Building histories from below: Learning about housing struggles from tenants’ storytelling and archiving

With Kirsteen Paton & Joey SimmonsDr Kate Wilson

The housing crisis is so entrenched, that evictions and gentrification have become an urgent inequality and legislation relating to housing has risen to the top of agendas in governments. ‘Solutions’ proffered are often narrow, temporary, small-scale interventions. Tenants on the sharp end of housing inequality have developed knowledge and alternative demands for housing justice. Archiving both historical knowledge and insights from tenant movements in real time can offer powerful interventions to challenge the narrow neoliberal housing imagination. As Derrida famously describes, the archive is orientated towards questions of the future. Developing a repository of knowledge on housing from tenants themselves, offering a ‘history-from-below’ through accounts of tenant organising, and presenting working-class demands for housing justice and legitimate political alternatives can challenge dominant neoliberal ideologies driving the crisis, and provide knowledge insight to the contemporary formation of class struggle as expressed through housing.