Sharing social reproduction in a housing commons: the case of La Borda in Barcelona

Santiago del Río

City, 2025, vol. 29, issue 1-2, 7-27

Abstract: This paper advances research on housing commons by providing a deeper understanding of the political significance of the collectivisation of home-based reproductive work under post-2008 austerity. Examining how reproductive work is collectively organised in La Borda, a housing commons in Barcelona, I explore how the collectivisation of care and housework challenges the social reproduction regimes that sustain financialised capitalism. Post-2008 housing financialisation has been enabled by austerity policies that re-privatise social reproduction within the home-family nexus. This process underscores the need to investigate collective homemaking practices that prefigure equitable forms of social reproduction. To this end, the paper first situates housing commons, where care and housework are collectively shared, within feminist legacies of social reproduction, highlighting their renewed relevance amid austerity and financialisation. Against this backdrop, it empirically examines how the collectivisation of reproductive work in La Borda has strengthened community belonging and brought social value to traditionally devalued practices. While the distribution of reproductive work in this housing initiative remains far from equitable, I argue that dynamics such as security of tenure, space co-production, participatory democracy, and a feminist ethos have created conditions for renegotiating historical reproductive imbalances.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2024.2442184

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