Workshops > Housing and inequality in the Americas

HOUSING AND INEQUALITY IN THE AMERICAS

  Thursday, June 15 from 9h00 to 11h00 

MILC S410

Organization: Tamara Boussac (Geographies-cités - Université Paris 1 - Panthéon Sorbonne) and Antonin Margier (ESO - Université Rennes 2)

Proposition

The Covid-19 pandemic has evidenced the difficulties of many households in the Americas to have access to decent housing, especially in cities where income inequalities are the highest. In New York, for example, tenants have engaged in strikes in order to protest the high rents they pay for poor quality housing, while the tent cities spreading across West Coast metropolises have shown the depth of the housing crisis. In Buenos Aires as in Bogota, many studies have pointed out the dispersion of low-income households to urban peripheries in which informal settlements and affordable housing units are concentrated. This geographical remoteness impacts their ability to have access to services, public transportation and jobs. Housing inequality therefore fosters other types of inequality, both socio-economic and sanitary. Underprivileged, minority neighborhoods particularly prone to substandard housing and industrial hazards have notably been disproportionately affected by Covid-related deaths and respiratory diseases. Meanwhile, the temporary ban on evictions that several U.S. cities have put in place since the beginning of the pandemic and the subsequent drop in evictions have demonstrated the great efficiency of – as well as the great need for – such renter protection measures. 

As sociologist Matthew Desmond has pointed out (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, 2016), studies of poverty and inequality cannot fail to take housing into full account. This interdisciplinary workshop seeks to gather scholars investigating the multiple connections between housing and inequality in the Americas. Presentations can broach the following topics:

• Housing inequality and inequalities fostered by housing: residential segregation; access to decent housing and the issue of substandard housing; homelessness; access to homeownership; housing finance and affordability; exposition to environmental hazards 
• Social mobilizations around housing: mobilizations against substandard housing and evictions; conservative mobilizations to preserve the social and racial homogeneity of residential neighborhoods    
• Housing and public policy: social protection measures in favor of decent and inclusive housing but also public policies that have reinforced housing inequality (zoning, public housing, urban renewal); new policies that facilitate access to housing (Housing first, tiny house villages, etc.) 
• Housing and the private sector: the initiatives of private charities; the role of philanthropists and economic elites in housing construction; the role of the finance and real estate industries in the development of inequalities
• How vulnerable populations experience housing inequality: individual strategies to improve substandard housing; experiences of gentrification by vulnerable residents

Speakers

• Cecilia Smith (LIRCES - Université Côte d’Azur) - «I wish the rent was heaven sent»: housing first? The plight of the homeless in Boston since the 1980s

• Yaneira Wilson Wetter (LAVUE - École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Paris Val-de-Seine) - Représentations d’une violence symbolique, structurelle et institutionnelle, un ordinaire de l’habitat social au Venezuela

• Maria Patricia Mariño (Ecole d'Architecture et Urbanisme - Universidad Nacional del Nordeste) - Conservation du patrimoine industriel comme stratégie de protection du logement à Fontana (Chaco)

• Aurélie Quentin (LAVUE - CNRS) - Le rôle du logement social dans la reproduction d’un ordre urbain inégalitaire à Medellin

• Mathilde Moaty (LATTS - Université Gustave Eiffel) - Elites économico-financières et logement à São Paulo : une approche macro et méso