Housing decommodification as remaking the territory-property nexus

In the theoretical and political effort to ‘re-enchant the world’ for a post-neoliberal and post-growth future, struggles over property and territory are taking centre stage. If we accept that property and territory are mutually constitutive, then efforts to repurpose property towards a horizon of decommodification of land and housing should be accompanied by a rethinking of territory. The article proposes a theoretical approach for understanding how movements for spatial and housing justice enact a re-appropriation of social wealth, against and beyond the naturalisation of individual homeownership, through re-imagining and repurposing the territory-property nexus. Such a move requires recognising, valuing and sustaining the webs of relations and infrastructures that underwrite and enable transformative emergence towards a re-articulation of dwelling practices and subjectivities. The article presents a situated discussion of the first case of a cooperative-oriented alternative ‘equity release’ for elderly homeowners in Catalonia. Building on a long-term engagement with the collective praxis of challenging the legal, economic and ethical ‘grammar of property’, it raises wider political and theoretical questions on the remaking of the territory-property nexus through territories of and for housing decommodification.