Housing Justice: A Lexicon for Building Solidarity

Housing Justice: A Lexicon for Building Solidarity provides accessible, future-facing language for housing scholars, practitioners, and activists.

At a time when the housing question is being reshaped by financialization, dispossession, displacement, and resistance across global contexts, this volume offers a critical vocabulary grounded in contemporary scholarship and struggle. Emerging from the eighth Antipode Institute for the Geographies of Justice, and shaped by a translocal editorial collective, the book draws together contributions from scholars and organizers working across multiple geographies and traditions of housing activism. Rather than offering closed definitions, each entry synthesizes current debates while tracing the political genealogies, conceptual tensions, and geographic specificities that shape how terms are used—and contested—across contexts, movements, and disciplines. Contributors draw from case studies and organizing experiences around the world, foregrounding the complex entanglements of housing with racial capitalism, settler colonialism, migration control, and state violence.

The result is not a static reference work, but a living archive of concepts that circulate within and between academic inquiry and political practice. From foundational terms like “eviction,” “property,” and “social housing” to emergent ones such as “carceral shelter,” “digital/material,” and “déracinement,” Housing Justice: A Lexicon for Building Solidarity illuminates how language mediates the spatial, institutional, and affective dimensions of housing injustice.

This book is both a resource and a provocation: it supports critical reflection, interdisciplinary dialogue, and coalition-building, while inviting readers to think with and beyond existing frameworks. For anyone engaged in the theorization or practice of housing justice, it offers a shared starting point for imagining—and organizing—alternative housing futures.

Praise

“The language that we have available to us disciplines our expression. Housing Justice: A Lexicon for Building Solidarity moves us out of the narrow confines of housing as commodity—units, tax credits, and capital stacks—to an emergent, internationalist housing justice lexicon. This book centers housing in the struggle for ‘abolition’ and ‘democracy,’ while encouraging the reader to reexamine familiar terms, like, ‘mortgage, ‘landlord,’ and ‘eviction.’ This book is a worthwhile reference for any scholar, activist, or scholar-activist concerned with housing as a terrain of struggle.”
—Oksana Mironova, housing policy analyst, Community Service Society New York

“Housing Justice: A Lexicon for Building Solidarity is a provocation to rethink housing beyond the shackles of the real estate and finance industries, diving into the global housing crisis we leave today using the lens of housing justice theory and research. The very short entries that comprise this lexicon are built upon recent scholarship on the theme but also housing justice praxis such as anti-eviction campaigns, squatting, and other social movements actions. Far from being ‘definitions,’ the entries provide ground not only for further research but for the building of a common language to academia, activists and policy makers.”
—Raquel Rolnik, professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo, former UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing

“Housing Justice: A Lexicon for Building Solidarity is a vital resource for anyone (which is all of us) facing the absurdity of housing today. Read the entries in this collection to see the global nature of the predicament we face, to sample the deep and sometimes dense debates and conceptual analyses that describe it, and to recognize the myriad solutions that are percolating in every corner of the world. Rent strikes, land trusts, social housing, and the urgent move to abolish the carceral state all intersect and overlap in the pages of this book to shape a radical politics with the heft to address a boiling world torn between barbarism and an untried future that definitively breaks with the rule of property and money.”
—Chris Carlsson, author Hidden San Francisco: A Guide to Lost Landscapes, Unsung Heroes and Radical Histories

“Illuminating, incisive, and urgently necessary, Housing Justice: A Lexicon for Building Solidarity should be in every housing organizer’s toolkit. This book lays the groundwork to build a shared language to fight for housing justice while offering digestible entry points into key debates in housing politics. Contributors represent the leading researchers, activists, and organizers in this space. The extensive reference lists that accompany each entry empower readers to jump into the fray and become active interlocutors in a rapidly evolving conversation. Written without borders and with abolition in mind, readers will find themselves returning to Housing Justice time and time again as both an essential reference work and as an inspiring source of transformative ideas.”
—Mary Shi, coeditor of Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance

About the Editors

Madeleine Hamlin is assistant professor of geography at Colgate University, where she also occasionally teaches in regional prisons. Her research examines the intersection of housing and the carceral state in US cities. In 2021, she was named an Emerging Scholar by the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation. Her work, which has also been supported by a fellowship from the Society of Woman Geographers, has been published in Antipode, Progress in Human Geography, and Urban Geography, among other outlets. Her forthcoming monograph with University of Chicago Press examines how policing shaped the trajectory of Chicago’s public housing over time, as well as the daily life of its residents. 

Carlos Delclós is a Serra Hunter Fellow in Sociology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He obtained his PhD in political and social sciences at the Pompeu Fabra University, where he specialized in sociodemography and received the distinction cum laude for his doctoral thesis, Cultural and Structural Explanations of Fertility: The Spanish Case at the Beginning of the 21st Century. He is an associate researcher at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs and participates in numerous international research projects. Through mixed methodologies, his work focuses on social stratification, urban sociology, political sociology, and social policy. His work has been published in international scientific journals such as European Urban and Regional Studies, Housing Studies, European Population Research, PLoS Medicine, International Journal of Epidemiology, and International Journal of Public Health.

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