Methodologies for Housing Justice: A Summer Institute for Movement-Based & University-Based Scholars

The Summer Institute on Methodologies for Housing Justice brought together movement-based and university-based scholars to address key needs and gaps in housing and planning research. A part of the Housing Justice in #UnequalCities Network, which is housed at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy and supported by the National Science Foundation, this class advances research methodologies that tackle pressing housing issues and build power for advocacy and community organizations. The course took place August 5 – 9, 2019 and was led by Ananya Roy, Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy and Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography at UCLA, and Raquel Rolnik, Professor of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo, and former UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing.

Goals:

1.  Examine the structural mechanisms of dispossession and displacement in unequal cities, such as financialization, and cover the methodologies needed to pinpoint, analyze, and expose these mechanisms.

2.  Study and implement the use of data and research to support forms of resistance, to contribute to public pedagogy, and to generate alternative housing and planning policies and programs.

3.  Think through the politics and ethics of data including who collects and controls data and how data is used and for what purposes.

4.  Adopt a comparative and transnational approach to housing research by thinking from Los Angeles and learning from struggles in other parts of the world.