Tenant perspectives on housing responsibilities
Subproject 4 focuses housing responsibilities on tenants’ practices of solidarity and (in)hospitality, thereby connecting questions about migration and the socio-ecological housing crisis.
The crises of demolition and displacement tenants experience in Swiss cities in the wake of densification policies disproportionately affect those who are already made vulnerable through low household incomes and migratory status (Kaufmann et al. 2023). As demolitions and their impacts on urban inhabitants have become a focal point in public discourse, anti-immigration sentiments are gaining prominence in housing debates (Huber 2023a; 2023b, Pöschl 2023, Vecchio 2024). At stake are not only social justice issues about affordability, displacement, and densification, but also broader questions about who has a right to come, who has a right to stay, and who is responsible for negotiating these tensions.
SP4 will address these questions by conceptualizing solidarity (Agustín & Jørgensen 2019, Caciagli 2021) and hospitality (Felder et al. 2023, Schiff 2018) as motives of relational housing responsibility. To this end, the SP investigates empirically how different tenant groups – ranging from long-term renters to temporary residents and recent immigrants – frame and practice housing responsibilities, with a particular focus on whether and how these responsibilities are extended to non-citizens. Drawing on recent literature on care-oriented urbanism (Fitz et al. 2019), solidarity movements, and urban migrant hospitality, this SP aims to put the entanglements between home, housing, and migration into sharper focus (Boccagni 2023, Jacobs 2023). It reflects on the roles of long-term tenants, temporary residents, and newcomers in negotiating housing responsibilities and their contribution to (re)politicizing housing struggles from below.
