Non-proprietary and decolonial housing experiences: forms, appropriations and meanings

Abstract

This research project intends to identify and gather housing experiences that adopt ownership models distinct from individual private property, seeking to understand the relationships between these other concepts of housing ownership, their forms of organization and appropriation of space and their socio-political contexts. Our starting point is that there is a proprietary reason that colonizes our ways of designing, planning, building and occupying the city. This reason goes back to the origins of modernity-coloniality, deepens throughout the 20th century and takes on more complex features in the 21st century in a context of capitalist urbanization under the domain of finance. In housing, the private property paradigm dominates public policies, while all other practices that are not guided by the languages of the market and state urban planning are stigmatized and marginalized. Dissonant experiences of common, however, persist in existing and are pointed out by many authors as the locus of confrontations, political imagination and the prefiguration of alternatives. The research will build an inventory of contemporary experiences, in housing and in Latin America, in which other models of property are present, characterizing these models and their relationship with ways of inhabiting. Through this inventory and the dialogue with the bibliographic production, it is expected to contribute to the expansion of housing knowledge repertoires that are configured as decolonial alternatives to the hegemony of individual private property, potentiating the struggles for the right to the city and housing.