People power strategies in contemporary housing movements

There is extensive analysis of the housing crises faced by cities around the world. Recent critical housing scholarship insists that solutions will require the construction of powerful movements of urban inhabitants demanding a right to housing. But what will these movements actually look like, and what movement strategies will be most effective in advancing these goals? This article brings together insights from urban geography, social movement theory and organisational change to identify five types of people power used by housing movements in cities. These are: ‘playing by the rules’; mobilising; organising; prefiguring, and; parties. We present four case studies of housing struggles in Cape Town, Barcelona, Sydney and Moscow, exploring their development and use of these different people power strategies. This four case comparison considers how people power strategies interlink, how they relate to crisis and context, and the how the political imaginaries associated with different strategies can generate both synergies and tensions.