Popular housing, from marginalization to citizenship

Abstract

Housing is more than housing. It is the place to live together, to increase the workforce and to build affective bonds. Housing is also one of the conditions to access de facto to citizenship. For many inhabitants, housing is something less than housing. The territorial marginality, which is also social, generates an exclusionary dynamic: formative difficulties, to live in a human environment that shares deficits of all kinds; lack of relationships with different people who can provide clues, contacts, information and recommendations; to feel excluded from the professional, academic and cultural media. The inhabitant in these cases cannot exercise as a citizen, he cannot exercise his formal status (if he has one). In our current culture, it is obvious that everyone has a right to housing. But for many it is not.
The end of many social housing politics does not have as main objective the well-being of the population and the right to housing, but the private business and the complicity of complicit and perverse public policy (whatever the initial propaganda intentions).
The city as housing is a continuous process, which cannot be left in the exclusive hands of leaders, professionals (architects, town planners, etc.) or promoters and builders. And even less of the banks and landowners. It is organized citizenship that must promote and guide urban dynamics. In this process it must conquer the socially legitimate but not formalized rights or the ones that are, but in fact the majority or broad sectors of the population cannot exercise them, as is the case of a decent and integrated housing in the city.