Meeting program
International People’s Assembly for Housing.
This year 2024, the PAH celebrates 15 years of advocacy and numerous victories in the fight for the Right to Housing. To celebrate this milestone, we are hosting an international meeting on housing, co-organized with the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing, to reflect on past successes and strategize collectively for future challenges and achievements.
This meeting will address the two major challenges that housing movements worldwide face:
• Externally, the need to develop effective strategies to fight against vulture funds such as Blackstone, Cerberus, or Lone Star.
• Internally, finding practices that empower those affected and that can expand our activist base in this new cycle of housing struggles.
The aim of the gathering is to share knowledge and ideas among movements from different continents to develop concrete proposals that could be implemented collaboratively. Accordingly, the meeting will act as an activator for a global collective intelligence and to build up international alliances between social movements. This also includes social movements from other sectors which are also impacted by vulture funds, such as healthcare, unions, neighbourhood associations affected by tourism, environmentalist, pensioners, and more.
In the past we took action against the banks. Then we held politicians accountable. Now, we must get to the root of the problem: the vulture funds that seek to turn our lives into financial assets.
Structure of the Gathering: Two blocks of workshops.
The event is organized around strategic workshops and plenary assemblies. The strategic workshops aim to develop specific proposals that movements could implement in a medium to long term. These will have a limited capacity to facilitate productive dynamics, with available spaced distributed among the attending movements.
• The plenary assemblies will be spaces for reaching agreements based on the proposals developed during the strategic workshops.
Additionally, there will be two practical workshops open to all attendees. Those are not intended to develop proposals but rather to provide basic training and educational material so that participants can replicate the sessions in their local assemblies.
Direct Action: Design proposals for disruptive actions and international campaigns. Requirements: Bring some preliminary proposals to the workshop.
Legal Strategy: Propose legislative measures and strategic litigations, and to establish relations with international institutions such as United Nations. Requirements: Basic understanding of legal and political matters.
Narrative and Communication: Develop demands and strategies to influence public opinion on vulture funds. Requirements: Bring some ideas to the workshop.
Research on Vulture Funds: Share knowledge on debt-financed property purchases, financialization, corporate structures, etc. Requirements: Prior experience in related research.
Definancialization of Housing: The aim is to work on proposals and analyze models for democratizing and definancializing housing. Requirements: Prior knowledge of an existing model is recommended.
Practical Workshop on Vulture Funds: To provide basic information to bring all the knowledge to the housing groups. No requirements: Open to all participants.
Organizational Structure: Share and discuss solutions to intersectional challenges within housing movements. Requirements: Knowledge of the internal challenges within your group.
Expansion of our Activist Base: Develop practices and materials to attract new activists and ensure generational continuity. Requirements: Bring some ideas to the workshop.
Funding and Resources: Share strategies to secure economic, human, social, and technological resources on a global scale. Requirements: Practical knowledge about fundraising and resource acquisition.
International Alliances: Build transnational alliances and collaborate with other movements affected by vulture funds (e.g., environmentalism, pensioners, unions, anti-racism, feminism, healthcare, education). No requirements.
Far-Right and Racism: Analyze the relationship between financialization, racism, and far-right extremism, and explore responses from our activist base. Requirements: Prepare some ideas in advance of the gathering.
Practical Workshop on Collective Counseling: Gain basic information on collective counseling and how to empower those affected by housing issues to bring this knowledge back to local housing groups. No requirements: Open to all participants.
Meeting program
In the program you will find all the activities and their locations: addresses, workshops in classrooms, food space…
GUESTS
sILVIA FEDERICI
Philosopher, historian, writer, professor, feminist and Marxist activist of Italian-American background.
Manuel Gabarre
Lawyer and researcher specialized in the financialization of basic needs, particularly housing.
Enikő Vincze
Professor at Babeș-Bolyai University and housing rights activist with the movement Căși Sociale ACUM!
Brett Christophers
Economic Geographer and Professor at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University.
Gemma García
Journalist and author of Els senyors del boom, where she uncovers who profited and how during the housing bubble.
Sam Freeman
Director of Research and Legal Advocacy at The Shift, a global movement to secure the right to housing.
Alys Samson
Political activist involved in social movements and a specialist in preventing corporate abuses at NOVACT.
George Iulian Zamfir
Researcher in housing and urban development and activist with the Căși Sociale ACUM group.
Irene Sabaté
Researcher in Social Anthropology and professor at the University of Barcelona.
Parallel activities
Thursday, November 14 (1pm): visit to Les Juntes housing cooperative
We will visit this cooperative of dispersed housing, made up of units that are in different blocks but that are managed as a cooperative. It is a project coordinated by La Fundició cooperative in La Florida neighborhood of the city of L’Hospitalet, adjacent to Barcelona.
Meeting point: Calle Pins, 10, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat.
Monday, November 18 (10am): visit to the Network of Popular and Community Structures of Manresa
We will visit the network of Popular and Community Structures in which the PAH colleagues participate in the city of Manresa. It includes different occupied blocks and organizations that address very diverse issues, from housing, to education or sexist violence.
You must have in mind that a train trip is necessary to get to Manresa and we must plan for participants.
If you are interested in participating, send us an email with the subject “VISITA Manresa” (please use this literal title to facilitate management) to internationalmeeting.pah@gmail.com.
If you are traveling with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation or The Action Lab/Housing Justice for All, it is not necessary to notify us individually, as we are already coordinating this visit.
Tuesday, November 19 (10am): visit to Coòpolis, Cooperative Atheneum of Barcelona
We will visit Coòpolis, a space dedicated to the promotion of the social and solidarity economy in the city of Barcelona and we are organizing the morning to learn about another cooperative project.
If you are interested in participating, send us an email with the subject “VISITA Coopolis” (please use this literal title to facilitate management) to internationalmeeting.pah@gmail.com.
We didn’t want to miss the chance to fight back together
