aware of their rights, created opportunities for them to get involved in multiple organizational spaces, contributed to making relatively marginal tactics – such as Marcos Ancelovici and Montserrat Emperador Badimon - 9781839109652 Downloaded from https://www.elgaronline.com/ at 02/15/2024 05:21:24PM by ancelovici.marcos@uqam.ca via Marcos Ancelovici 122 Handbook on urban social movements rent strikes, eviction tribunals, eviction blockades, and worst evictors lists – better known, and ultimately laid the basis for further networks, coalitions, and campaigns (TakeRoot Justice and RTCNYC 2022). The RTC campaign fostered the creation of social capital, that in turn shaped and sustained subsequent waves of mobilization. The work of the RTC NYC Coalition has thus continued and in 2020, it launched a new state-wide campaign – Housing Courts Must Change! (HCMC) – aiming at expanding RTC to the entire state of New York and stopping the “eviction machine”. The institutionalization of RTC is also illustrated in its diffusion to other cities in the United States: “Between 2017 and 2022, sixteen jurisdictions passed the right to counsel for tenants facing eviction” (Roumiantseva 2022: 1362). The experience of the New York City RTC campaign laid out a strategy and produced data for obtaining such reforms and showed that such right can be realistically implemented (Roumiantseva 2022: 1363). There is thus a learning and diffusion process that contributes to strengthening the housing rights movement at the national level and shapes its repertoire of action. Nonetheless, important challenges remain. For example, according to a report by CASA and NWBCCC (2019: 5), “more than half of tenants eligible for RTC had no awareness of their right to an attorney prior to the first court date. … It means that they spent weeks fearing eviction, not knowing their rights or options or that they would be defended in housing court”. Following up on the implementation of RTC, developing awareness campaigns, and pressuring the city for sufficient funding and resources to make it a reality is thus critical. The fight must go on. THE ‘CONTENTIOUS TRIAD’ OF BARCELONA In contrast to Montreal and New York City, Barcelona, much like the rest of Spain, is primarily a city of homeowners. In 2011, 70 per cent of Barcelonan households owned their home whereas only 30 per cent rented it (similarly, in Spain in 2010, 80 per cent of households owned their home while 20 per cent rented it).15 But unfortunately, homeownership has not protected Barcelonans from the threat of evictions, particularly in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and the burst of the housing bubble that had fed economic growth. Between 2008 and 2021, in Barcelona there were 103,739 executed eviction warrants.16 In 2021, there were 6,327 executed evictions, for an average of 24 evictions per day (counting only business days), of which 73.5 per cent involved tenants, 16 per cent indebted homeowners, and 10.5 per cent “precarious occupants”.17 To face such challenge, the manifold housing rights collectives of Barcelona converged in their use of what we call the ‘contentious triad’, namely, disruption, civil disobedience, and prefigurative action. In what follows, we first outline the housing rights movement in Barcelona and then lay out these three tactics. The city of Barcelona has a long tradition of housing struggles. Several episodes stand out, such as the mass rent strike of the 1930s (Aisa Pàmpols 2019), the local mobilizations to improve living conditions in working-class neighbourhoods in the Marcos Ancelovici and Montserrat Emperador Badimon - 9781839109652 Downloaded from https://www.elgaronline.com/ at 02/15/2024 05:21:24PM by ancelovici.marcos@uqam.ca via Marcos Ancelovici Anti-eviction mobilizations in Barcelona, Montreal, and New York City 123 1970s and early 1980s (Castells 1983), and the squatters’ movement in the 1990s (Adell and Martínez 2004). One of the housing groups most active today – the Platform of Mortgages’ Victims (Plataforma de afectadas por la hipoteca, PAH) – was founded in Barcelona in 2009. As its name indicates, the PAH primarily defended indebted homeowners threatened with eviction. In just a few years, it expanded throughout the country, became the spinal cord of a renewed, inclusive, transversal, and mass housing rights movement, and managed to put the housing question at the center of the public debate (Ancelovici and Emperador Badimon 2021; Emperador Badimon 2022; Emperador Badimon and Ancelovici 2022). A few years later, the PAH was joined by another network of housing right collectives, but the latter were more focused on tenants’ rights or on the right to the city at the neighbourhood level. The Tenants’ Union (Sindicat de llogateres) was thus founded in Barcelona in 2017 (a similar union was founded in Madrid almost simultaneously) while multiple housing and neighbourhood unions (sindicatos de barrio) appeared in many working-class and middle-class districts of Barcelona (Lira and March 2023). None of these organizations – whether the PAH, the Tenants’ Union, or neighbourhood unions – benefit from direct public or private funding and they do not have full-time paid staff.18 The organizations that make up the Barcelona housing rights movement have developed a series of distinct medium and long-term tactics and strategies. On the one hand, the PAH and the Tenants’ Union clearly went for a protest strategy aiming at pressuring elected officials and public authorities into political bargaining to pass new housing laws defending the rights of tenants, indebted homeowners, and squatters. On the other hand, neighbourhood unions distrust institutional channels and favour the construction of autonomous ‘popular structures’ that would concretely address the everyday problems and needs of people who approach them (Comissió de formadores del moviment per l’habitatge de Catalunya 2021). Nonetheless, in spite of these strategic differences, all housing rights groups converge on the use of a ‘contentious triad’ to fight evictions. The first component of this triad refers to disruptive actions, which we define as actions that alter “the normal functioning of society and [are] antithetical to the interests of the group’s opponents” (McAdam 1999 [1982]: 30). These actions have multiple targets. In Barcelona, insofar as the housing rights movement re-emerged in the context of the burst of the housing bubble and initially primarily involved homeowners, banks with important real estate portfolios and which were bailed out during crisis have been the target of many modalities of disruption: quiet actions wherein activists pretend to be bank customers and ask for multiple time-consuming services that prevent desk clerks from attending routine operations; street protest in front of bank branches to denounce publicly the abuses committed against indebted homeowners or, sometimes, tenants; loud and festive bank occupations that can last several hours, until activists manage to meet with the branch manager to negotiate and reschedule the payment of the mortgage; etc. Disruptive actions have also targeted some actors in the real estate sector. For example, branches of global hedge funds like Blackstone and Norvet (García-Lamarca 2021) have been targeted by Marcos Ancelovici and Montserrat Emperador Badimon - 9781839109652 Downloaded from https://www.elgaronline.com/ at 02/15/2024 05:21:24PM by ancelovici.marcos@uqam.ca via Marcos Ancelovici 124 Handbook on urban social movements street protests and occupations. Finally, the housing rights movement has often targeted elected officials with escraches, that is, testimony protests in front of the office or private home of elected officials who refuse to stop evictions and support the demands of the movement.19 The goal of all these disruptive actions is to generate ‘negative inducements’, that is a situation that “disrupt[s] their opponent’s interest to such an extent that the cessation of the offending tactic becomes a sufficient inducement to grant concessions” (McAdam 1999 [1982]: 30). Thanks to the use of such disruptive tactics, the Barcelona housing rights movement has succeeded in stopping many eviction processes. The second component of the contentious triad is civil disobedience, which essentially takes the form of blockades to stop eviction warrants from being carried out. The steps to stop the execution of an eviction warrant were laid out by the PAH in 2011 and they have shaped the practices and tactics of other housing collectives. First, activists and supporters gather before dawn in front of the building where the eviction is supposed to take place to prevent the police, local court bailiffs, or the locksmith, from accessing the home. When bailiffs arrive to carry out the eviction – usually after several hours of waiting – activists try to negotiate with them the suspension of the warrant. If they fail and the bailiffs decide to go ahead with the help of the police, activists sit down together or make a human chain to try and block the eviction while they chant slogans inviting neighbours to join them and celebrating the right to stay put and neighbourhood solidarity (Ancelovici and Emperador Badimon 2021, 2023). The PAH’s anti-eviction protocol stipulates that the blockade should take place peacefully, without insulting police officers and without seeking physical confrontation, but without shunning passive physical resistance either. Like the sit-ins that took place in the American South in the 1960s, such tactics require preparation and more seasoned activists often take the lead to guide less experienced or novice supporters. The PAH claims to have stopped hundreds of evictions in such a way since 2011. However, the repressive response of the police has intensified in the last few years and in 2022 Barcelona housing groups accumulated more than €300,000 in fines for disobedience, resistance, and obstruction of police work.20 The third and last component of the contentious triad refers to prefigurative actions, that is, actions which exemplify the principles and the ends of the movement. Prefiguration implies that the means and the ends are mutually constitutive and that ideals should be embodied and experienced here and now instead of waiting for a revolution or some sort of great upheaval. Instead of claiming that the ends justify the means, prefiguration proclaims that the means are the ends and vice versa.21 In the case of the Barcelona housing rights movement, prefigurative actions also have pragmatic implications because they are about securing alternative housing solutions and addressing the residential urgency in which the people who have not managed to prevent or stop the execution of the eviction warrant find themselves. The main form that such prefigurative actions take is the occupation of vacant buildings, most of the time newly constructed housing blocks owned by banks or hedge funds, to re-house evicted families. Sometimes, entire blocks are thus squatted and managed by the new dwellers on the basis of weekly assemblies in which families discuss the negotiation Marcos Ancelovici and Montserrat Emperador Badimon - 9781839109652 Downloaded from https://www.elgaronline.com/ at 02/15/2024 05:21:24PM by ancelovici.marcos@uqam.ca via Marcos Ancelovici Anti-eviction mobilizations in Barcelona, Montreal, and New York City 125 regarding the status of the building as well as practical matters related to furniture and childcare. These occupants often notify the landlord of their willingness to pay a small rent in the hope of avoiding the stigma associated with squatting (Martínez 2019). The reliance on this contentious triad of disruption, civil disobedience, and prefigurative action, makes the Barcelona housing rights movement stand out compared with Montreal and even New York City. Perhaps because in Barcelona housing groups do not have as much access to public and private funding as in these two other cities, activists do not have as much to lose and are thus willing to take more risks. However, some Barcelona housing activists also believe that the transgressive tactics aforementioned are only short term, temporary solutions and that any real change requires ambitious legislative reforms. They thus invest resources in many other tactics aiming at making housing salient in the public debate and building large, popular coalitions to pressure elected officials. Although they still fall short of their goals, they have made important gains in the last ten years and show that contained and transgressive contention can be complementary (Emperador Badimon and Ancelovici 2022). CONCLUSION Although all the mobilizations outlined above respond to evictions, they build on different experiences and histories and rely on different tactics and strategies. They suggest that there is not a single or universal best way to fight evictions and advocate for housing rights. To understand why the housing rights movement relies on certain tactics and strategies rather than others, we should not implicitly treat the experience of a particular city as a benchmark to assess others but rather look at how the local institutional context, power configurations, and inherited repertoires of action shape tactical choices and strategic calculations. Furthermore, the anti-eviction mobilizations of Barcelona, Montreal, and New York City clearly show that housing rights movements never rely on a single tactic. In this respect, it is worth pointing out that all the mobilizations discussed in this chapter always rely on knowledge-making practices to develop their strategies. They produce – either by themselves or in partnerships with activist academics or nonprofit legal organizations – detailed reports that convey bottom-up accounts of the problems and challenges that local residents experience in their dealings with their landlord, the housing court system, and municipal authorities. These knowledge-making practices are increasingly becoming digital, as, for example, the spread of online countermapping work illustrates. The growing visibility of the anti-eviction mapping project, founded in San Francisco in 2013 and now active in Los Angeles and New York City as well, is a case in point (see Graziani and Shi 2020; Maharawal and McElroy 2018).22 Its data visualization work, that seeks to make visible the landscapes and experiences of both dispossession and resistance through maps and oral history, is a potentially compelling way to generate and diffuse new stories and Marcos Ancelovici and Montserrat Emperador Badimon - 9781839109652 Downloaded from https://www.elgaronline.com/ at 02/15/2024 05:21:24PM by ancelovici.marcos@uqam.ca via Marcos Ancelovici 126 Handbook on urban social movements thereby contribute to framing and legitimating the movement’s analysis, claims, and demands. It suggests that data is not only a resource and an object of struggle but also a site of struggle in the sense that its production and epistemic dimensions can have political implications (Beraldo and Milan 2019: 4). We can see similar issues at play in the growing use of digital apps to collect data on housing conditions and file complaints against landlords.23 At the same time, however, the rise of this housing activism 2.0 can contribute to exclusionary dynamics insofar as the access to, and use of, digital technologies reflect class inequalities (see Schradie 2018). Finally, the institutional contexts and repertoires of action that shape the tactics and strategies of housing rights movements are not static. Not only do they evolve as a result of macro-structural forces, but they are also shaped by the very actions of movements. It follows that grasping the constraints and opportunities that structure the struggle against evictions requires that we situate them historically and treat mobilizations as both an outcome and a cause. NOTES 1. Although here we are quoting Desmond, it is worth noting that his own research has contributed significantly to the study of evictions in the United States and his Eviction Lab, based at Princeton University, has become a central reference in just a few years (see https://evictionlab.org/). 2. As Nelson et al. (2021: 696) stress regarding the situation in the United States, “divergent contexts result in institutional definitions of eviction that are legally, materially, consequentially, and theoretically heterogeneous across the nation”. 3. For example, Garboden and Rosen (2019: 639) note that in Baltimore, MD, “about 6,500 evictions are executed per year, while landlords file for eviction approximately 150,000 times”. 4. According to Robert Merton’s (1996: 153) original conceptualization: “Opportunity structure designates the scale and distribution of conditions that provide various probabilities for individuals and groups to achieve specifiable outcomes”. For a discussion, see also Ancelovici (2021: 157–158). 5. Statistics Canada, Census Profile, 2016 Census (https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census -recensement/2016/dp-pd/prof/index.cfm?Lang=E). 6. Sarah R. Champagne and Zacharie Goudreault, ‘2021, année d’évictions au Québec’, Le Devoir, 28 December 2021. 7. For a brief presentation of struggles against urban development in Montreal in the late 196os and early 1970s, see Castells (1972: 431–444). 8. See United States Census Bureau Data: https://data.census.gov/cedsci/. 9. Data from https://evictionlab.org/. 10. On declining real wages as one of the forces behind displacement pressures in the United States, see Chapple (2017). 11. According to the NYU Furman Center (2019: 10), eviction filings for nonpayment represented 88.1 per cent of all eviction filing cases in 2010; by 2017, this number had slightly decreased to 84.3 percent. 12. It should be kept in mind that a single eviction case affects not a single individual but a household with potentially multiple people. A figure of 200,000 cases a year means that several hundred thousand more individuals are affected each year in New York City alone. Marcos Ancelovici and Montserrat Emperador Badimon - 9781839109652 Downloaded from https://www.elgaronline.com/ at 02/15/2024 05:21:24PM by ancelovici.marcos@uqam.ca via Marcos Ancelovici Anti-eviction mobilizations in Barcelona, Montreal, and New York City 127 13. Our account of the campaign is based on RTCNYC (2017) and CASA and NWBCCC (2019). 14. The list of member organizations is available at https://www.righttocounselnyc.org/who _we_are. 15. Observatori Metropolità de l’Habitatge de Barcelona (https://ohb.cat/visor) for Barcelona and EUROSTAT (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/digpub/european_economy/bloc -2c.html?lang=en) for Spain. 16. Data for the 2008–2019 period is derived from Observatori DESC (2020) whereas data for the 2020–2021 period is from Consejo General del Poder Judicial, https:// www .poderjudicial .es/ cgpj/ es/ Temas/ Estadistica -Judicial/ Estadistica -por -temas/ Datos-penales--civiles-y-laborales/Civil-y-laboral/Efecto-de-la-Crisis-en-los-organos -judiciales/ (last accessed 14 June 2022). 17. Consejo General del Poder Judicial, CGPJ – Efecto de la Crisis en los órganos judiciales (https://www.poderjudicial.es/cgpj/es/Temas/Estadistica-Judicial/Estadistica-por-temas/ Datos-penales--civiles-y-laborales/Civil-y-laboral/Efecto-de-la-Crisis-en-los-organos -judiciales/). ‘Precarious occupants’ are former owners or tenants who remained in their home in spite of having formally lost their property or lease. They are thus former legal occupants turned squatters. 18. However, the PAH of Barcelona does benefit from indirect funding through the Observatori DESC, which funds two part-time staff positions. 19. The term Escraches was originally used in Latin America to shame politicians and high-ranking military officers involved in torture, disappearances, and other crimes against humanity. 20. See https://beteve.cat/societat/activistes-dret-habitatge-comencen-rebre-multes-desallotjament -bloc-llavors/. 21. On prefiguration, see Breines (1989 [1982]), Maeckelbergh (2011), and Yates (2015). 22. See the impressive website of the project at https://antievictionmap.com/. There is a similar initiative – although not as elaborated – in Montreal with the Parc-Ex Anti-Eviction Mapping Project: https://antievictionmontreal.org/en/. 23. See, for example, the work of the nonprofit JustFix.nyc (https://www.justfix.nyc/en/), which offers “technology for housing justice”. REFERENCES Adell, Ramon, and Miguel A. Martínez. 2004. ¿Dónde están las llaves? El movimiento okupa: prácticas y contextos sociales. Barcelona: Los libros de la catarata. Aisa Pàmpols, Manel. 2019. 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