Article Number: 3890
Soft Cover, English, Glue Binding, 544 Pages, 2012, Sternberg Press
Andrea Phillips/Fulya Erdemci

Actors, Agents and Attendants Social Housing—Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice

Social Housing—Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice examines ongoing transformations in social housing and asks how these transformations are reflected in the aspirations and practices of artists.

Housing provides essential shelter, but also gives form to the social. It represents and embodies the materiality of civic politics and thus demonstrates the uneven nature of spatial justice at local and global scale. For many years artists have contributed to the design and organization of structures of living together, often with ambivalent effect. Whilst many have imagined—and attempted to implement—radical new forms of social housing, as alternatives to both privatization and state provision, they have also ushered in waves of gentrification, thus contributing significantly to a story of capitalization now dominant within urban infrastructures. Social HousingHousing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice questions the politics of urban practice from a variety of geopolitical and disciplinary viewpoints, from liberal private initiatives to the Occupy movement, from Almere to Ramallah, mixing artistic and architectural contributions with those of sociologists, urban historians, philosophers, and activists (...).