Why More Housing is NOT the Fix to the Housing Crisis!

Cities After… with Miguel Robles-Duran

[S3.5E05] Why More Housing is NOT the Fix to the Housing Crisis!

Cities After… with Prof. Miguel Robles-Durán. A radical exploration into the capitalist contradictions of our urban world, and the many anti-capitalist futures to come.

This episode is the second of several to come where Politics In Motion will be re-publishing some of the previous productions that he did on a volunteer basis for democracy@work.

"Housing is a basic human need and the market tends to ignore social needs, as it prioritizes individual profit." - Prof. Robles-Durán

There is a widespread belief that the central culprit of the housing crisis in most metropolitan regions around the world today is the lack of supply. This notion has been well spread by mainstream media outlets and urban professionals, such as urban planners, architects, housing developers, and real-estate agencies. For those disseminating this idea, ending the housing crisis is straightforward: more and more housing needs to be built. In this episode of Cities After.., Prof. Robles-Durán contests this belief, explaining that this solution is built on the false notion of a stable market free of externalities and inherent contradictions. Addressing the housing crisis solely through supply and demand dogmas makes little sense in the era of real-estate financialization and mega-landlords. There is a much deeper systemic issue brewing than simply an unequal relationship between supply and demand. __________________________________________________________________________

Miguel Robles-Durán is an urbanist and Marxist urban theorist working at the intersections of urban political-ecology, unitary urbanism, and the design of social and environmentally just urban processes. He is a tenured Associate Professor of Urbanism at The New School / Parsons School of Design in New York City. Robles-Durán is founding partner and co-director of Urban Front, a transnational consultancy for urban justice. He is also a founding board member of The Shape of Cities to Come Institute, a New York City based co-learning and strategizing platform for urban activism. Robles-Durán's work with the New York City and Rotterdam-based design cooperative Cohabitation Strategies (CohStra) has been influential to the contemporary development of socially-engaged forms of urban practice.

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Cohabitation Strategies: http://www.CohStra.org

The Shape of Cities to Come Institute: http://www.shapeofcitiestocome.org

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