"In a life beyond staying, ownership is organised not around property, but around the deep, complex bonds between people, place, and land that financialisation cannot account for."
In their article for Antipode, "Speculative Urban Worldmaking: Meeting Financial Violence with a Politics of Collective Care," Professors Summers and Fields bring Black feminist thought to bear on the urban geography of racialised financial violence. Their analysis focuses on the Moms 4 Housing movement, which began when five Black mothers occupied a vacant, corporate investor-owned house in West Oakland to protest how real estate speculation is fuelling displacement and homelessness for Black Oakland residents, disrupting care at the scale of the home and community. In taking space through recuperating the house on Magnolia Street, the Moms insist on housing as a site of care central to the survival of Black families and reclaim Oakland as a Black geographic space. In claiming ownership based on relations of care while refusing the institution of private property, Brandi and Desiree argue the Moms engage in speculative urban worldmaking—a form of collective care and a praxis of providing an alternative present that imagines and advocates for urban futures beyond financialisation’s abstract racial violence.
Read the article online here or download it here.
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