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.

Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive (GHSA) a collective comprising researchers and members of Living Rent, Scotland’s tenant union, documenting and learning from Glasgow’s hidden history of tenant struggles and archiving the rise of Living Rent tenant union as it happens. This project builds a new transnational collaborative network between tenant activists and interdisciplinary housing researchers who are building tenant archives in the UK and US. The project will cultivate collaboration between GHSA and similar project in the United States archiving tenant stories, through a site visit and 3-day workshop. This project aims to consolidate and share knowledge on tenant organising and archival storytelling methods and develop a transnational body of knowledge on housing from the perspective of tenants investigating their own housing struggles. Through developing a transnational network, the project’s longer-term aims are to develop scholarship on radical tenant histories and radical housing futures, develop a collaborative research proposal, and build community power through development of popular education strategies.