Overcoming hyper-localism: How global corporate landlords shape their own opposition

Lisa Vollmer

Urban Studies, 2025, vol. 62, issue 16, 3188-3204

Abstract: Housing movements often form at the hyper-local level whereas their opponents, financialised housing companies, are increasingly global actors. This article asks how housing movements are able to shift scale. It uses the case of Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen (DWE), a campaign seeking to socialise financialised housing in Berlin that managed to unite the city’s fragmented housing movement. It argues that scale shift cannot only be explained through the movements’ own agency, but equally with structural conditions. The emergence of global corporate landlords as super–landlords has led to the roll-out of similar valorisation strategies in a spatial–temporal condensed way, resulting in landlord-based city-wide tenant networks, which united in the campaign for socialisation. Apart from this organisational scale shift, DWE also upscaled its demands into a coherent vision of affordable, decommodified, democratic and environmentally just housing provision.

Keywords: finance/financialisation; housing; inequality; social justice; social movements; é‡‘èž / é‡‘èž åŒ–; ä½ æˆ¿; ä¸ å¹³ç­‰; 社会正义; ç¤¾ä¼šè¿ åŠ¨ (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00420980251344048 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:62:y:2025:i:16:p:3188-3204

DOI: 10.1177/00420980251344048

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().