Housing struggles: dwelling in crisis economies

This chapter discusses the impact of two global crises, the 2008 financial crash and the COVID-19 pandemic, on contemporary economic geographies, with a particular focus on housing precarity and political struggles. It positions practices of dwelling in crisis at the analytical centre of critical and feminist understandings of ‘the economy’ and its contemporary geographies. Across a formal–informal continuum, it argues that dwelling practices are key to examining and addressing not only processes of extraction, control and dispossession, but also forms of resistance, interdependency and reconfiguration. The chapter anchors this argument in concrete examples: informal urban livelihoods and self-organized care through squatting, and extension of platform economies and digital mediation, in two European cities.