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title: 01 Intro

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version: 1.3
title: 01 Intro 
created: 2021-05-26
updated: 2022-01-20
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# Gaining Ground? Housing movement and commons development initiatives and their efforts to decommodify urban land

# 1 Introduction


Land is a special resource: it is scarce and non-reproducible and foundational for all spheres of human (and non-human) life on earth. At the same time, land is treated as a commodity, an “asset” to generate profits through exclusion. With rising land prices and speculation, this contradiction becomes less and less acceptable, notably in growing cities with their manifold needs and interests competing for space.

This becomes obvious in the field of housing — being one of the most basic human needs that is in crisis. Its importance was being underlined by the worldwide call to \#stayhome to prevent the spread of COVID-19, with the sphere of work entering millions of homes, but also people losing their jobs that paid their rent. In cities all over the world, adequate housing has become unaffordable for large parts of the working population. The fear of losing one's home and not finding an alternative in the same budget is widespread. At the same time, financialization and large-scale private investments in housing and land [@aalbersVariegatedFinancializationHousing2017a] are further diminishing the affordable housing stock and reinforce gentrification dynamics. With rising resistance and demands from urban social movements, there is the “return of the housing question” [@hodkinsonReturnHousingQuestion2012; @schonigNeueWohnungsfrage2013] — thus housing policy measures of states and cities take centre stage. While the question of housing is becoming more and more a question of the “underlying” issue land [@ryan-collins2017; @debrunnerWohnungsfrageIstBodenfrage2020], it is currently rather an expert discussion than the central topic of broad urban social movements.[^Basel] Meanwhile, notably in the German-speaking sphere [@gerberBodenBehaltenStadt2019; @rettich2021], there is growing interest and mobilization in professional circles of architecture and urban planning, in the “question of land reloaded” [@hertweck2020a].

In this context, a radical, taboo-breaking demand has been put forward in Berlin: the expropriation of large-scale private housing corporations [@dwe]. Surely, Berlin is somewhat special: With 83 percent of the city’s inhabitants renting their homes, it is a tenant city. And with prices rising as much as in no other German city (offered rents doubled within 10 years [@az2020]), a powerful local tenant’s movement has formed, resisting the displacement of less affluent renters as well as non-commercial projects/spaces from the inner city. The remarkably successful referendum campaign _Deutsche Wohnen  & Co. enteignen_  (expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co.) has won a solid majority of votes in favour in the 2021 elections. The government is thus being urged to draft a law on the grounds of the German constitution for the socialization of all private housing corporations with more than 3,000 housing units in Berlin, with a compensation below market price. Adding to this, the centre-left government showed first attempts to regulate the private market by restricting short term rentals (Ban on Wrongful Use of Housing, _Zweckentfremdungsverbot_) and new contracts with a (albeit failed) Rent Cap Law.[^1] Apart from these “selective interventions”, a “paradigm shift towards a postneoliberal housing policy” cannot be identified yet [@vollmer2018]. In the inner-city district Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, there are more advanced plans to prevent the displacement of renters: Its city councillor, the activist-turned-politician Schmidt has set an example of systematically using pre-emptive purchase rights to buy private market inner-city housing. The stated goal is to “communalize” 50% of the housing stock — i.e., to either legally restrict private owners from excessive rent extraction, or to preferrably shift the property in question to public ownership (municipalization) or other forms of common ownership (like housing cooperatives) [@jensen2020, 164f.]. In housing studies, this _de-commodification_ of housing, meaning a shift towards housing provision by nonprofit housing providers, is seen as an important avenue for improving the situation in the long run [@madden2016; @schonigWohnraumFurAlle2018].

The question of ownership of land and housing  has therefore been put on the agenda — contrary to a neoliberal discourse of the housing market equilibrium that just needs to be reestablished by matching the excessive demand with more supply through increasing construction. With the new mayor this perspective on the housing issue is given hegemony in mainstream political (and “housing industry”) discourse [@spdberlin2021].[^Bund]

A rich network of civil society initiatives concerned with housing and land on the other hand is countering this unduly simplified understanding of the housing issue in Berlin. They focus not only on the question of democratization but also put the question of long-term safeguarding of urban resources, irrespective of political conjunctures into focus, a concern that is rooted in privatizations of the 2000s. The initiatives demonstrate the existence of alternative models of governing resources like land or housing, outside of the realm of the state or the market. Practices of commoning and governing land collectively can be found for instance in alternative tenure models like _Mietshäuser Syndikat_[^MHS] [@balmer2015] or community land trusts/CLTs [@horlitz2012a; @horlitz2013; @davisCommonGroundInternational2020]. While these models have remained niche alternatives in Berlin, hopes are that a more active land policy and new modes of land governance could help to give access to land for non-profit, commons developers and counter the increasing exclusions produced by the market.

In this thesis I am examining in which ways the studied housing and land initiatives are making efforts at decommodifying urban land and what their main criticisms concerning Berlin’s public land policy and institutions are. To shed some light on inter-initiative relations, I ask to what extent the identified actors overlap in their problem definitions, goals and proposed measures. 

After reflecting on the methodology, I start by bringing different theoretical elements together: land as part of the current liberal property regime and previous and current reform debates; the housing issue and decommodification; urban social movements and intermediary organizations and finally commons theory, the specific challenges of urban commons like land and housing and the interaction of the commons and social movements. In the subsequent chapter (3),  I elaborate on the case study by contextualizing it in the German housing system and introducing Berlin’s urban development and activism trajectory and land policy since 1990. Then I turn to a description of the different housing/land initiatives and their individual efforts towards decommodification (4), before analysing (5) their mode of commoning, their decommodification pathways and approaches and shedding light on their main criticisms concerning Berlin’s public land policy. Finally, I arrive at a short conclusion in the final section (5).


[^Basel]: Notable exception is the 2016 referendum campaign in Basel that successfully demanded that city-owned land should not be sold anymore but only use rights (ground leases) should be given. 

[^Bund]: The same holds true for the new social-democrat-led federal ministry for construction that set the target of 400,000 new housing units for Germany, with 25% state-subsidized housing.

[^MHS]: Miethäuser Syndikat can be explained as an umbrella for alternative, collectively-owned housing projects that have long-term de-commodification as a goal. The legal construction of a private limited company holding 51% of the property acts as an asset lock [cf. @balmer2015, 190-91]

[^1]: The highest German court ruled that the regulation of rents is in the jurisdiction of the federal state, but not that the regulation of the private market is unlawful per se.




## Research Question

- How are which kinds of actors making efforts at decommodifying urban land in Berlin?
    - What is their criticism concerning the municipal land policy?
- To which extent do they form a coherent force vis-à-vis the state and market?
- What are barriers to mutual reinforcement?




