Housing and wider urban inequality are key issues in contemporary cities. Years of austerity, the entry of financial actors into the housing sector, decades of the right to buy, estate demolitions and rogue landlords have shaped a landscape in which households face various, overlapping forms of injustice. But how do we make sense of the role of the state and capital in shaping these processes?
In this pamphlet written by Nigel de Noronha and Jonathan Silver, with design from Glen Cutwerk, the writers argue that the work by Friedrich Engels offers a way forward. While the ideas of Engels emerged over a century and a half ago de Noronha and Silver argue they remain a vital and important tradition of critical urban political economy. This is a mode of thinking about housing and the urban condition that directs attention to the ways in which the state and capital shape the housing experience.
In the pamphlet, launched in association with the Greater Manchester Tenants Union, the authors draw on The Housing Question and other works by Engels to develop a critique of the housing system in England over the long term. They focus on one district, Ancoats, that was also studied and written about by Engels, to think about its transformations across the last two centuries bringing the past and the present together.
Friedrich Engels is often derided in the city he made his home for almost 30 years as a relic from the past, his ideas misunderstood or discredited by the right and liberals alike. This pamphlet sets out the case why his ideas must remain central to criitical understandings of the housing crisis and a project of political organising that places tenants, not landlords at the heart of a fairer future.
Download The Housing Question in the District of Ancoats here.