RCN: Housing Justice in Unequal Cities

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award will support the establishment of a research coordination network (RCN) to address the housing crisis in a variety of cities. The network will advance research on the interconnected processes related to the precarious nature of housing such as evictions, homelessness and displacement, and plans to study them in tandem with forms of segregation and discrimination. The RCN fills a gap in research by systematically analyzing community and policy responses that seek to create housing access and housing justice through legal frameworks, cooperative models of land and housing, and collective action. An important aspect of the RCN is its coordination at the intersection of social movements, universities, and policy. Paying close attention to housing movements and policy interventions, the RCN will synthesize the primary modalities of housing justice and its conceptual underpinnings into a Housing Justice Handbook that will be broadly disseminated. Focused Summer Institutes with a diverse group of scholars looking at housing issues will be held in a variety of settings. By integrating experience from a variety of contexts and settings, this RCN will generate new formats of university-community partnerships and engaged research in the United States focused on the experiences of marginalized social groups. This RCN builds a transnational, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational collaboration to tackle analytical and methodological problems pertaining to spatial exclusion. It cuts across various silos of housing research and links housing to two other relevant realms of geographic inquiry, carceral geographies, and land dispossession. In doing so, it builds data collection, data visualization, and story mapping tools that can capture the complex space-time geographies of housing precarity. By developing novel methods of research dissemination and pedagogy that link key nodes of knowledge production in the Global South with those in the Global North, it fosters critical geographies of learning. Such an approach sheds new light on the housing crisis in the United States through comparison and demonstrates how the social function of land and housing is being addressed in other democratic contexts with long histories of spatial inequality. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.