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In June 2022, a group of activists, students, and scholars gathered in Barcelona for the 8th annual International Geographies of Justice Summer Institute (IGJ), Housing Justice in Unequal Cities, co-sponsored by Antipode and the UCLA Institute on Inequality and Democracy. IGJ attendees included people from within movement and activist spaces, academics, and non-profit organizations who share the common vision of working toward housing justice. This article features a collective conversation that took place with IGJ attendees who participated in a public panel discussion attended by activists, community members, and people interested in hearing from local and international panelists about the state and direction of the housing justice movements in Glasgow, Berlin, New York, and Barcelona respectively. Thematically, the conversation held among IGJ attendees to produce the following manuscript focused on the broad and interconnected pillars of housing injustice that repeatedly arose in conversation throughout our time together in Barcelona, including financialization, activism and organizing, and housing justice movements broadly speaking. 

Housing Justice in Unequal Cities is a global research network funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS 1758774) and housed at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin. This open-access volume, co-edited by Ananya Roy and Hilary Malson, brings together movement-based and university-based scholars to build a shared field of inquiry focused on housing justice. Based on a convening that took place in Los Angeles in January 2019, at the LA Community Action Network and at the University of California, Los Angeles, the essays and interventions situate housing justice in the long struggle for freedom on stolen land. Embedded in the stark inequalities of Los Angeles, our work is necessarily global, connecting the city’s Skid Row to the indebted and evicted in Spain and Greece, to black women’s resistance in Brazil, to the rights asserted by squatters in India and South Africa. Learning from radical social movements, we argue that housing justice also requires a commitment to research justice. With this in mind, our effort to build a field of inquiry is also necessarily an endeavor to build epistemologies and methodologies that are accountable to communities that are on the frontlines of banishment and displacement.