Decommodified and self-governed: Self-management in Housing I Iva Marcetic at ENHR 2025

Iva Marčetić speaks at this year's ENHR (European Network for Housing Research) conference in Paris about "Decommodified and self-governed: Self-management in housing" as part of the "Decommodification of land for housing: trends and tools" workshop.

Abstract

The financialization of housing is the effective consequence of policy realignment over the last four decades. It positions land and homes in the center of rampant capital accumulation devoid of democratic processes that can influence it (Kusiak 2021). Installing one - model - fits - all property regimes (Brenner and Theodore 2002) has dismantled systems and sidetracked knowledge of the previously existing alternatives to capital accumulation and exploitation by housing. Today, when the EU housing agenda again positions public entities as actors in housing procurement (to which the user adapts their strategies), this paper asks - would it be possible to build the housing system starting with the user strategies as a point of departure? Therefore, this paper focuses on the under researched developmental knowledge that comes from the periphery of economic power by exploring the housing and land decommodification system of self-management of the Yugoslavian commune as it refers to the institution building that navigates individual and collective users interests within housing development starting from the collective property relations and user generated governance.