Coordinators: Marco Aparicio Wilhelmi (Departament de Dret Públic, Universitat de Girona), Irene Sabaté Muriel (Departament d’Antropologia Social, Universitat de Barcelona), Miguel Ruiz (Universitat de Barcelona (TEVIPROP) y Observatori DESCA, Universitat de Barcelona), João França (Departament d’Antropologia Social, Universitat de Barcelona, c. Montalegre)
Description of the meeting
This workshop will explore the relationship between the anthropological conception of property, limited to the arena of residential real estate, and the problems surrounding housingin Spain, within the framework of a housing crisis that goes back to the burst of the real estate bubble in 2007-8, and which has been mutating in form since then, with the housing rights of wide social sectors being violated. The different sessions will combine theoretical reflection, the building of methodological toolkits, and the study of particular cases. The first sessions will deal with the tensions between the right to housing and the right to property from a theoretical point of view. Scholars from the fields of Law and Anthropology will share a socio-legal interdisciplinary analysis around the discourses, strategies and practices of the actors involved in the housing issue. In opposition to approaches that naturalize private property, which relate it to some kind of instinct or timeless reality, the perspective adopted here assumes that property is a social and legal institution. During the sessions devoted to building a methodological toolkit for the research of the tensions between the right to housing and the right to property, researchers will be invited to share their experience in the intersections of Law and Anthropology. It will be discussed how to study those tensions in the analysis of law and jurisprudence, how to design ethnographies that deal with the notions of justice of the different actors involved in the housing crisis, and how to articulate interdisciplinary collaborations involving different methodologies. There will also be sessions devoted to specific cases that are particularly productive in the study of different conceptions of justice around the right to housing and the right to property. On the one hand, the unlawful occupation of empty homes emerges as a vindication of the right to use dwellers beyond property relations, with different degrees of legitimacy being attributed to different kinds of occupation. On the other hand, discrimination in access results from the power of owners to deny access to housing to certain groups, within the framework of unrestricted conceptions of property rights.
