Urban commons in practice: housing cooperativism and city-making

30. Urban commons in practice: housing cooperativism and city-making Lorenzo Vidal Urban commons encompass a series of collective social practices as well as a political principle that has re-emerged out of the struggles against neoliberal capitalism (Dardot & Laval 2019). They have become a lens through which to conceptualise social processes of collective (re)appropriation of urban resources. Engaging with the commons from an urban sociological perspective implies being attentive to the social groups that are involved in these processes and how they transform and are transformed by their urban context. Housing cooperativism can be understood as a form of urban commoning and has received renewed attention as one of the responses to the ‘return of the housing question’ (Hodkinson 2012). This chapter explores the potential, limits and contradictions of the cooperative route to urban housing commons in light of the experiences of three cities: Barcelona, Copenhagen and Montevideo. How can housing cooperativism provide a collective and non-commodified housing alternative and for whom? During the fallout from the 2007–8 global financial crisis, Barcelona was a city teeming with practices of urban commoning. The spirit of the Plaça Catalunya occupation during the indignados uprisings of 2011 spilled over to decentralised assemblies engaged in collectively appropriating their neighbourhoods through social centres, urban gardens and squatted housing, as well as anti-eviction pickets. Public services such as healthcare, education and transportation were being revalued and reclaimed by mareas (tides) of workers and users in response to austerity and budget cuts. A new generation of production and consumption cooperativism also took off in the face of precarity and unemployment. In 2015, moreover, local elections were won by a new municipalist platform called Barcelona En Comú (Barcelona in Common), signalling an affinity to the notion of the commons. This social and political momentum was channelled in different directions and has taken diverse organisational and institutional forms. This chapter will hone into the debates and decisions driving a new generation of user housing cooperatives in the city. It is a story embedded in local history and movements, but also heavily influenced by practices and policy mobilities from other cities, particularly Copenhagen and Montevideo. As made explicit on the website of La Borda, one of Barcelona’s pioneer user housing cooperatives, the cooperative housing models in Uruguay and Denmark have served as a ‘direct reference’ for local praxis (La Borda, no date). Their collective property and limited-equity character embody an alternative to the entrenched local imaginaries of individual homeownership. Copenhagen is as an example of just how significant such housing alternatives can become. More than 30% of the city’s housing stock belongs to ‘private housing cooperatives’ (privat andelsboligforening) and another 20% to ‘common housing’ (almene boliger), a sector of non-profit rental housing associations with roots in the country’s cooperative housing history and governed through a system of ‘tenant democracy’ (See Table 30.1). The latter sector comprises 550 housing associations with 7000 residential estates (BL 2015). In Uruguay, cooperative housing represents approximately 3% of the national housing stock and 472 Housing cooperativism and city-making 473 Table 30.1 Copenhagen Common housing Sector Tenure Access Governance Source: Housing sectors rooted in housing cooperativism Private housing cooperatives Indefinite leases Limited-equity shares Queues Queues, inheritance or transactions (variations) Housing association Cooperative boards and boards and estate-level boards assemblies and assemblies Montevideo User cooperatives Barcelona User cooperatives Limited-equity shares Limited-equity shares Queues, inheritance or Queues, inheritance transactions (variations) (variations) Cooperative boards and Cooperative boards and assemblies assemblies Author’s elaboration. almost half of these cooperatives are located in Montevideo (Barenstein et al. 2023: 10). What has stood out most in this case is the activism of the Uruguayan Federation of Mutual-Aid Housing Cooperatives (FUCVAM in Spanish). This umbrella organisation is an inspirational example of how housing cooperativism can develop into an important social movement pushing for housing solutions. In Catalonia, the user cooperative housing sector is still emerging and taking shape. At the end of 2021 there were 30 user cooperatives in either the development or living phase, 17 of which were located in Barcelona (La Dinamo Fundació 2021). The history of housing cooperativism in Uruguay and Denmark has its lights and shadows when viewed from an urban commons perspective. These have informed discussions in Catalonia’s nascent cooperative housing sector, which is eager to become an affordable and accessible alternative in a context of housing crisis. This chapter will address some of the key issues that have centred such discussions: the affordability and accessibility of cooperative housing, its scalability, its resilience to enclosure and commodification pressures and its role in broader urban processes in a context of the ‘generalisation of gentrification as a global urban strategy’ (Smith 2002). Before analysing these concrete issues, the notion of the urban commons and the efforts to put it into practice through cooperativism will be introduced. How community, class and capital can be conceptualised in relation to cooperative housing will also be discussed in order to theoretically frame the empirical analysis. I argue that housing cooperatives can be a vehicle for urban commoning and are best equipped to confront recurring dynamics of enclosure when nested in multi-scalar and multi-stakeholder institutional and organisational structures. These structures must harness the redistributive capacities of the state whilst simultaneously defending their autonomy from both the state and the market. The geographies of (to different degrees) collectively self-governed and inter-linked cooperative housing communities can potentially provide the groundwork for such possibilities. These spaces, however, interact with broader urban processes that are beyond their reach. This constitutes both a limiting factor as well as the point of engagement with other practices and movements reclaiming the commons. These insights are of interest to urban sociologists concerned with the political-economy enablers and constraints for urban change and the class dimensions of both cooperative housing and urban commons. 474 Research handbook on urban sociology The chapter draws from research fieldwork in Copenhagen (2015) and Montevideo (2016) in the context of my doctoral studies, as well as from direct personal involvement in the cooperative housing sector in Barcelona since the year 2017. Fieldwork in Copenhagen and Montevideo included 60 semi-structured interviews with policymakers, practitioners, activists and cooperative housing members, as well as documentary analysis of extensive grey literature. This material is referenced indirectly here through previous publications (Vidal 2018, 2019a, 2019b). In Barcelona, I am a member of a housing cooperative, a delegate in the sector-wide coordination space and part of the advisory board of La Dinamo, a foundation dedicated to the promotion of cooperative housing. Inputs from this personal experience have not been systematically recorded, yet they have nevertheless informed my knowledge on the subject. URBAN COMMONING THROUGH COOPERATIVISM The notion of the commons has been gaining popularity in the past three decades. A broad and diverse body of work in the social sciences has engaged with this concept and two main approaches can arguably be discerned: the institutionalist and the neo-Marxist. The institutionalist approach emerges largely as a response to Hardin’s (1968) well-known essay on the ‘tragedy of the commons’. Hardin argued that shared resources that were subtractable and difficult to exclude people from tended to be overexploited due to the ‘rationally’ self-serving behaviour of their users. His paradigmatic hypothetical example of this was grazing ground for cattle. The only solution, in his view, was either privatisation or state control over the resource. The institutionalists, notably Ostrom (1990), contend instead that ‘common-property regimes’ based on user-centred collective institutions designed around a key set of principles can and have provided a sustainable alternative. Although initially centred on natural ‘common-pool resources’, this literature has since applied this analysis to a number of contexts, from the digital space of the internet (Hess & Ostrom 2007) to the urban space of the city (Foster & Iaione 2019), including housing cooperatives (Vogel et al. 2016). Rather than addressing a ‘tragedy’ derived from a thought experiment, the starting point for the neo-Marxist approach is the historical process of enclosure of the commons during capitalism’s ‘primitive accumulation’ (Marx 1995); that is, the proletarianisation of rural communities as they were stripped of their common rights to access and use local land, pastures, forests and other natural resources that were essential to their livelihoods. These resources then became the exclusive property of private owners or of the modern state. The Midnight Notes Collective (1990) first argued that this process does not only belong to the pre-history of capitalism but that there are persistent ‘new enclosures’ that separate the population from their means of subsistence. As neoliberal globalisation pushed forward, they were referring to a diverse range of processes: from the displacement of indigenous peoples from their lands to the privatisation of public assets. For Holloway (2010), moreover, this separation is never a finished process but is constantly active and at issue. A dialectical interplay between enclosures and commons then ensues, as the forms of producing and managing the means of subsistence are continuously contested. From the neo-Marxist perspective then the commons refers to a collective and non-commodified social relation between a community and its ‘actually existing or yet-to-be-created social or physical environment deemed crucial to its life and livelihood’, as Housing cooperativism and city-making 475 Harvey (2012: 73) puts it. It is a practice, commoning (Linebaugh 2008), consisting of enacting and/or claiming this type of social relation ‘in, against and beyond’ capitalism (Caffentzis & Federici 2014, Cumbers 2015, Holloway 2010). This practice is often pre-figurative and imperfect, generating ‘restricted commons’, as Martínez (2020) puts it. The neo-Marxist approach has informed a burgeoning literature on cooperative housing in different ways (Aernouts & Ryckewaert 2018, Balmer & Bernet 2015, Card 2020, Huron 2018, Nonini 2017, Noterman 2016, Thompson 2020b, Vidal 2019b). The present chapter positions itself within this literature, which still draws key insights from institutionalist approaches. The collective and (partially) decommodified dimensions of cooperative housing, collective property and non- or limited equity, are features that can be conceptualised through the lens of the commons. Urban commoning involves recreating communities anew and providing collective means for their social reproduction in built-up landscapes already parcelled out into private and state property. There are specific ‘urban challenges’ to the commons (Kip 2015) and certain elements that make urban commons ‘materially distinct’ (Huron 2017, 2018). These can be summarised as (1) population density, transience and diversity – the coming together of strangers with different backgrounds, worldviews and material conditions; (2) the coupling of urbanisation and capital accumulation, operating in a context shaped by its centrality to the circulation of commodities and capital, the storage of surplus value and the extraction of rents; and (3) the state’s regulation of the latter, existing under the close gaze and presence of state authority and power. Due to the centrality of urban areas for capital accumulation and state power and their more heterogeneous and mobile populations, the urban commons’ communities and boundaries are often characterised by somewhat more contestation and porosity than rural commons. There is also a ‘scale problem’ (Harvey 2012) when it comes to the urban commons. Urban life is sustained by large-scale and complex intersecting processes and infrastructures than cannot be managed by local communities alone. Urban communities cannot even fathom the possibility of self-sustenance through the collective appropriation of their local environment. Urban commoning must thus develop multi-scalar understandings of community and collective institutionality. The urban proletariat engaged early on in mutualism and cooperativism to secure some relative autonomy from their dependence on the market. The cooperative association can be seen to provide an ‘organizational shell’ (Barenstein et al. 2023) and a new set of norms for the commons in contexts where traditional rural customs no longer hold. The ‘Rochdale principles’ are an example of a modern ethical code of values, as well as an organising guideline. The cooperative society provides a legal framework for a collective form of organisation that is inscribed in the modern system of laws and property rights. Commoning under this guise operates through the collective ownership of the cooperative, rather than through customary use. Belonging to the community is gained through membership rather than through social ties to place. The cooperative is an association that arises out of the common pooling of resources, but the urban proletariat has little to pool together beyond its own labour power, wages and savings. Cooperatives have often scaled-up through federalist structures, yet without a broader social change in property rights, cooperatives can only expand by drawing on the surpluses of their activity or by capturing resources from the state. The former option is limited by their non-profit status, unless they abandon their non-commodified character. The latter establishes a complex nexus between the member-based community of the cooperative and the abstract citizen-based community of the state. 476 Research handbook on urban sociology The ‘public–cooperative nexus’ (Ferreri & Vidal 2021) underpins many experiences of urban commoning. Housing cooperatives often appropriate extra financial as well as physical resources, such as land and buildings, from the state. The state’s legal apparatus and redistributive functions provide opportunities for scaling the cooperative housing sector and making it more affordable. Yet the state is ‘a form of social relations, a way of doing things’, as Holloway (2010: 58) insists, that is part of the process of separation of ‘the common affairs of the community from the community itself’, a separation enforced by a hierarchical state bureaucracy. The nexus between cooperatives and the state thus involves the interaction of diverse and contravening logics. The balance between housing cooperatives’ embeddedness in the state and their autonomy is a precarious one, in which the cooperatives can grow but also run the risk of losing their independence (Ganapati 2010). Making a similar but broader argument, De Angelis (2017) argues that the commons runs the risk of being co-opted by the state and the market. However, the opposite is also true. The commons can strategically use the complexity of these systems for their own development. Municipal public administrations have a central role in articulating the ‘public–cooperative nexus’ when it comes to cooperative housing. This is due to the urban and local dimension of housing but also the fact that the electoral successes of social-democratic and left-wing parties often start and endure relatively longer at the municipal scale. This has been the case in Copenhagen, Montevideo and Barcelona. In the latter case, winning municipal elections was initially conceived of as a ‘strategic entry point’ for commons-oriented social change (Russell 2019). The hypothesis was that municipal public administrations lay closest to the level at which relations of proximity take place, the everyday practices in which communities are formed (Observatorio Metropolitano 2014: 148). They are thus best positioned to promote communities engaged in urban commoning, as well as to include them in processes of co-production of urban policies (Blanco & Gomà 2019). As Thompson (2020c: 336) poses, ‘the political promise of municipalism is the bridge it builds between alternative economic spaces that prefigure post-capitalist futures and the institutional supports at the municipal or city-regional scale required to nurture and sustain them’. Cooperatives and the social and solidarity economy more generally have been conceived of as key non-state actors within this approach (Miró 2017, 2018). Relations between left-leaning parties and cooperative organisations have not always been close and complicit, yet the municipal scale has proved central to the public–cooperative nexus developed in all three cities. COMMUNITY, CLASS AND CAPITAL IN COOPERATIVE HOUSING COMMONS Urban land and housing present a series of peculiarities that require closer consideration when appropriated as commons through housing cooperativism. Urban housing is composed of individual residential buildings, each with its own community of residents. The sum of these buildings, as well as of the plots of land available for future residential use, amounts to the residential infrastructure of cities and towns upon which urban dwellers as a whole depend. Yet housing is necessarily an excludable good: its use by current residents prevents others from using it. Since it is such an essential infrastructure for urban life, however, how it is managed concerns the wider community of current and future urban dwellers, more so when considering that land for residential use is limited and non-reproducible. On the other hand, Housing cooperativism and city-making 477 housing is part of the ‘secondary circuit of capital’ (Harvey 2006), where capital is stored and ground rents are extracted. As such, urban land and housing are traversed by diverse uses and interests, overlapping boundaries of community and class dynamics. Housing cooperativism involves communities that are bounded by membership in the cooperative association. This association is often restricted to current residents, although housing estates can also be nested within larger structures. This is the case of Sostre Cívic in Catalonia, for example, a cooperative that integrates a number of different housing projects. Danish common housing associations also have a multi-scalar organisational structure, bringing together different housing estates organised around both local as well as association-wide assemblies and boards. These structures sustain multi-scalar forms of community, yet can still only represent current residents in the cooperative housing stock. As such, they can still become ‘inward facing’ (Thompson 2020a) and develop only ‘internal solidarity’ (Sørvoll & Bengtsson 2020) amongst members. Membership, however, can also be open to non-resident collaborators and stakeholders. This is the case for many user cooperatives in Catalonia, for example, where collaborating non-resident members also have (minority) representation in the governing board. Another example is the many Danish common housing associations that have municipalities and other external actors represented in their governing boards. These multi-stakeholder organisational frameworks broaden the boundaries of the community involved in cooperative housing. Commons often involve ‘layered or nested rights’ (Bruun 2015) and ‘multiple claimants’ (Amin & Howell 2016) that go beyond a strictly predefined community and a narrow definition of insiders and outsiders. As Stavrides insists, openness and porosity should be important characteristics of urban commons within their ‘anti-enclosure dynamic’ (2016: 113). The right to exclude, on which the privacy and security of the home is grounded, must be balanced by outsiders’ ‘right not to be excluded’ (Blomley 2020) from the cooperative housing stock. How this balance is struck is complex. Dardot and Laval (2019) argue that the commons do not entail a passive entitlement but an active and practical one. Communities are constituted through the practice of producing and using the commons and co-producing their terms and rules of use. For non-residents to be actively involved in cooperative housing, specific mechanisms must be put in place. Multi-stakeholder organisational frameworks, such as those mentioned above, are one possibility. The public–cooperative nexus through legal and policy instruments is another. The state can act as a channel for wider social claims to the commons, albeit in highly mediated, indirect and contradictory ways. Housing cooperatives can also be embedded in a more diffuse ‘moral economy’ in which residents are considered local stewards and caretakers of a resource that ultimately belongs to society as a whole (Bruun 2015). How the right not to be excluded, as distinguished from a right to be included, is materialised is largely dependent on the ways in which access to the cooperative housing stock is mediated. Using a Bourdieusian framework (Bourdieu 1986), the endowments of economic, social and cultural capital are key mediating dimensions to take into account. The affordability of cooperative housing determines the extent to which the endowment of economic capital and capacity to pay is a factor of exclusion. The extent to which the endowment of cultural and educational resources and/or participation in certain social networks and spaces, as well as knowledge of the norms, values and attitudes that regulate them, are implicitly required to gain membership in a housing cooperative are also factors of exclusion. It is through the operation of these often less explicit forms of capital that housing cooperatives can become inaccessible to socially disadvantaged and excluded groups. Lack of transparency in many private housing 478 Research handbook on urban sociology cooperative waiting lists in Copenhagen, for example, has often meant that one must ‘know somebody’ to get in, which has produced a local and middle-class selection bias (Boterman 2011). In Barcelona, the self-management dynamics of housing cooperative groups have disproportionately favoured (precarious) middle-class activists with more available time and collective self-management skills. Specific organisational mechanisms, such as transparent queues and technical and external support, for example, can make such cases more inclusive. From a Marxist perspective, the class character of cooperative housing can be gauged from the enclosure–commons dialectic. Cooperative housing can be conceived of as part of the commons that has been reclaimed and recreated by the ‘commoners without a commons’, as Linebaugh (2014: 202) defines the urban proletariat. The stronger tenure security provided by housing cooperatives can partially deproletarianise the condition of their members, as they reconnect to land and home in a more stable way. This security, in turn, can provide a relatively stronger position from which to negotiate conditions in the labour market. Since Engels’ take on the ‘housing question’, however, Marxists have worried that approximations to homeownership can embourgoise the working classes and create shared interests with the propertied (Hodkinson 2012). Dweller control over cooperatives, in fact, has in many cases been used to commodify housing for individual gain or to enact tenure changes to individual homeownership. In this sense, Sørvoll (2013) formulates a ‘fragility hypothesis’ in relation to cooperative housing. He considers that its strong element of user ownership makes it susceptible to deregulation and vulnerable to market-oriented reforms. Housing, after all, is a significant asset that can be capitalised upon, mobilised to extract rents and leveraged to access credit. The temptation to tap into their housing’s equity can drive cooperative members to share the interests of property owners in maximising the exchange value of their assets. As such, only insofar as the cooperative housing stock maintains its collective and decommodified characteristics can it function as a common resource for the urban proletariat. ACCESSING AND SCALING THE COOPERATIVE HOUSING SECTOR For cooperative housing to develop into a significant alternative to dominant forms of housing provision, it must become a broadly available option that is affordable and accessible to urban dwellers. This depends on its capacity to reduce the profit, ground rent and interest components that bourgeon housing costs and/or to leverage state resources for a progressive socialisation of these costs. Housing cooperativism involves fewer intermediaries in the promotion, development and management of housing and thus fewer opportunities for fee-based revenues and profit margins. Furthermore, non- or limited-equity cooperatives reduce the ground rent component of housing costs in the cooperative housing stock in the long run. Through legal and policy tools, the state can facilitate access to credit, land and buildings and direct subsidies towards covering construction costs as well as the monthly payments of residents. Beyond the creation and maintenance of new cooperative housing stock, the norms and mechanisms regulating access to its housing units also determine what population can opt to become residents. After the first wave of pilot projects in Barcelona, how to scale the sector and make it more affordable have centred local discussions and campaigns. This section analyses the trajectories of cooperative housing in Denmark and Uruguay in this regard, as well as outlining the first steps taken in this direction in Barcelona. Housing cooperativism and city-making 479 Cooperative housing has expanded in Denmark and Uruguay in the context of an enabling legal framework and policy mix. In Denmark, the first housing cooperatives emerged at the end of the 19th century as self-help initiatives of workers organised in their workplaces and trade unions (Greve 1971). This form of housing broadened its population base as public subsidies were directed towards cooperatives in the inter-war years and subsequently became a central part of post-Second World War reconstruction (Bro 2009, Jensen 2013). These policies reflected a compromise between the social democratic party, keen on promoting public housing, and liberal and conservative parties, which were weary of state ownership. Through state involvement, cooperatives and non-profit associations and foundations were gradually brought together into what is today known as the common housing sector (Larsen & Lund Hansen 2015, Richman 1995, Vidal 2019b). Through this process, cooperatives lost part of their autonomy. Today, public authorities participate in the sector’s common fund (Landsbygefonden, LBF) and new-build developments require prior approval from municipalities. New-build developments in this sector do receive an initial grant from municipal public authorities equivalent to 14% of the total cost and mortgage payments are partially subsidised by the central state (Gibb et al. 2013: 37, Nielsen 2010b: 208). Tenants are also eligible for rental payment subsidies. After going through a process of residualisation due to middle-class flight towards property ownership opportunities, it has become the sector that today houses the population with the lowest average income in the country. In Uruguay, housing cooperativism took off after the National Housing Law of 1968, which provided the basic legal and institutional framework for its development. The only antecedents were three pilot projects developed two years prior by the Uruguayan Cooperativist Centre (Centro Cooperativista Uruguayo 2016). The inclusion of a chapter on housing cooperatives was inspired by Nordic European experiences and was initially a peripheral aspect of the law. Cooperatives soon became a popular option, however, for groups that formed in workplaces and trade union centres. The law defined the basic characteristics of housing cooperatives and created a National Housing Fund for the provision of mortgage credit. Public land was available for purchase under market rates for cooperatives, a mechanism that was later systematised following the institutional progression of the left-wing Frente Amplio party, first through a Municipal Land Portfolio in Montevideo in 1991 and then a National Land Portfolio in 2008. Throughout its history, FUCVAM has been pushing for public resources for the sector through political lobbying, demonstrations and land occupations (González 2013, Nahoum 2013). Cooperative groups today can present their projects for public land or buildings and mortgage credit in regular open calls by the Ministry of Housing. In the majority of cooperatives, no initial down payment is required in exchange for a commitment to 20 hours of weekly work per household during the construction phase. In addition, low-income members are eligible for monthly payment subsidies. Finally, there are income ceilings for beneficiaries of these schemes. In all, housing cooperatives have become an affordable option for the middle- to lower-middle-income population. Tenure change in existing residential stock has been another key avenue for the expansion of cooperative housing. Copenhagen stands out as a prime example. It is through this route that private housing cooperatives have taken over more than one third of the city’s housing stock in less than three decades. This housing model, in which members own a share in the collective property of the cooperative, was instituted in the mid-1970s with the backing of a broad political coalition, including the left-wing People’s Socialist Party and the Conservative Party (Richman 1995: 154). Tenants in rental housing buildings were granted a right of first 480 Research handbook on urban sociology refusal if at least 60% of them organised into a private housing cooperative association when their landlords put up their homes for sale. The prior prohibition of the horizontal division of urban properties and strict rent controls made landlordism an unattractive business in aging tenements, prompting cheap sales to sitting tenants-cum-cooperativists. Furthermore, most municipally owned rental housing in Copenhagen was sold off via this formula in the mid-1990s (Velfærdsministeriet 2008). Cooperative housing communities in this case were formed by the tenants residing in the buildings at the moment of purchase and reflected the socio-economic composition of tenants in the local area or neighbourhood. As cooperative membership implied losing eligibility for rent subsidies, however, many low-income and vulnerable tenants opted out of the tenure change and continued as renters with the cooperative as their new landlord (Larsen & Lund Hansen 2008, Vidal 2019a). Today, the average income of residents in private housing cooperatives is higher than in both the private rental and common housing sectors but lower than that of the individual homeowners. Beyond direct economic determinants, access to cooperative housing is also shaped by other processes in the formation of cooperative groups and the transfer of housing units. During the creation of new housing cooperatives, how groups are formed and organised has important socio-economic implications. Groups that are self-selected are often formed around established social networks and favour those with more social and cultural capital. Collective self-management also requires time and skills that are often out of reach for those with heavier workloads and care responsibilities. In Uruguay, FUCVAM works to put individuals in contact to form new groups and the law regulates the Technical Assistance Institutes that support groups during the different stages of the promotion process. These institutes are non-profit companies with multi-disciplinary staff, from architects and accountants to social workers, whose services are price-regulated and covered by the public loan that cooperatives are eligible for. Once cooperative housing is built and inhabited, how housing units are transferred is another key determinant of accessibility. Whereas in Danish common housing units cannot be inherited, both the shares and the housing units in Danish private cooperatives and Uruguayan user cooperatives can. As such, they constitute a family resource that is less available to society as a whole. The former stock is further accessed through open and transparent waiting lists, whereas the functioning of queues in the latter two models varies from cooperative to cooperative. In Barcelona, growing and opening up the emerging cooperative housing sector has centred efforts in the context of a pressing social need for housing. A key challenge has been not to fall into a form of ‘municipalist vanguardism’ (Thompson 2020c: 336) that threatens the ‘ability to include, mobilise or represent the material interests of less empowered, disenfranchised social groups’. Economic costs for cooperatives have been reduced by leasing municipally owned land and buildings for 75 to 99 years at a symbolic price. Cooperatives have also received mortgage credit from the Catalan public credit institution and subsidies for construction from the Barcelona municipal housing institute and Spanish state housing plans. Land and subsidies, in turn, are conditioned with income ceilings for cooperative members. A campaign for further public support to guarantee affordability has become a strategic axis for the sector (Sectorial 2021). Regulation of the inheritability of shares and housing units though varies from cooperative to cooperative, and in terms of unit transfers, many have opted for open and transparent queues. In all, the sector is undergoing an active and uneven process of expansion and configuration. Housing cooperativism and city-making 481 RESILIENCE TO ENCLOSURE AND COMMODIFICATION PRESSURES Cooperative housing operates in urban landscapes shaped by state and market logics. The collective and decommodified dimensions of cooperatives are subject to both latent and direct pressures by these more dominant forms of social relations. In this context, cooperative housing commons can be subject to enclosures enacted by the state and by cooperative members themselves navigating the market. This section analyses how these dynamics have played out in the Danish and Uruguayan cases and how they are currently being addressed in Barcelona. Resident-based collective ownership characterises the housing models analysed in all three cases and (partial) decommodification operates through cost-priced rents in Danish common housing and membership share equity limitations in the rest. The resilience of these collective and non-market characteristics depends to a large extent on the organisational and institutional configuration of these housing sectors. Autonomy from the state has been crucial for cooperative housing in the face of privatisation policies promoted by neoliberal governments. In Uruguay, the cooperative housing sector confronted two privatisation attempts in the mid-1980s. During the last stages of the dictatorship, a Horizontal Property Law in 1983 aimed to forcefully convert all cooperative housing into owner-occupied units. FUCVAM reacted by collecting signatures to call for a referendum against the law and by intensifying its participation in the mobilisations against the regime. The dictatorship soon came to the end and, rather than abolishing the law, the newly elected conservative government forced a vote in all cooperatives for each to decide on the matter. In a context of high mobilisation and politicisation, voting results overwhelmingly backed the user cooperative model (González 2013: 113). In Denmark, the liberal-conservative government during the 2000s sought to privatise common housing by implementing a ‘right to buy’ scheme for sitting tenants. The common housing associations, grouped together in their national federation Boligselskabernes Landsforening (BL), mobilised against the measure claiming it amounted to an unconstitutional expropriation of their properties (BL 2003). The Supreme Court’s final decision (Højesteret 2007) fell mid-way between the government’s original intention and the sector’s position by granting local tenant assemblies, rather than the associations, the prerogative to decide on sales in their estates. For a sale to occur, however, the final scheme further required a 2/3 majority vote, the backing of either the local municipality and/or the ‘parent’ housing association and that the association could not prove that the sale would result in significant negative net proceeds. The effect of the scheme was negligible (LBF 2016: 105). How autonomy from the state has been articulated has proven an equally crucial factor in the face of commodification pressures. Nesting dweller control within broader collective processes and multi-scalar and multi-stakeholder organisational structures has made cooperative housing more resilient to enclosure. Members of user cooperatives in Uruguay voted not to become property owners in the context of wider social mobilisations against neoliberal measures and an active sector-wide federation. Tenants in Danish common housing did not buy out units after years of sector-wide campaigns and the conditioning of this decision to the approval of other stakeholders. The evolution of Danish private housing cooperatives provides a contrasting example. The price of shares in these cooperatives are capped to the valuation of the property as rental housing. Yet in the year 2004 the liberal-conservative government lifted a ban on the use of cooperative shares as collateral for personal credit. As a result, cooperative 482 Research handbook on urban sociology dwellings were allowed to start functioning similarly to a private mortgageable commodity (Larsen & Lund Hansen 2015). In the context of rental market liberalisations, cheap credit and a housing boom, property valuations rose dramatically. Cooperative assemblies had the option of keeping share prices down or following the valuation hikes and overwhelmingly voted for the latter (Bruun 2018, Vidal 2019a). The decentralised and atomised nature of the sector meant that there was no sector-wide space in which such transcendental decisions could be discussed and coordinated. Moreover, the decision was exclusively in the hands of cooperative shareholders. A broader appropriation of cooperatives as commons has proven important in pre-empting such enclosures from within. This broader appropriation also has to do with the ways in which access to cooperative housing is mediated and units are transferred. In the case of Danish private housing cooperatives, the delegitimation of its non-market transfer mechanism based on queues laid the groundwork for its subsequent substitution by market exchanges. The lack of transparency in the queuing system, practices of nepotism and ‘money under the table’ in the buying and selling of shares, often amplified by the media, damaged social perceptions of the sector. In this context, market exchange gained legitimacy as a more ‘objective’ and ‘just’ alternative for outsiders. This social climate underpinned the legal changes and cooperative decisions that have led to the decline of the queuing system. Private exchanges at new quasi-market prices are increasingly taking its place. Uruguay’s user cooperatives have not undergone comparable transformations, yet the absence of a rigorous queuing system has also proved problematic in some cases. In housing cooperatives located in revalorised coastal neighbourhoods of Montevideo, for example, there are accounts of shares having been irregularly sold at above regulated prices (Solanas 2016: 269–321). Although a relatively marginal phenomenon, it re-emphasises the idea that robust non-market mechanisms are necessary to prevent market mediations from creeping into the functioning of cooperative housing. In building autonomy from both the state and the market, the use of state resources becomes a contradictory but necessary element. State funding cutbacks have been fought by cooperative housing federations in order to keep affordability and a supporting crutch against market dynamics. In 2002, the Danish liberal-conservative government sought to increase the self-financing of the common housing sector by using the sector’s own common fund (LBF) in financing new-build projects. The sector campaigned against this measure and argued that the construction of new common housing was society’s task, to be paid via progressive taxation, rather than via a ‘Robin Hood in reverse’ ‘special tax’ on the sector itself (Nielsen 2010a). In Uruguay, FUCVAM has also mobilised for public subsidies to cover monthly payments of low-income members so as to guarantee the ‘right of permanence’ in cooperative housing and protection from fluctuating conditions in the labour market (FUCVAM 2016). The federation has also engaged in mortgage strikes to renegotiate their public debts and achieve substantial debt reductions (Vidal 2018). As these examples illustrate, resources funnelled from the state can help build up the size and clout of cooperative housing sectors, planting the seeds of a counter-power to the state in certain historical contexts. As such, although state involvement can in some aspects curtail the cooperative sector’s autonomy, in others it can contribute to building it up vis-à-vis both the market and the state itself. In Barcelona, the emerging cooperative housing sector is currently pushing for measures to entrench its decommodified character, primarily by aiming to modify the Catalan cooperative law to legally ground and delimit its collective property and limited-equity characteristics. Yet, as laws can be eventually changed and modified, robust non-state institution-building is Housing cooperativism and city-making 483 an equally important and pending task. In terms of the organisational structure of the sector itself, sector-wide coordination provides a space for deliberation but does not have any concrete powers in the governing organs of housing cooperatives. Only Sostre Cívic, as mentioned beforehand, centralises key economic and strategic decisions of the different housing projects under its organisational umbrella. For those projects leasing municipally owned plots, housing equity is restricted in any case by the absence of ownership over the land. However, a change in municipal policies once the leases expire is a possibility and a risk. The creation of a community land trust (CLT) model of land stewardship, based on a tripartite ownership structure including public authorities, social entities and residents, is a future development that is being considered (Cabré 2020). This type of multi-stakeholder control of the land upon which cooperatives are built would further entangle the sector in multiple and layered rights, which would make it difficult for any actor to unilaterally appropriate and enclose a part of the sector’s stock. HOUSING COOPERATIVES IN THE MAKING AND REMAKING OF THE CITY Housing cooperatives can be considered ‘enclaves’ (Bruun 2011) or ‘islands’ (Vidal 2019a) within the capitalist city. How cooperatives interact with their surrounding environment and are inserted within broader urban processes is important in gauging their role in wider urban commoning strategies. The true significance of where cooperatives are located, what activities they host and what kind of relations they build with surrounding neighbours and other urban actors can only be fully understood in the broader urban context – in particular, in relation to urbanisation processes and the valorisation and devalorisation of space that characterise the uneven geographical development of capital (Slater 2017, Smith 1982). This section analyses some of the key dimensions to be considered in this regard in the Uruguayan and Danish cases and centres on the role of cooperatives in the more recent context of the ‘generalisation of gentrification as a global urban strategy’ (Smith 2002) or ‘planetary gentrification’ (Lees et al. 2016). In revalorising urban environments, cooperatives’ collective and decommodified characteristics are strained and ‘put to test’, allowing for a more focused analysis of their strengths, weaknesses and contradictions. Lessons learned are of interest to Barcelona and beyond. Cooperative housing has often been constructed in the fringes of the city where land prices are lower. This has been mostly the case for housing cooperatives in Montevideo, which have been extending the city and its urban infrastructures. Cooperativists have not only engaged in housing construction but have also laid energy, water and sewage groundwork and constructed social and community infrastructure from libraries to crèches to sports facilities. Many of these infrastructures have been shared, on a permanent or temporal basis, with surrounding urban developments and neighbours. In this case, commoning by members has spilled beyond the boundaries of the cooperative community and provided spaces for broader social encounters. Yet this openness is fragile and often vulnerable to the harsh dynamics of urban life, as well as to the broader social climate generated by urban conflicts and inequalities. In response to heightened perceptions of urban insecurity and crime, many cooperatives have gradually built walls and fences around their estates in the past years. This stricter differentiation between cooperative and public space has undermined the broader appropriation of housing cooperatives as commons. 484 Research handbook on urban sociology Source: Miguel A. Martínez. Figure 30.1 FUCVAM estates in the historical centre of Montevideo (2018) Cooperatives have also participated in the urban renewal of city centres. In the early 1990s, FUCVAM took a strategic decision to go beyond building in the periphery of Montevideo and set an agenda for urban reform and the right of the popular classes to inhabit the central city (FUCVAM 1997). Housing cooperative initiatives were started in central areas, particularly in the historic Ciudad Vieja district, on municipal plots or through the renovation of publicly owned derelict buildings (see Figure 30.1). The first housing cooperative in the neighbourhood, COVICIVI, came together under the slogan of the ‘right of neighbours to live in their neighbourhood’, in the midst of an embryonic urban regeneration process that had triggered displacements of low-income and marginalised residents (Abin 2014, Díaz Parra & Pozuelo Rabasco 2013). In the context of liberalised urban land rent regulations and the earmarking of the district for cultural and touristic activities, housing cooperatives have had an ambiguous effect in undoing the renewa–gentrification coupling: firstly because despite housing low-income neighbours, they have not been able to integrate the local marginalised population living in informal accommodation and lacking the required economic, social and cultural capital to participate as members and secondly because their participation in the improvement of the built environment has been capitalised upon by surrounding landlords in the form of rising property values and rents. As a result, cooperatives have partially functioned as pioneers in the neighbourhood’s uneven gentrification processes (Martinet 2015, Vidal 2019a). Private housing cooperatives in the central areas of Copenhagen have also participated in urban transformations entangled in gentrification processes. The neighbourhood of Vesterbro, Housing cooperativism and city-making 485 once the city’s infamous ‘red-light district’, is an illustrative case in point. A comprehensive and far-reaching policy of urban renewal was initiated in the neighbourhood in the 1990s, set on integrally refurbishing its mostly rental and private cooperative buildings and incorporating the area into Copenhagen’s ‘creative city’ strategy (Bayliss 2007, Lund Hansen et al. 2001). In the process of refurbishment, many cooperatives were pushed to merge small flats and renovation investments translated into higher monthly payments. Rental-to-cooperative tenure conversions were also facilitated during this time and many low-income and vulnerable tenants incapable of becoming members opted to be rehoused elsewhere. Despite these dynamics, many of the district’s low- and middle-income tenants still managed to remain in the neighbourhood’s newly refurbished buildings as cooperative members. However, once cooperative assemblies followed the valuation hikes in the 2000s mentioned in the previous section, membership share prices skyrocketed to more closely reflect the market appraisal of their new building quality and central location. As such, whereas the increase in membership share prices has enriched long-time residents of cooperative housing, equivalent low-income groups can no longer afford to move into the neighbourhood. As Larsen and Lund Hansen (2008) argue, housing cooperatives in Vesterbro have in this sense generated ‘exclusionary displacement’ (Marcuse 1986). As these cases illustrate, the wider urban regulations and processes in which housing cooperatives are immersed strongly mark their impact and trajectory. Cooperatives participate in, and are vulnerable to, urban transformations that operate across multiple scales. Commoning in its collective properties might produce contradictory and perverse effects in its interaction with its commodified urban environment. Thus, exercising broader powers over the process of urbanisation also requires engaging with state policies and regulations that influence the socio-spatial configuration of the city. The municipalist movement seeks to capture local governments to align commoning logics within and outside the state but faces serious difficulties in steering the state away from governing for capital. The Barcelona experience points to the advances that can be achieved in this sense but also to its limits. The new wave of user cooperatives in the city could not have expanded without favourable municipal policies, but cooperative projects continue to be just a drop in the ocean. In Montevideo and Copenhagen, municipal public authorities have promoted housing cooperativism, yet also enacted policies enabling capital-driven urbanisation and gentrification processes. In all three cases, moreover, key legal and policy competencies that shape urban space are in the hands of supra-municipal authorities. In all, housing cooperativism within urban commoning strategies implies being attentive to the interaction between housing cooperatives and their surrounding urban environment, as well as to their position within multi-scalar strategies to appropriate the city itself as commons. CONCLUSIONS This chapter has discussed theoretical and practical challenges involved in urban commoning, with specific reference to cooperative housing. The main theoretical challenges have concerned situating urban commoning within the dynamics of capitalism and defining the communities involved in these commoning practices. I have placed the commons in a dialectical interplay with enclosures and argued for a broad and practically instituted notion of community. The practical challenges have concerned the specific organisational and institutional configuration 486 Research handbook on urban sociology of the commons and its development in concrete historical and geographical contexts. I argue that cooperatives can create the organisational space for commoning in modern urban settings within institutional frameworks that are also shaped by the state and the market. The cases of Barcelona, Copenhagen and Montevideo provided the empirical material for an analysis of the concrete development and trajectories of housing cooperatives. With references to these cases, the chapter has focused on how cooperative housing can be scaled to become a significant alternative to dominant forms of housing provision, the evolution of cooperative housing in the face of recurrent dynamics of enclosure and the interaction between housing cooperatives and broader urban processes. Multi-scalar and multi-stakeholder organisational and institutional frameworks have been identified as key to the scaling-up of cooperative housing and to its resilience to enclosure and commodification. It is through the public–cooperative nexus (Ferreri & Vidal 2021) that the cooperative sector can become more affordable and grow in size and in relative autonomy from the market. However, it is by keeping a strong foothold outside of the state that it can confront state-led enclosures. The interlinking of (to different degrees) self-governed urban communities through sector-wide federations can create a significant counter-power to the state in certain historical contexts. A broader social appropriation of cooperative housing, however, is also important in preventing enclosures from within by residents themselves. This broader appropriation is tied to wider social claims over cooperative housing as commons that the rest of society has a right not to be excluded from (Blomley 2020, Bruun 2015), as well as to specific institutional mechanisms that allow for the participation and inclusion of non-residents. The latter include equity limitations to maintain affordability and housing transfer regulations that keep the sector relatively open and accessible. The direct participation of non-residents within the governing bodies of the cooperative housing sector is another key mechanism present in the Catalan and Danish cases. In all, commoning in, against and beyond the state and the market requires building a robust institutional and organisational framework that obstructs enclosures. The limits of housing cooperatives as a vehicle for urban commoning are brought to relief when situated against the backdrop of capitalist urbanisation processes. Housing cooperatives participate in, and are vulnerable to, broader urban dynamics that are largely beyond their reach. The interaction of housing cooperatives with their surrounding urban environment can produce contradictory and perverse effects. The participation of housing cooperatives in gentrification processes has been used as an extreme and illustrative example of this. This example is useful in signalling the importance of broader alliances to amplify urban commoning and exercise social control over the process of urbanisation. Municipalism underscores the strategic position of municipal governments and urban-based social movements and organisations in articulating these broader strategies, yet has its own set of limits and contradictions and problems of scale. It does contribute, however, to broadening the terrain of action beyond more traditional alliances, such as between the cooperative movement, trade unions and social-democratic parties, that have been influential in Nordic countries like Denmark and beyond. As the three cases show, the role of cooperatives within these broader alliances is not a given but is contingent on concrete historical processes. Finally, urban sociology has much to contribute to the literature on the urban commons and cooperative housing, particularly in understanding the interplay between structure and agency that shapes these experiences. 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