Tenant perspectives on housing responsibilities
Subproject 4 focuses housing responsibilities on displacement, housing discontent, and hospitality, connecting questions about migration and socio-ecological housing crises.
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 examining how controversies around displacement and emplacement, hostility and hospitality, a right to stay put and a right to arrive are negotiated.
It does so by exploring displaceability (Yiftachel 2020) as a condition rooted in structural injustice and discursive framings, by tracing how housing discontent (Waldron 2021) arises, manifests, and is mobilized politically; and by conceptualizing hospitality (Felder et al. 2020, Schiff 2018) as a motive for housing responsibility.
To this end, the SP investigates empirically how different tenant groups – ranging from long-term renters to temporary residents and recent arrival – frame and practice housing responsibilities, with a particular focus on whether and how these responsibilities are extended to those construed as ‘other’ in prominent housing narratives.
Drawing on calls to think across urban, housing, and migration scholarship, this SP aims to put the entanglements between displacement, inhabitation, and hospitality into sharper focus (Boano & Astolfo 2022). 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 (Hilbrandt et al. 2023).
