Housing: a right, not a commodity
Jovana Vuković [Regional Center for Minorities, Belgrade]
Housing: a right, not a commodity
Lecturer: Jovana Vuković (Regional Center for Minorities, Belgrade)
June 13, 2014
The right to housing is one of the basic human rights. It was codified in the conventions of the United Nations as one of the key social rights, which is undoubtedly the merit of the political pressures of a strong and organized labor movement in the middle of the 20th century. However, the exercise of this right has been largely questioned in recent decades. Its disintegration begins already with the collapse of the welfare state in Western Europe and later with the restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe. It is first of all reflected in the growing neoliberal pressures to redefine the issue of housing as the exclusive possibility of individuals to solve their own housing needs on the market, instead of a collective right.
The lecture, among other things, discussed the privatization of the housing stock in the early nineties of the last century, which marks the beginning of this process in Serbia, as well as the erosion of this right during the past decade, which culminates in the creation of slums, the formation of segregated settlements, the emergence of a market-oriented system of social housing and increasingly frequent forced evictions.
The lecture was organized as part of the public program of the seminar Housing policy and its impact on society, which is realized as part of the Critical Machine project.
Jovana Vuković works at the Regional Center for Minorities (RCM), which is a non-governmental, non-partisan, non-profit organization based in Belgrade, which operates on the territory of the Western Balkans. RCM works to promote and protect minority rights, fights against all forms of discrimination, exclusion and marginalization of minorities and marginalized groups and promotes the empowerment of minorities in order to ensure their full participation in all areas of society.
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The Critical Machine project is implemented through a series of seminars whose goal is to contribute to providing conditions for the continuous reproduction and dissemination of a new language of criticism that would deal with the analysis of social phenomena accessible to the general public, in an analytically set way, research-based and with critical sharpness. The need for new analyzes that would constantly oppose the logic of common sense and social consensus seems to be necessary.