Presentation short abstract

The socialization of Berlin's housing sector offers a path to urban degrowth: By transferring flats into collective ownership and democratic administration, the initiative challenges financialized urbanism and aims for an environmental just, decommodified life that would enable everyday degrowth.

Presentation long abstract

Berlin’s housing crisis is deeply political-ecological: Buildings account for 40% of EU energy consumption and 36% of emissions, while financialized ownership structures prioritize profit extraction over environmental or social needs.

Against this backdrop, the Berlin socialization initiatives “Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen and Co” propose a fundamental shift: By transferring a quarter Million of apartments from major real estate companies and speculative markets into collective ownership, the initiative aims to establish management structures that emphasizes democratic participation from tenants and the broader urban society while adhering to principles of degrowth and environmental justice. Accordingly, the initiative not only proposes the socialization of major real estate companies as a decisive response to Berlin's acute housing crisis but also illustrates how socialization can serve as a vehicle for a radical socio-ecological transformation.

This presentation explores the political-environmental and degrowth potential of socialization (Vergesellschaftung) in Berlin’s housing sector. Building on Erik Olin Wright’s framework of real Utopias, and David Graeber’s concept of everyday communism, I argue that the democratization processes envisioned in Berlin’s socialization movement would enable (new) forms of low-carbon, cooperative, and decommodified everyday life that directly confront the ecological and social harms of financialized urban housing.

This paper argues that democratization-through-socialization already prefigures degrowth in the present. By confronting capitalist urbanism at the scale of ownership and governance, Vergesellschaftung opens a pathway in which everyday degrowth emerges from tenants’ (and the Berliners’) expanded capacity to co-decide, maintain, and collectively shape the material reproduction of their homes.