Deep Dives
Land and Housing: A Panoramic View
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT…
The event can be accessed on YouTube in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French (as well as the original sound) at the following link:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-rtGmRcW5tVLPjglhRw259y8V5Mm6QyL
On October 31, 2022 the Global Network of Movement Lawyers at Movement Law Lab (in partnership with Observatori DESC, Terra de Direitos and Labá - Direito, Espaço & Política) hosted “Land and Housing: A Panoramic View” - a wide-ranging webinar on the many issues related to land and housing that form the epicenter of major social conflicts around the world. This panel discussion sharpened our analysis of the main structural problems that intersect with conflicts over land and housing in both urban and rural contexts, and the role of lawyers in supporting movements in these struggles.
The panel featured powerful voices representing different dimensions of the issue:
Raquel Rolnik: Professor and urban planner at the University of São Paulo and former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing
Alejandra Jacinto: Lawyer specialized in housing issues and current deputy for Unidas-Podemos in the Assembly of Madrid
Nélida Ayay Chilón: Indigenous lawyer from Cajamarca, Peru and environmental defender
Pedro Martins: Coordinator of the Amazon Program of Terra de Direitos
S’bu Zikode: President, Abahlali baseMjondolo, shack dwellers' movement in South Africa
A musical interlude followed the panel, with Arabic music artist, Layle Omeran.
THE CONVERSATION WE BUILT
A rich conversation across four languages resulted from gathering together these speakers with different perspectives from around the world. Diverse as their experiences were, however, they all identified a politics of extractivism and commodification embraced by governments that continues to serve as the basis for the degradation of the environment, the deprivation of large swaths of urban and rural communities of access to adequate housing and land uses that sustain human life, and the devalorization of collective forms of ownership, organization and occupation characteristic of indigenous communities and pre-colonial forms ways of structuring society.
To combat this dynamic, they all pointed to the need to:
Recover these alternative and indigenous histories of connecting to land;
Elevate the social value of land and housing over the market value as a central consideration for policy making;
Marry organizing with a policy and institutional agenda that translates demands into long term power for social movements; and
Ensure prior consultation and involvement of communities in any project that will affect their use, continued occupation and relationship to their land, housing and natural resources.
THE SPEAKERS’ POINTS IN DETAIL
We started with Raquel Rolnik who highlighted the following from her perspective as urban planner and former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing:
Land and Housing have become a central site for new forms of extractivism.
The global process of extractivism and financialization has been exacerbated during the pandemic. Every movement of every worker everywhere can be extracted from to create surplus value through digital platforms and complicated supply chains, not only changing the logic of how work is organized, but also transforming every part of our lives into assets. Our survival has depended on this exploitation.
The pandemic made absolutely clear how much this system is a system that promotes death, denies the right to life and takes nature as a source of prosperity for a few and not as a source for providing life for most.
The hegemony of individual private property in urban and rural areas is what has allowed the development of an extractivist and financial perspective of the relationship with the planet. Previous and still existing collective forms of organizing the community and its relationship to the land have been silenced, repressed and criminalized.
On the other hand, the pandemic has shown how solidarity, self-defense and self-organization as well as collective links between people and with land were crucial to defend life. Collective and cooperative forms of land occupation are the only way to sever the link between land and finance. The main challenge of our struggles today is to defend non-commodified forms of connecting to land in order to block the entry of finance. This is also the epistemological turn we have to make regarding the idea of the right to housing.
S’bu Zikode, as President and cofounder, Abahlali baseMjondolo, shack dwellers' movement in South Africa, then centered his intervention on the following points:
There are multiple crises we are witnessing that are destructive of democracy, housing, infrastructure, people’s livelihoods and nature.
The circumstances in South Africa are dire: the unemployment rate is higher than 42%, and the people are confronting the highest level of hunger and starvation. This context, together with State violence and corruption, has created anger in communities. There are high levels of xenophobia, tribalism, racism, violence against women and children in the communities. However, it is very disturbing that these crises are happening at a time when we have the most productive economy in human history.
The multiple crises have had particularly devastating effects in informal settlements. These communities were ashamed by their inability to comply with the measures instructed by the government to take COVID-19 precautions for lack of infrastructure: for example, they could not wash their hands because there is no access to water and sanitation in their settlements.
At the same time, despite an eviction moratorium in place due to the pandemic, the metropolises of South Africa embarked on evicting communities on a massive scale. Many people were thrown out of their homes and rendered homeless.
The Shack dwellers’ Movement Abahlali baseMjondolo has continued to organize the communities to resist evictions, both in the streets and in courts. They had to defend their right to decent housing even in the middle of a pandemic.
Repression, a lack of food, and climate change as a result of the actions of corporate actors have had terrible effects on the poor and the struggle for land and housing has been paid in blood. Abahlali has lost 24 activists to assassination since 2009. This year, between March and August, in the course of 5 months, Abahlali has lost 4 activists to assassination just for demanding their right to land and housing.
Abahlali occupies vacant and unused land not only to build housing but also plant community gardens to feed the community, and run community halls, political schools and poetry cooperatives to highlight the social value of land over the market value. Communities are building an alternative economy by these means. Because of this, it is necessary to secure not just the right to housing, but also the right of people to access land. There can be no right to housing without a right to land.
As a housing lawyer and present deputy for Unidas-Podemos in Madrid, Spain, Alejandra Jacinto surfaced these observations:
Political, economic, social and ecological crises have converged in our present space-time. Recent crises like the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have further enhanced the effects of these other more general crises, infusing them with greater virulence and more globalized repercussions.
One lesson learned from the pandemic is that life does not stand on its own and that all people need care, which requires the guarantee of certain rights. Housing, in this context, has been the last barrier against the coronavirus.
Spain is in a housing emergency as a result of an extractive economy that turns human rights into market goods. The roots of this emergency go back to the financial crisis of 2008, but even before that, they originate with the policies of the Franco dictatorship. At that time, Minister José Luis Arrese popularized the phrase that Spain should become a country of owners and not of proletarians.
The foundations that underpin the exercise of the right to property at all costs are very solid, in what is known in Spain as the "brick culture." So it is very hard to tackle the common sense that allows, for example, empty homes to remain vacant, despite what the Spanish Constitution says about the social function of housing and the prohibition of real estate speculation.
In the period before the 2018 crisis, the new housing built in Spain was the same as in France, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom combined. Much of that housing was purchased by foreign investment, and while much of it was "subsidized housing," it was only subsidized for a time.
In the city of Madrid, all the legislation is at the service of speculation. For 27 years there has been no housing policy, but only real estate policies, consisting of selling public land and social housing to investment funds, which then expel the people who previously lived there from their homes. This is why Spain has been condemned by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights on 8 occasions, for evictions carried out in the Madrid Commune.
The struggle of social movements combined with the struggle in the law and institutions are necessary for social transformation. Changes are born from social movements and then translated into laws and public policies. The best example is the strength of the feminist movement that has achieved the recognition of a wide range of rights. The massive mobilizations of May 15, 2011, have surfaced that transformative political options are not capable of achieving their objectives without a strong organized social fabric, and social movements cannot advance beyond the abstract demand for social justice without institutional mechanisms to transmit these agendas. There must be political organizations that transfer the grammar and forms of social movements to institutions - without seeking to replace them. There must also be social movements that are aware of their relative autonomy, but understand that activism without institutional power cannot radically change the status quo.
Pedro Martins then emphasized the following points based on his experience in the Amazon as Coordinator of the Amazon Program of Terra de Direitos:
The elections in Brazil have been decisive for the Amazon, as Lula - now elected - placed great emphasis during his electoral campaign on the ecosystemic importance of the Amazon and also of the green economy. He also spoke of creating a Ministry for Native Peoples.
The colonial structure that marks the relationship with the land in Amazonas suffered a new remodeling with the advance of large corporations that have been demanding more infrastructure and logistics to increase the development of mining projects.
This has been developing despite the discussions at COP 27 and the need for Brazil to adopt new Amazonian land uses in accordance with the parameters of the Paris Agreement. This implementation would help the Amazon biome and also the Amazonian population, but it is very much connected to market instruments, so the proposed modernization represents the reproduction of the commodification and financialization of Amazonian land and the ecosystem services it provides.
The hope is that with the new political context, historical guidelines of social mobilization that are key to the Amazon, such as agrarian reform, the demarcation of indigenous lands and the titling of the territory of black communities, can be re-discussed. The previous government understood that the way to guarantee these rights could be through the delivery of titles, instead of recognizing the ancestral forms of occupation and use of this land by the communities.
In the current context, indigenous peoples in Brazil have become one of the most mobilized emerging actors in society.
The right to free, prior and informed consultation is very recent in Brazil. It began with great force in 2004. This is linked to the access to university education by indigenous people favored by the government of the Workers' Party (PT), which also did the same with Black people. That is why in 2022 there was the first national march of rural Black people in Brazil.
Brazil needs to recognize itself as more indigenous and more Black to facilitate the recognition and realization of more rights that have been historically denied. In addition, this is crucial for the sake of representation in the political arena.
Nélida Ayay Chilón indigenous lawyer and environmental activist complemented these perspectives with insights from Cajamarca, Peru:
Peru is going through a very tough political moment, with two attempts to remove the current president from office [and it has since been accomplished]. The Ministry of Energy is projecting a total of 63 mining and oil projects for next year. Peru is the world's second largest producer of silver, copper and zinc, and Cajamarca ranks second nationally in gold production. However, Cajamarca is the fifth poorest department in the country.
Therefore, it is clear that these resources do not mean a benefit for the affected communities. There are problems with water, which is no longer of the same quality or quantity, in addition to the dispossession of land from those who used to live there.
Peru is exported abroad as a country with vast wealth, but nothing is known about the struggles that exist within the country to prevent the advance of these extractivist projects.
The Peruvian Constitution states that renewable and non-renewable resources, as well as the subsoil, are patrimony of the Nation. This means that when a deposit is discovered, exploitation begins without consulting those affected. If the farmer opposes, the State expropriates him.
In 2012, in Cajamarca, the Conga mining project was stopped. There was a very large mobilization from Cajamarca to Lima to be heard (a walk of more than a week), which led to the approval of Law 283-2016 on the conservation and protection of the headwaters of river basins. It is an important instrument because it makes it possible to defend the lagoons, the lands, the sacred "apus", since the mining projects are located in the Andean zone which is where all the waters originate. Now there is another cycle of mobilizations for a new mining project called Colpayo.
There are few environmental lawyers and even fewer indigenous lawyers. In Cajamarca there are only two environmental prosecutors, which is too few for the number of environmental conflicts. There are very few lawyers who understand the meaning of nature and mother earth. You have to understand and listen to Mother Nature to make a defense. The prosecution has closed cases saying that there is no proof of damage to the environment, when those who live there every day know how nature has been damaged.
All governments, before initiating a mining or hydroelectric concession project, must carry out a prior consultation with the affected peoples, which must be binding. There must be an inventory of the entire ecosystem to then determine the losses and damages, and the law must provide mechanisms for ecological and economic zoning, including a database for land use planning to determine what activities should be carried out in each place and avoid the depredation of all the places as has been occurring.
She closed her speech by saying: "water has no price but the miner looks down on it" (“el agua no tiene precio pero el minero la mira con desprecio”).
