Paper short abstract:

This article focuses on a new municipally-promoted cooperative housing model in Barcelona; particularly in its potential to challenge the hegemony of homeownership. This model will be considered a means to politicising everyday life by cultivating ways of living and (re)producing space in common.

Paper long abstract:

This article focuses on a new municipally-promoted cooperative housing model in Barcelona which has been devised as an alternative to homeownership. This model has been conceived as a response to a new housing crisis generated by processes such as the gentrification and the touristification of the city. The initiative is based on making municipal land available to cooperatives which are granted user rights over it to develop their autonomous housing projects. The article explores the potential of this model to break free from the neoliberal, state-backed promotion of homeownership which has been conducive to the hypercommodification and financialisation of housing. It also points to the importance of transcending the hegemony of discourses on homeownership, which have been deployed on the working class to suppress class unrest and break institutionalised systems of solidarity. In other words, under neoliberalism, discourses on homeownership have been ideologically used to turn the subjectivties and interests of the working-class into those of individualised, indebted investors vulnerable to market fluctuations, and the welfare state into an asset-based welfare. However, in these housing initiatives, the use-value of homes comes to the fore, in contrast to financialised dynamics which produce houses as tradable assets. Consequently, this model will be considered a means to politicising everyday life by cultivating ways of living and (re)producing space in common from which collective subjectivities could emerge. In addition, these initiatives aim at challenging exploitative dynamics, which not only take place around houses but also within them, by collectivising and degendering housework and care.