Growing numbers of people are renting rather than owning commodities such as music, films, cars and, crucially, housing. The shift from ownership to access in exchange for a fee is occurring in the context of new socio-economic conditions and digital platforms emerging from crisis-ridden landscapes. Homeownership, the social cement of capitalism in past decades and a central element of the “social contract” in many liberal democratic regimes, is receding. This entails that new profiles of renters and rentiers are gaining centrality in contemporary urban political economies. Novel forms of income generation have developed, but also novel forms of precarity and inequality.
The project engages with these changing urban conditions and analyses emerging strategies to counter associated power and wealth imbalances. To this end, the project involves an intensive analysis of Barcelona, an ‘extreme case’ in two respects; (1) in the significance of the shift from ownership to access economies in housing, and (2) in how related asset-ownership inequalities, as well as asymmetries in the control of data and digital infrastructures, are being addressed in innovative ways. The project outlines the wider digital and property landscapes in which Barcelona is embedded and analyses the development of digital counter-infrastructures and legal and policy innovations that are drafting new ‘social contracts’ for a post-homeownership scenario.
The research carried out sheds light on a period of expansion and dispersion of property ownership followed by one of contraction and concentration after the global financial crisis of 2008. A young “generation rent” excluded from property ownership has emerged in parallel to an older “generation landlord”, which expanded its patrimony by acquiring devalued properties in the crisis’ wake. Concomitantly, institutional investors, notably foreign pension funds, have also taken a stake in residential real estate. Asset management firms and digital platforms have become key intermediators of these processes. Altogether, a landscape of polarisation around property and rent has emerged from the ruins of the 2008 mortgage crash.
The resulting social conflictivity between tenants and landlords has produced new social movements and organisations that have been pushing for legal and policy changes in the rental housing sector, including novel rent controls and measures of housing rationing. These changes have been strongly contested in the public debate, yet the arguments employed against pro-tenant measures are plagued with empirical and theoretical weaknesses. Tenant and municipalist organisations have also started to build their own digital infrastructures to improve their operational capacities and reduce information asymmetries in the realm of housing. These digital infrastructures operate in conditions of structural inequality in relation to private power, yet have become important tools in the urban conflicts underway.
