In times of the Covid-19 pandemic, the access to housing is becoming one of the most urgent social issues in almost anywhere in the world. Individuals, families and communities struggle daily for the fundamental right to housing. Social movements are mobilizing to strengthen the demands, raised by diverse groups – tenants on rent strike, street people, rural occupations and urban squats as well as indigenous and traditional communities… In the sphere of institutional policy, little has been done to alleviate the consequences of the pandemic on access to dignified and secure housing. While some local, regional or national governments passed emergency measures like a ban on evictions during the pandemic, in august 2020, these policies are expiring in a lot of contexts, while the pandemic and the economic crisis that comes with it, endures. Thus, rent strike, as well as other housing justice actions become a legitimate tactics for people all over. For a reflection on rent strikes throughout history and the strategic moment we are living now, read also this text from Editorial Segadores and Col·lectiu Bauma.
The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) is a data-visualization, data analysis, and storytelling collective with chapters primarily in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project aggregates data using free and open-source technologies to support social movements, community organizations, and research groups working toward housing justice. AEMP has contributed to Not-an-Atlas, with its Community Power Map, but also through Erin McElroy‘s precious participation in our events in Berlin an Hamburg, as well as in our Documentary on Counter-Cartographies.
As an emergency response the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project greated a collaborative map, to visualize housing legislation and housing justice action. Along with other groups of academics and housing activist, kollektiv orangotango, helped to make this map accessible in several languages, and to populate it with crowed source data from various contexts. The map gives visibility to the struggles for the right to housing in times of the pandemic and provides useful information to those threatened by the increased housing precarity that this crisis has led to. The objective is also to support movements to promote housing justice actions, like rent strike or the negotiation of rent decrease, squatting or occupying, mutual aid among affected tenants or campaigning for housing justice issues. Anyone can contribute to the map and visualize actions for the right to housing by simply answering this form!
If you do not yet participate in an organized movement, but have decided to suspend or negotiate a reduction of your rent, you are, indeed, part of a global struggle! Describe your case on the map to show other tenants that it is possible to fight for housing in times of pandemic.