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Paper short abstract:

Despite being particularly hit by Barcelona’s housing crisis, women tend to take the initiative in struggling for homes. Their agency does not rely on rational, autonomous choice, but rather emerges both as a driver and as an outcome of social interdependencies within structural constraints.

Paper long abstract:

Throughout the housing crisis experienced in Barcelona’s metropolitan area since 2008, inhabitants differently positioned in hierarchies of gender, class, or citizenship status have been impacted unevenly. Coping with housing unaffordability, unstable tenure, or displacement pressures requires the deployment of a wide array of strategies in which people’s agency is mobilized, be it on an individual or a collective basis. Despite being over-represented among the victims of these circumstances and facing specific disadvantages due to the feminisation of poverty, job precarity, care responsibilities, or multiple forms of violence, women assume a particularly active role in the seek for solutions, as leading members of their households, clients of welfare agencies and charity institutions, or activists in Barcelona's vigorous housing justice movement. The results of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2021-22 among women affected by the housing crisis will inspire our reflection on the complex declinations of agency, understood as a relational and situated disposition to economic practice that does not need to be limited to rational and autonomous choice, and that is inescapably shaped by the structural constraints imposed by financial forces and institutional regulations. According to our data, agency may (re)produce interdependencies and value-loaded mutual obligations – sometimes even framed in emancipatory projects in creative ways – while at the same time involving planning, management, and calculation practices. The complex, specific combinations of these variegated aspects of agency result in women’s different abilities to manoeuvre while struggling to secure their livelihoods and homes.