# 6 Analysis: land/housing initiative relations

**To which extent do they form a coherent force vis-à-vis the state and market?**

**What are barriers to mutual reinforcement?**

As I have shown in the last chapter, the land/housing initiatives are are heterogenous field of actors. When analysing the actors and their ways of decommodifying urban land and housing, the question is to which extent they form a coherent force vis-à-vis the state and market actors. I distinguish between different commoning efforts: resource-based commoning, boundary commoning[^deangelis], and commonalizing efforts.[^deangelis]

[^deangelis]: Drawing on De Angelis [-@deangelis2017], See chapter 3.

| Initiative | Approach | Decommodification pathway | Commoning efforts |
|--------------------------------------------|--------------------------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Stadt von Unten (SvU) City from Below | antagonistic, cooperative up to some point | public ownership \+ governance | commonalizing |
| NBMHSI <br>Syndicate network | community-building, deliberative | MHS-model of “anti-ownership” housing (with state subsidies) | boundary commoning, commons-lobbying |
| Stadtbodenstiftung (SBS) <br>CLT | community-building, cooperative | participatory land governance (CLT model) | resource-based commoning, (commons-lobbying) |
| ISN / Round Table | institutionalizing, deliberative | municipal land allocation to commons developers | commons-lobbying |
| DWE <br>expropriation campaign | antagonistic (cooperative to necessary extent) | public ownership \+ governance | commonalizing |
| BJG <br>Young Coops | community-building, deliberative | housing coops (with state subsidies) | boundary commoning, commons-lobbying, (members: resource-based commoning) |
| Netzwerk GI <br>commons developers network | institutionalizing, deliberative, (community-building) | distinction from for-profit developers, strengthening commons developers vis-à-vis the state | boundary commoning, commons-lobbying |

_Table 6.1: Initiatives, their approaches, envisioned decommodification pathways and commoning efforts_

## 6.1 Commoning efforts

### Resource-based commoning

A wide range of activities that the studied initiatives undertake can be subsumed under commoning. Some initiatives are _directly_ de-commodifying through classical commoning, i.e. building or maintaining commons institutions. They have a common resource at its core (like land managed by the Stadtbodenstiftung or housing that is managed by the coops that are members of BJG), a member base (the commoners) and rules for governing the resource (the institution). Here we can find interesting examples of how contractual arrangements under the current property rights regime are used creatively to form an “asset lock” that prevents the (re-)commodification of the resource.

### Boundary commoning

Some actors (NBMHSI, BJG) are second-level organizations engaging in _boundary commoning,_ or more specifically _meta-commonality:_ comprised of several commons that are maintaining their identity internal activities “while at the same time establishing a new systemic coherence among two or more commons” [@deangelis2017, 293]. In the case of the GI network, we can see how commons institutions can become nested: an individual may be a member of a coop which is a member of BJG which is a member of GI. This also corresponds with Ostrom’s eighth design principle for _“common pool resources that are part of larger systems:_ […] governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises” [@ostrom1990, 90, see annex].

### Commonalizing

As the example of the expropriation campaign (DWE) with their housing management democratizing aspiration shows, a more encompassing notion of commoning could also include commonalizing [@deangelis2017, 340], i.e. transforming existing private or public systems into a commons — as opposed to a narrower “third way” definition that exclusively concerns the niche between state and market . The activity of Stadt von Unten (SvU) in Kreuzberg points in the same direction: by struggling against privatization, demanding permanently affordable social housing secured by hereditary building rights and participating in the drafting of governance processes and the urban planning process, they combined social-movement-demanding with commoning. Commonalizing corresponds to the “public ownership + governance” decommodification pathway, which I will further discuss below.

### Commons-lobbying

Other initiatives (Netzwerk GI, NBMHSI, ISN, BJG) are lobbying for or maintaining activities that are geared towards framework conditions or laws that need to be enacted by institutional politics. I call this political action _commons-lobbying:_ trying to widen the niche or “till the ground” for commons expansion through a “deal” with the state that could — through recognition and support — enable commoning. In our case, this could be the provision of de-commodified land for de-commodified housing commons through municipal land allocations on a significant scale. Commons-lobbying of course presupposes significant resources (knowledge, time) and a certain openness of state actors and respective cooperative or participative urban governance formats, which can then be leveraged by networked commons. This would also help to explain why several such institutions were founded in the wake of the new, centre-left government coalition that came to power in 2016. Intermediary organizations in Berlin play an important role in organizing such lobbying, as can be seen in the demands communicated through them [@initiativenforumstadtpolitikberlin2021; @netzwerkgi2021]. However, achieving outcomes is usually not straightforward, as lists of concrete and actionable demands for better policy are necessary but not sufficient: It might be here, that the tailwinds of pressure from the streets

The “porous interaction” [@varvarousis2020, 8] between commons and social movements is indeed notable: Local resource-based commoning projects have become parts of organizations that are indirectly commoning with collective action or activism aimed at land policy, like in the case of ExRotaprint, which is one of the predecessor contexts of ISN [@brahm2020]. Conversely, a group of experts from different projects and fields have founded an organization in order to directly common land (Stadtbodenstiftung). However, there remains a “fault line” of a more antagonistic approach (activist or movement logics) and a more deliberative approach, wich I will discuss below ({6.3}).

## 6.2 Decommodification pathways

Decommodificiation is only sometimes mentioned explicitly [@ID6, @ID7, @ID4], but there is a great concensus for long-term securitization of urban resources [@ID5, 448-464; @ID9; @ID8]. They see the need for housing and land in public or common ownership to be safeguarded — independent of ebbs and flows of short-term political conjunctures, in order to keep these resources off the market in the long run [@ID6, ll. 41-47;]. This is grounded on “the experience that also these public institutions [who are charged with land management] need to be controlled, and not only by elections every four years” [@ID1, ll. 103-107]. This shows the awareness of the fragility of decommodification through state property alone. By problematizing this, they are centring the issue of long-term safeguarding of public and common resources, independent of political conjunctures. The pathways on which initiatives envision the long-term withdrawal of resources from the market are slightly different however.

It could be through public ownership with co-determination and democratization of the management, as well as a legal ban on privatization — reviving and transforming welfare-state provision (DWE, SvU). This corresponds with the call for more democratic, community-based social housing [@madden2016, 211] or what Dartdot and Laval outline as transformative agenda for a different, more direct social democracy, “based on direct political participation in the decisions and the management of that which is shared in common” [@dardot2019] .

For resource-based commoning approaches, it shall be done through contractual, property-based arrangements — bei it coop statutes (BJG), the MHS model of “anti-ownership” (NBMHSI) or the involvement of more interests in the management of land coupled with statutes in either private (SBS) or public legal form (SvU land model).

### Housing management/governance

The matter of the public housing companies and how they should be governed is one of the fault lines of different professional and ideological spheres. While the movement actors stress the need to regulate these “neoliberalized” [@ID1, l. 54; @ID7, 42-43] companies and democratize them through tenants’ councils, the cooperative leaders on the other hand criticize the interference of politics with management decisions that lack “housing industry expertise” [@ID8, l. 756]. Referring to losses resulting from affordability requirements in new-built housing:

> “But it is a political demand. This is no way to operate the housing industry, not even the municipal. It is a disgrace. It’s not by accident that the municipal [managers] are fleeing. [...] It is irresponsible what is happening there” [@ID8, l. 767-70, own translation].

BJG are highly critical of ambitions concerning a more centralized (and less company-like) public housing administration — as proposed for the housing stocks that could be socialized if the DWE campaign is successful  [@dwe2020a]. After at first defending the large private companies, they position themselves against a state-owned company that is too large and centrally managed by a bureaucracy – also referring to the danger of changing political circumstances. They criticize the resulting market power and draw comparisons to the former socialist centralized GDR housing system [@ID8, l. 782-83, 174]. They take a position that is relatively close to a conservative, managerial “real estate industry” position: Against too much regulation of the housing market like the Rent Cap Law [@ID8, ll. 53-58], against social housing requirements in public housing that are deemed excessive [@ID8, ll. 757-758], against high infrastructure contributions [@ID8, ll.502-507], and against the expropriation of housing corporations based on their (arbitrarily defined) size [@ID8, l. 116]. The problem of gentrification, oddly enough, was not mentioned, even though they take a welcoming stance concerning state intervention in the application of pre-emptive purchases by municipalities, where coops are engaged as partners of the municipalities for the commonalization of these housing stocks.

Concerning the DWE campaign, BJG take offence at the “state-socialist impetus” [quoted in @zulch2021], but also state that they do not have a common position internally (and that expropriation could be a potential, if smaller, local cooperative companies could be the beneficiaries instead of a large public corporation) [@zulch2021]. Therefore, some of the aforementionend positions may not be “official”, consolidated BJG positions but partly the lobby leaders’ personal stances that could also be a generational issue.

Depending on ideology and the viewpoint, these different visions of housing can easily be caricatured as either doomed paternalistic state property or libertarian-anarchist reveries and middle class clientele projects that will remain in the niche. However, both are misrepresentations of the different housing systems’ potentials and the respective initiatives’ intentions. But of course it makes a difference of opinion whether housing is conceived as an important public infrastructure or as a state-independent self-help resource.

The more different property configurations are mixed, these lines are becoming blurred, though. On the one hand, coop housing is (envisioned to be) built on public land with ground leases (even if rather by force, due to the dependance on subsidized land), on the other, the tenants’ movement is fighting for the democratization of housing management.

## 6.3 Approaches

I distinguish four different approaches, that are not mutually exclusive. An _antagonistic approach_ is rather confrontational and trying to push the state in a certain direction, by force of public opinion, as with DWE’s struggle for the expropriation of large housing companies. This does not mean that there is no contact with state actors, as cooperation is often neccessary to set the course for implementation after a successful mobilization, whether in a multi-stakeholder project development (SvU) or through participation in the socialization expert commission (DWE). There is usually no direct state funding for this political work, though.

This is different from actors with a decidedly _institutional approach:_ they can obtain state funding to institutionalize and build capacity, provided the political will and successful tendering [@ID4]. This is then used to develop the institution further (SBS) or to sustain and formalize an activity which was done precariously before, in voluntary, unpaid labour (Round Table). Some state-financed institutions are there precisely to support bottom-up initiatives with their knowledge and capacities (AKS, GI, Iniforum). While the activities can be professionalized and sustained with more resources, there is also a certain dependance and a tendency to a less openly confrontative (or a more moderate, technical) position [@ID6, l. 125] as well as a different discourse, appealing more to innovation and a certain expertise concerning a topic such as land policy.

The _deliberative approach_ aims at participating in formats of urban governance, and once the organization is recognized as a relevant actor representing important interests, it may influence urban policy making or concrete projects. The approach is related to _commons lobbying_ and may require considerable resources and perseverance, which is hard to manage in voluntary labour while also running the risk of being ignored or stalled in case more powerful actors are unwilling to change course, as in the case of NBMHSI and the improvement of municipal land allocations that were simply not a priority of the SPD-led Finance Senate [@ID1, ll. 60-67].

The _community approach_ is, largely independent from the position toward the state. This inward-looking strategy can help to strengthen a group internally, for example by building knowledge or capacities for common activity. This is important to build and maintain networks, alliances or coalitions and group cohesion. It corresponds with _boundary commoning._

### Communication, protest and critique

All four approaches rely on communication, which is, unsurprisingly, a major concern for all initiatives. By publishing documents, social media posts, leaflets, newsletters or website entries, the actors can make themselves heard and understood, by a specific audience like specialist politicians, a general public audience or new possible commoners.

Protesting is one form of communication — done by almost all actors, but with different adressees, expression, language, and frequency. Some regularly communicate their demands to the public in demonstrations or social media posts (DWE), others address issues in open letters, petitions or press statements (e.g. BJG, Netzwerk GI). Protests occur both in favour of something (e.g. coop housing, expropriation, new-built social housing) or against something (e.g. privatization of public land, the cancellation of the Rent Cap Law). Some actors however refrain from voicing their criticism too loud and try to distinguish themselves from _antagonistic_ “protests”, when they think they can be more effective or gain more with other means: cooperation with inclined state organs, participating in a _deliberative_ expert discourse expressing criticism of the content (ISN) or focusing on internal processes as in building an institution that can withstand the ebbs and flows of political conjunctures (SBS).

### Community-building

Another means of communication is engaging in exchange with other actors and institutions. This can be informal exchange for mutual benefit (e.g. the exchange within MHS groups to build knowledge to participate in concept competitions), a public panel discussion or even a deliberate construction of a formalized alliance or coalition and its maintenance. The institutions or groups sometimes derive from preceding organizational contexts. Probably all actors have members with multiple group affiliations — in movement studies, the importance of such “bridge builders” for coalition formation is emphasized [@lima2021a, 537].

Another way of building an alliance is writing a charter to “bring diversity into shared purpose”, as this pattern of “peer governance through commoning” is called by Bollier and Helfrich [-@bollier2019, 126]. One example is the LokalBau charter mentioned above which is the basis for the subscribed members of GI. The statute of the BJG [@bjg2021a] is another example of aligning several organizations in order to build legitimacy towards the political level and in the “urban governance arena” [@beck2016].

The overall shift to more civil society participation (for criticism, see 5.2) since the first red-red-green legislation period in 2016 has had a downside — due to an increasing workload in different projects, many active people have become so busy that it has become difficult to find time for internal networks, communication and informal exchange:

> “people are overthrown with work, right now. And this is not so good for the networks, among us. Because we have meetings and workshops with the hell of politics and administration and whatever, but we don’t get to (...) concentrate on our alliances, you know.” [@ID9, l. 270-1272]

This also leads to several parallel networks which become hard to maintain and synchronize. Of course, the Covid-19 pandemic has also had a pronounced negative effect on networks, with fewer occasions for informal exchange and many people “losing track” [@ID9, ll. 356-358; @ID6, ll. 315-322]. Another challenge in the lack of inter-initiative exchange is to zoom out of the busy day-to-day business and “get people together in a bigger circle, to talk about more general topics”. To tackle the networking-capacity dilemma for activists, some would propose a specialized, possibly annual “more expert” oriented festival as an opportunity to build bridges and look beyond one’s own horizon [@ID6, ll. 325-330; @ID9, ll. 296-298].

### Deliberative and antagonistic approach

Urban social movements and housing activist groups have a tendency to employ a rather antagonistic approach, while project developers and intermediaries on the other hand usually employ a *deliberative* approach. It is not mutually exclusive though, as the antagonistic moment of the foundation of the ISN shows (see 5.1). A commons developer expresses the inherent tension this way:

> [On the leftist, activist side] the strategy is rather to make demands and address them to the politicians and say: that’s our demand, and how you implement it, that’s your business now. [...] We say that we must clearly take responsibility for project development — in order to secure this area in the long term. […] These are very different approaches that also clash from time to time. [@ID5, ll. 448-464]

Indeed, the housing movement activists’ repertoire includes the *100 percent strategy*: “demand 100 percent so you get 60 percent, or anything”, when the discursive ground is established to “demand something radical but explain why it’s absolutely not radical and it’s just ... common sense to do that” [@ID1, ll. 198-204]. This approach then clashes with the deliberative urban planning or project development framework that is employed in “stakeholder collaboration” in order to accommodate different interests of several actors as it is often the case in urban design or construction projects. SvU experienced this when they entered a formal cooperation with the city and state-own companies, leading to difficulties to consolidate the demands of cooperation with their previously successful antagonistic strategy [@ID1]. According to a CLT representative, the different modes of operation are connected to a the level of accountability and responsibilites:

> “A movement can act very differently, very freely, but also doesn’t have to be responsible, and doesn’t have to […] deal with all the practicalities of actually owning land. People involved have to understand the difference. Otherwise it’s not going to work. Like, you cannot run an organization the way you run a movement.” [@ID3, ll. 178-187]

However, when that deliberative or pluralist governance perspective becomes normative in dismissing the more radical demands as “ideologically biased _[vorbelastet]_” [@ID5, l. 410], there is not only the danger of a false balance, but it also misses the mutually beneficial effect of a diversity of more and less radical positions within the housing/land policy discourse, as it is expressed by the DWE interviewee (for the case of the campaign and its members):

> I would say that precisely because of this radically formulated criticism, but the moderate middle ground, [DWE] builds an interesting bridge. (...) And I would say, in fact (...) in the long run, everyone benefits from each other. [Because there are certain people (...) who push the discourse forward and make things sayable, and then we can, a bit further in the mainstream, so to speak, discuss topics that no longer sound quite so radical.] Because that land should not be a commodity is perhaps no longer quite so “wow” and radical. In this respect, I would say that we benefit in terms of the political outcome.

This mutually beneficial shift in the discursive frame can be seen in the example of gentrification, which was successfully established in the German-speaking public as an undesirable process over the last decade. Other framings of issues that the housing movement is occupied with have not become hegemonic yet. Among these are the issue of social mix (with the dominant view that only a certain percentage of social housing renters is acceptable in public housing) and the focus on new construction — which marks another fault line between different housing and land movement actors.

Both fighting against dominant neoliberal discourses and practices, and working cooperatively to increase chances to realise concrete projects are important, mutually complementary approaches.

#### (opposition to) new construction focus

Concerning new construction, there are two typical stances of civil society actors in the land and housing field: Contrary to urban social movements with their general tendency to oppose new construction for differing reasons, developers and planners usually stress the importance of new construction and advocate “better” new construction.

Classically, there is opposition of “localist” neighbourhood-based groups against new construction or densification, for example to keep green spaces and trees or to prevent the privatization of land. Notable examples of this are the referendum campaign to keep the entire area of the former Tempelhof airport as an open space or the Prinzessinnengärten urban gardening project. But also among the housing activists, there is normally opposition against new construction: Firstly, against private (luxury) new-built housing developments (fuelling new-built gentrification), but secondly also against the hegemonic neoliberal position, that the tight housing market situation will be fixed when enough new housing is supplied through construction. The tenant movement’s struggle is for the most part directed against this housing-industry narrative and its implicit dismissal of the existing housing stock as a field of policy intervention, not against new construction per se. Long-term affordable new housing in public or community ownership is principally welcomed, but it is not the main concern of the movement — not least due to the fact that it is often the defensive struggle for the right to stay put that politicises individual members of the movement.

The other side of the fault line consists of mainly planners, architects and “alternative” developers like the young coops, whose main concern is the new construction of housing and other spaces as part of the solution to the current crisis:

> “So, I think you need to have a complimentary structure, where well-organized actors work on concrete projects, which are following concrete goals. And that, that has to be not over-complex. So, buy back houses, buy back lands. […] And you need to go from project to project, but then again have […] a strategy where you want to […] end. And yeah, you need the right apparatus to get there.” [@ID6, ll. 416-427]

It is more rooted in the architecture and urban planning discourse and therefore also concerns new typologies like co-housing projects as well as the upscaling of concept competitions for the allocation of land for long-term affordable housing. Some of the studied initiatives are interesting bridges for these two “camps”. SvU on the one hand that advocated densification, but with long-term affordable housing on land kept in public ownership as well as the Syndikat network NBMHSI who are trying to realize new construction but without property formation (see 5.1). Another important step was the formation of an alliance of alternative or commons project developers that subscribe to the Lokalbau principles. The land issue is the matter, where the spheres of housing, construction and ownership converge. With rising land prices, the issue has gotten more traction, not least due to the tenants’ movement becoming more aware of it as an underlying issue affecting rent prices:

> ”I think people never thought about it. […] Only those who (...) were active in this field, like architects or developers or house owners [...]. Of course, the huge movement is not the land policy movement, it’s the rent policy movement. That’s the huge movement. Because that affects everybody. I mean, in Berlin, 80%, so everybody understands immediately the problem. And the land issue is just something on top. And I’m really [happy] that (...) the *Mietenaktivisten* included, at one point [...] the land issue in their arguments. To (...) describe the reason, because the price of land has raised so much that now it makes up 50% of your rental costs or something. You know, just to bring it into relation, and that is very important. And through this, I think a lot of people get more insight into the land issue.” [@ID9, 396-404]

## 6.4 Gaining ground

The identified “fault lines”, or false dichotomies, could be overcome by more exchange and collaboration between the different actors. Similarly, fighting about the “right” decommodification pathway based on ideological differences or undermining the position of potential allies that are deemed either not radical or not constructive enough undermines the shared positions, too. In the tenants’ movement, this realization made it into the principle, that different groups with different demands come to demonstrate together — but without discrediting each other publicly [@ID7, ll. 333-34]. This resonates with studies of coalitions, which need to “[avoid] exposing the group’s internal dissent in public” [@lima2021a, 547]. They are successful, when a broad ideology and respect for political differences and diverse tactics allows their coalition members to sustain their identities [@lima2021a, 547].

For commons developers and the tenants’ movements to mutually reinforce, I pose that there is a need to synchronize, with more communication between the different decommodification initiatives to focus on commonalities and shared concerns, which would offer the opportunity of building a _commons movement._ As De Angelis expresses it, we need to seek ways to “turn the subjects of movements into commoners and make commoners protestors” [@deangelis2017, 371].

Expert knowledge about the most powerful instruments of land policy is important but of limited use, as long as those in the position to decide about their application remain hesitant. The task is up to the movements, to “push the state to do certain things” [@kipMovingCityConceptualizing2015, 55], that help the upscaling of decommodifying commoning — against the interests of capital.

With a stronger mutual understanding, the different approaches could be used as a repertoire to that end, in a complementary way. With tenants’ movement actors demanding alternatives, deliberative activities like commons-lobbying, helped by intermediary organizations, might get the tailwind necessary to open the niche for resource-based commoning that provides alternatives. In turn, these new, larger commons networks could then be the basis for a more powerful movement [@deangelis2017, 371].

This possible movement would not have to be built from scratch: Some of the initiatives and their members are already important “bridge builders” [@lima2021a, 537] _within_ their respective fields, while notably intermediary organizations are important bridging actors _between_ different spheres (see annex for a table of examples). The frequencies of exchange would need to be increased and the actors’ resource problems mitigated to build and maintain a coalition, or in my terminology, strengthen a _community approach_ among the initiatives.

Also, the “broad ideology” might already latently be in place. It is the implicit concensus,  that housing and land should not be a commodity or a financial asset for speculation as well as the unanimous judgement that recent privatizations of public resources were a great mistake. A positive, common point could then be be that public land policy should be strategic, long-term oriented and co-determined by civil society. In the end, the *vision of land as a common resource*, with use value instead of the dominant logic of property at its core, could easily be shared by all.

## Interim conclusion

In this chapter I have analyzed the studied initiatives concerning their commoning efforts, the envisioned ways of decommodification of urban land and housing and their approaches.
The safeguarding of public and common resources for the long-term is a shared concern, as — due to the experience of Berlin’s privatizations — the actors are highly aware of the fragility of decommodification through state property alone.

While they do not form a coherent force vis-à-vis the state and market actors (yet), a likely common vision of understanding urban land as a common resource which should not be speculated with but accessible to the population of the city, could be a starting point for a coalition with diverse actors and approaches as repertoires.

I have identified some false-dichotomy “fault lines” that hinder a better mutual understanding or collaboration between the different actors. For commoning initiatives and the tenants’ movements to mutually reinforce, I pose that there is a need to synchronize, with more communication between the different decommodification initiatives to focus on commonalities and shared projects, which would offer an opportunity of building a _commons movement_. As De Angelis expresses it, we need to seek ways to “turn the subjects of movements into commoners and make commoners protestors” [@deangelis2017, 371].