In recent decades, the economic crisis, the financialization of real estate, and the neoliberal restructuring of cities have affected households and provoked citizen mobilizations in cities around the globe. In particular, the Great Recession that followed the financial crisis of 2008, and its procapital management by states, spurred protests that became a significant aspect of postcrisis politics in many countries (e.g., Flesher Fominaya, 2017; Gerbaudo, 2017). Many of these protests focused on urban spaces and property relations—from the widespread protest technique of public square occupations to squatting or broader mobilization against housing-related inequalities and the use of housing needs as a basis for capital extraction (e.g., Fields, 2017; Ishkanian & Glasius, 2018; Martinez, 2019; Soederberg, 2020). Housing was also at the center of new postcrisis solidarity initiatives and the solidarity economy developing in urban contexts (e.g., Kawano, 2010; Patti & Polyak, 2018). On the European continent, Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe were the regions most affected by the crisis (Becker & Jäger, 2010). In this book, we turn our attention to two cities in Central and Eastern Europe that were strongly affected by the financial crisis and the effects of the financialization of housing: Bucharest and Budapest. In empirical terms, the objective is to see how this crisis—as a case of structural tensions and transformation—was politicized by multiple actors engaged in the issue of housing in these local contexts.

We know from previous economic crises that exceptional environmental conditions may lead organizations and groups to set aside ideological and status differences (e.g., Borland, 2010), enabling the formation of unusual alliances and cooperations. Indeed, it has been pointed out that the 2008 global financial crisis created the conditions for forming multigroup and cross-class alliances (e.g., Brenner et al., 2012; Mayer, 2013; Flesher Fominaya, 2017; Greenberg & Lewis, 2017; Kanellopoulos et al., 2017; Lobera, 2019). In one of the more optimistic accounts, Marcuse (2012) envisioned that the crisis would enable alliances between “the deprived” and “the discontented,” that is, between the impoverished and people otherwise constrained from exploring the possibilities of life.

However, looking back at the decade following the Great Recession, we note that the financial crises and neoliberal restructuring of societies not only provoked anticapitalist, new leftist, and solidaristic movements but also saw the rise of right-wing and sometimes neo-nationalistic ones. Many countries—in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe alike—face increased social polarization and divisions along class as well as urban–rural divides, with citizens at both ends of the ideological spectrum mobilizing. This also complicates the situation in the case of housing-related movements, as the politicization of housing-related tensions can arise through alliances with people with multiple political inclinations. A closer look at the local contexts in focus in this book—Budapest and Bucharest—clearly reveals the ideological complexity of contemporary housing contention. In both cases, we see mobilization by different constituencies, with different agendas, occupying opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, new leftist solidaristic movements as well as conservative, neo-nationalistic ones. We also see a continuously changing landscape of alliances and conflicts among them. Against this background, this book argues that we need a way of analyzing contemporary social contention in its complexity. This book is intended to offer one by developing what we call the “structural field of contention approach.” We focus here on contention in the sphere of housing.

To capture how the local politicization of housing tensions relates to the broader context of the crisis, the book argues for attention to processes beyond short-term local movements, which is necessary to understand how structural and political factors interact in a complex field of contention. This includes analyzing housing struggles in the two cities, not only in the context of postsocialist transformations and postcrisis economic development but also by seeing how housing conditions are shaped by long-term processes of localized structural integration into the dynamics of financial markets and global competition.

Applying this approach to the two contexts of Bucharest and Budapest, we direct our attention to housing activism and protest in the decade following the financial crisis of 2008. Disparities between the rich and poor are particularly salient in the housing sphere, but housing is also a field in which multiclass alliances have emerged in various parts of the world (e.g., Mayer, 2013; Polanska, 2016; Florea, 2016; Martinez, 2016). Moreover, there is evidence that anti-eviction and anti-debt protests were a key component of the anti-austerity movements arising in the wake of the Great Recession (Romanos, 2014; Barbero, 2015; Della Porta, 2015; Hamann & Türkmen, 2020; Martinez, 2016; Sabaté, 2016). In the buildup to and aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the financialization of housing—that is, the transformation of housing into an investment asset directly exposed to global market fluctuations—made housing a main driver of social inequality, and therefore at the center of postcrisis social and political contention (Aalbers, 2016).

However, studies of the post-2008 housing contention wave so far have tended to focus on politically progressive solidaristic movements, for which the researchers had much sympathy. These were movements that addressed the outcomes of the crisis in the same analytical framework as academic analysis did, namely as criticisms of the neoliberalization of the global economy and local urban development (e.g., Mayer, 2007, 2016; Harvey, 2012; Mayer et al., 2016; Grazioli & Caciagli, 2018; Lima, 2021) and/or a social contestation of the effects of housing financialization (e.g., Aalbers, 2016; Fields, 2017; Di Feliciantonio, 2017; Wijburg, 2020, to mention but a few studies). However, because a closer examination reveals greater ideological complexity in housing contention (e.g., Reichle & Bescherer, 2021), it is increasingly urgent to develop an analytical framework that can address housing contention in all its complexity.

Therefore, the book seeks to make a twofold contribution to current debates on housing mobilizations and movements. First, it offers an analytical approach that can account for the structural and ideological complexity of contemporary housing struggles and movements, interpreting them in terms of their embeddedness in local structural (socioeconomic and sociohistorical) and political contexts. Second, it effectively illustrates the practical gains of this approach through a comparative study of housing contention in two European capital cities: Bucharest and Budapest. Both cities (and countries) were severely affected by the financial crisis of 2008, which spawned and strengthened a variety of housing movements. These were characterized by different constituencies, alliances, and agendas. In some cases, they occupied opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. This book offers a complex analysis of housing activism in these two cities, exploring relations between structural (sociohistorical) and contingent factors (such as shifting political constellations), in addition to emerging solidarities and antagonisms, the dissipation of solidarity, or the lack of interaction among diverse actors in mobilizations around housing.

Studying Contention in Its Structural Context: The Structural Field of Contention Approach

Our distinct contribution is to develop an analytical approach that embeds the study of contention firmly in a structural context. We use the notion of contention to refer to politicized struggles and contestation, in these cases around housing. We follow Tarrow in acknowledging that collective action can take many forms—institutional or noninstitutional—but it becomes contentious when “it is used by people who lack regular access to representative institutions, who act in the name of new or unaccepted claims, and who behave in ways that fundamentally challenge others or the authorities” (Tarrow, 2011, p. 7). As McAdam et al. (2001, p. 5) put it: “The contentious politics that concerns us is episodic rather than continuous, occurs in public, involves interaction between makers of claims and others, is recognized by those others as bearing on their interests, and brings in government as mediator, target, or claimant.”

We propose that an approach is needed that allows us to analyze the complex and changing relations between multiple actors and their broader environment in an integrated way. As Chap. 2 describes in greater detail, the approach developed in this book derives inspiration from but develops Nick Crossley’s notion of a “field of contention” (e.g., Crossley, 2006a, b, 2013). Crossley proposed an understanding of social movements as fields of contention, emphasizing first the numerous groups and agents who interact within the internal space of a “movement” and the relations, alliances, and conflicts between them as they unfold over time, and second, the embedding of social movement struggles within multiple differentiated contexts of struggle (Crossley, 2006a, b, p. 552). Building on Crossley’s work, our approach then adds to the notion of field of contention the structural factors that generate the contested conditions through long-term processes, while constituting the conditions of group formation and struggle. We call this the structural field of contention approach.

The two cases analyzed in the book demonstrate that attention to processes beyond short-term local movements is necessary for understanding how structural and political factors interact in a complex field of contention. Housing conditions, policies, and struggles around housing are shaped by long-term processes of localized structural integration into the dynamics of financial markets and global competition. We conceive of structural factors as elements of the field of contention that both produce conflicts and shape relationship formations within those struggles and are acted upon in collective struggles. We claim that for a deeper understanding of post-2008 housing contention, and for a relevant assessment of the politics of its various forms, this perspective of a structurally based and complex analysis is essential. We argue that this approach requires a longer historical perspective and attention to the details of local constellations of socioeconomic and political development, rather than “catch-all” analyses of social contention in terms of neoliberalization and financialization, even though these processes are no doubt part of the story as well. The pressures from such processes, and the way in which the conflicts stemming from them play out, depend on the long-term trajectories of integration in the global economy of the cities and their respective polities (e.g., Kloosterman & Lambregts, 2007; Wiest, 2012).

Moreover, unlike approaches that trace the trajectory of a single movement or compare movements with similar agendas, the structural field of contention approach proposed here does not start from a focus on coherent movement agency (or identity) to then investigate its relations with external factors. Instead, it traces connections between various forms of contention and aspects of structural transformations that they address or to which they are structurally linked. Such an approach allows us to grasp multiple modes of politicization and their interactions, as well as to place their dynamics within the broader context of structural trends.

In the empirical study of structural tensions and their politicization in the local contexts of Budapest and Bucharest, we let five foci of attention—or research questions, if one prefers—guide the analysis. The first concerns how structural and political processes in the longer term of late socialist and postsocialist transformations conditioned the emergence of movement actors and their interactions. The second considers the relation between actors’ structural positions and their movement agenda or politics, with a special interest in the conditions for making or unmaking cross-class coalitions or alliances. The third concerns how highly visible forms of politicization and what in Chap. 2 we conceptualize as “political silences” are related. The fourth concerns intermovement relations and how they shift over time. The fifth focus is on the connection between how movements politicize structural issues and the multiple scales through which those issues develop, considering the structural and political processes at the local, national, and transnational/global levels. These five foci are investigated following changes across time, from 2008 to the present (2021).

Methodology

The empirical research for this book was conducted between 2017 and 2021. In mapping the long-term structural and political contexts of housing politics of the two countries, we relied on authors’ previous knowledge of the local contexts, a systematic overview of secondary literature on postsocialist structural transformations and housing politics, and collaborations with local researchers specializing in these fields.Footnote 1 In both Hungary and Romania, we reviewed the housing policies of the periods immediately before and after 2008, and analyzed them in the context of local structural and political pressures of the Great Recession.

In mapping relevant actors of housing mobilizations after 2008, we started from authors’ preexisting knowledge of local housing movements, initiating participative observations and interviews with the most visible and significant actors, following their connections and references to other (movement or institutional) actors, and adding new actors highlighted by our contextual research.

In the case of Hungary, 17 in-depth interviews were conducted, individually and in focus groups, with a total of 32 people, including movement organizers and participants, NGO workers, experts, and politicians whose work had relevant connections to movements or the tensions they addressed. The main movements that the interviews focused on were forex debtor activism, leftist housing groups, and cohousing and collaborative housing organizations. Interviews were conducted with institutional, political, and expert actors who had direct connections with the housing conflicts addressed by movements, as well as with NGOs that worked on the same issues. Interview guides were semistructured and prepared according to previous desk research on the background and history of each actor, including work by the experts interviewed. Information shared in the interviews was followed up by examining the materials mentioned or shared by interviewees. This was particularly important in the case of the forex debtors’ movement, where the connections between legal, financial, and movement aspects could not have been mapped otherwise. For the main actors, new developments were followed through personal contact, their movements’ communications, and media stories, as well as through follow-up interviews where necessary. These methods were supplemented by participant observation at movement meetings and demonstrations.

In Romania, a total of 19 interviews were conducted with 36 people. First, 12 in-depth interviews were conducted with individual movement organizers and participants, focusing on leftist housing groups and heritage protection groups, respectively. In 2019, a series of three group interviews with a total of eight people were conducted with organizers of the labor movement as it started addressing housing issues. A series of four group interviews were conducted with institutional and political actors at the municipal and national levels (e.g., the National Agency for the Roma, Members of Parliament), focusing on initiators of legislative/policy changes related to housing issues and representatives responsible for social and housing policies. For bank debtor activism, we followed a book with 100 life stories published by one of the debtor associations (Grupul Clienților cu Credite în CHF, 2018), and the social media page and blog of the most deeply involved and vocal lawyer, Gheorghe Piperea (www.piperea.ro). In addition, participant observation was employed continuously throughout the research process, during almost weekly internal organization meetings and public events (including protest events) of the leftist housing groups at episodic events of NGOs and experts involved in housing, and at protest events of the labor and anticorruption movements. As in the Hungarian case, new developments by the main actors were followed through personal contact and observing movements’ communications and media presence (covering those of the leftist housing groups entirely).

After mapping the field of housing actors in both cities, we spent a considerable time discussing the comparative aspects. This involved reviewing connections between housing activism, political changes, and the broader field of post-2008 demonstrations. For this latter aspect, we conducted additional research based on secondary literature, media coverage, and background discussions with the actors involved. The comparisons helped us avoid jumping to general conclusions from local constellations, while checking the relevance of our approach in grasping relations between crisis processes and mobilization. Our comparative findings inform the presentation of our empirical cases in Chaps. 4 and 5. In line with the structural field of contention approach, this presentation considers not only the organization and agenda of the most visible and politicized actors but it also takes the broader structural and political transformation (introduced in Chap. 3) as a basis, placing various actors within that frame. While maintaining focus on movement and civil society organizations, this approach also allows us to notice less visible and “silent” (politically unexpressed) instances of housing struggles, while revealing multiple dimensions of relations between actors, beyond the direct relations of coalition or conflict. The presentations of the two empirical cases necessarily differ in their narratives owing to different constellations of local contention fields, yet the chapters share a common basic structure because of their shared approach and questions. Against the background of a broader structural and political transformation, they trace the development of diverse agencies and problem representations around housing issues during post-1989 structural changes, covering politically visible contention as well as what we call “invisible struggles” or “silences,” that is, areas of structural conflict that do not gain political expression.

In the analysis of actors and their problem representations, one main aspect to which the chapters pay attention is how actors’ positions reflect a class dimension of housing struggles; that is, in the specific ways actors are affected by structural shifts and policies, in the availability or lack of specific resources (such as expertise or political connections), or in the dynamics of cross-class relations in intragroup and intergroup interactions. In analyzing the development of housing struggles, in addition to relations between housing groups, we consider actors’ relationships with other political initiatives and national-level politicians. These are a defining factor that shapes field dynamics through both the structural aspects of policies and the ideological effect of political coalition formation or conflict. After this parallel presentation of the two cases, in Chap. 6 we draw lessons from the comparisons that we found particularly relevant from the perspective of the analytical approach offered in this book.

The Book’s Contributions

The two cases in this book introduce a comparative, in-depth analysis of contemporary housing conflicts and mobilizations in Budapest and Bucharest. Besides adding Eastern European cases to better-known Western and Southern European ones in the study of post-2008 housing conflicts, our case choice also has implications for the analytical stakes beyond the region. Our in-depth, contextually embedded, and comparative treatment of the two cases allows us to address several theoretical and methodological aspects of international debates.

As we observed, studies of the post-2008 housing contention wave have so far tended to focus on movements that address the outcomes of the crisis in the same analytical framework as academic analyses. This means that social movement studies (and arguably, general progressive political thinkers) struggle to understand nonprogressive responses to crisis effects. The more complex contextual relations that often link progressive and nonprogressive actors, or politically active and politically silent responses, are made less visible in research agendas that focus on the conditions and potential of progressive mobilization. Our studies of Hungarian and Romanian cases reveal housing mobilizations to be a complex and dynamic field of actors on the wider spectrum between progressive and nonprogressive responses and between visible and less visible aspects of housing conflicts, changing over time as actors interact among themselves and with power structures at different levels.

In addition to showing how housing movements after the 2008 crisis develop in a dense sociopolitical context and how they rely on long-term dynamics of housing politics, the comparison between the two cases makes additional contributions to the conceptualization of movements related to crises. On the one hand, the broader structural factors conditioning housing movements in Romania and Hungary are very similar, including privatization processes after 1990, very high levels of homeownership, large proportions of a precarious population, housing deprivation levels among the highest of all EU countries, and a strong impact of post-2008 austerity measures (after previous waves of austerity starting in the early 1980s). On the other hand, the local sociopolitical constellations wherein these broader structural conditions exist and are governed differ significantly between the two cases. For instance, while in Romania the most visible post-2008 demonstrations (against corruption) allied with the liberal-technocratic elites who were gaining dominance, in Hungary the post-2008 period was marked by the rise of a conservative regime that became known as a prime example of postcrisis illiberalism. These differences remind us not to jump to direct theoretical conclusions from each case but instead develop conceptual tools to show how similar structural processes are manifested and addressed by local social actors, how differences in the political field are related to other layers of socioeconomic struggles, and how both are integrated into the same broader crisis process.

When comparing our two cases of housing mobilizations, we highlight how similar positions and structural backgrounds of integration into global processes are manifested locally in different institutional and political environments. Specifically, we trace how the mobilization of different groups is embedded in local structural contexts of housing development and policy, how movement groups’ politics relate to different modes of national-level politicization of the crisis, and how different class bases and movement strategies in the two cases interact within those constellations. The point of the comparison is not to produce a general theory of an Eastern European type of housing financialization and related mobilization but to demonstrate why a structural field of contention approach is needed to understand how the global process of financialization becomes manifest and contested in specific local contexts.

Concerning the analytical approach, we aim to contribute to more general debates with a renewed focus on the relevance of in-depth contextual analysis. In addition to individual case studies or comparative studies based on specific datasets (such as numbers of demonstrations), we maintain that a contextual understanding of the long-term embedded dynamics of local politics is also necessary to understand mobilization in times of crisis. The politics of the crisis does not start from the moment of crisis but it is built on preexisting institutional, political, and structural trends. The dynamics of different mobilizations do not stand on their own but depend on the interrelations through which these preexisting conditions change in response to a crisis. This is what we refer to as the “field dynamics” of the structural field of contention.

In relation to ongoing debates, the book brings an additional distinct contribution to several streams of literature. Owing to the housing crisis and resulting contention waves since 2008, we have seen a global boom of literature on housing contention (e.g., Watt & Minton, 2016; Fields, 2017; Martinez, 2019; Dhananka, 2020; Stavrides, 2020; Dolenec et al., 2021, to mention but a few studies). The book speaks to this interest, expanding the horizons of existing approaches theoretically as well as empirically.

The theoretical contribution of the book relates to a major question of social movement studies after 2008. The post-2008 movement boom shifted the focus of social movement studies; how movements’ own frames and politics relate to structural factors became a recurring key question (e.g., Künkel & Mayer, 2012; Hetland & Goodwin, 2013; Della Porta, 2015; Mayer et al., 2016; Lancione, 2017; Stoiciu, 2017). Ours is a grounded, complex argument over how this connection can be pursued empirically in relation to housing movements, with conclusions that concern the theoretical conceptualization of contention, even beyond the issue of housing.

Moreover, our case studies illustrate the need to unpack the abstract concepts of gentrification and financialization as well as the relationships between these processes and the social movements that react to them, which we see as less unilinear than the present literature suggests.

Another new focal issue to which our book responds is that of nonprogressive countermovements to neoliberal crisis management. In light of the new wave of right-wing mobilizations, social movement studies and general political thought strive to understand nonprogressive responses to crisis effects. Our book provides an empirically based theoretical contribution to this question, with case studies from the Eastern European region that recently attracted attention as an international example of a right-wing backlash (e.g., Rupnik, 2007; Buzogány & Varga, 2018; Ban et al., 2021).

Moreover, the book also responds to a longer tradition of critical discussion of the development of civil society in Eastern Europe. The debate on postsocialist civil society in the region has recently turned in a nonnormative empirical direction to which we have contributed previous research (Jacobsson, 2016a; Jacobsson & Korolczuk, 2017). Additionally, the book responds to calls for approaches to studies of civil society and social mobilization in Central and Eastern Europe that are more sensitive to the region’s global integration (Gagyi, 2015; Císař & Navrátil, 2017) as well as a general turn toward taking non-Western movements’ thought and contexts seriously in theorizing about social movements (Jacobsson, 2016b, 2016c; Cox et al., 2017; Baća, 2021).

Moreover, the book makes a distinct contribution to what has been called a comparative “(re)turn” in urban studies (Ward, 2008; see also Kantor & Savitch, 2005; Kloosterman & Lambregts, 2007; cf. Pickvance, 1986, 1995). Kantor and Savitch (2005) identified the lack of comparative urban frameworks as an obstacle to systematic comparative research, arguing that most middle-range urban politics theories are not easily transferred across national cultures and that the challenge is to find conceptual tools that can accurately address the same problem in different contexts. Our approach is intended to offer such conceptual tools and illustrate the benefits of this integrated analytical approach. In this way, the book is a novel contribution to comparative urban analysis, including what has been discussed as “comparative urbanism” (e.g., Dear, 2005; Nijman, 2007; McFarlane & Robinson, 2012; Tuvikene, 2016). The literature on comparative urbanism calls for the systematic study of differences and similarities between cities or urban processes (Nijman, 2007), imagining new “ways of working across diverse urban experiences” (McFarlane & Robinson, 2012, p. 765). While scholars in comparative urbanism have criticized the tendency to study “most similar” cities and called for comparison across radically diverse contexts (McFarlane & Robinson, 2012, cf. Kantor & Savitch, 2005), we have chosen to study two capital cities that in many ways appear to be “most similar” (e.g., in terms of shared characteristics of postsocialist development and EU accession). However, we show how differences in urban development combine with different local constellations of sociopolitical regimes, leading to very different patterns of housing mobilization in Budapest and Bucharest. These differences are of particular importance, as they allow us to illustrate how a structural field of contention approach can shed light on relations between structural processes and mobilizations.

Finally, it has been critically noted that some parts of the world are sources of theory while others remain on the periphery of thinking (e.g., Roy, 2009; Hamel, 2014). Indeed, a number of authors have argued for letting the experiences of postsocialist cities serve as a basis for global urban theorizing (e.g., Grubbauer & Kusiak, 2012; Jacobsson, 2016c; Tuvikene, 2016; Müller & Trubina, 2020; Baća, 2021; Jehlička & Jacobsson, 2021). The ambition of this book is to provide a conceptual framework and analytical approach that could be applied to other contexts and social struggles, based on an analysis of urban struggles in the light of local histories.

In conclusion, the book is situated at the intersection of several areas that have experienced a recent surge of interest in housing, social movements, comparative urban studies, uneven development on EU peripheries, and studies of postsocialism. In the following chapters, we outline and illustrate the workings of the analytical framework that we suggest can apply across these streams of literature.

Chapter Outline

The remainder of this book is structured as follows. Chapter 2 outlines the structural field of the contention approach and positions it in relation to existing field approaches to the study of social movements. Chapter 3 provides the structural and political context of the development of the empirical analyses of housing contention in Budapest (Chap. 4) and Bucharest (Chap. 5). Chapter 6 then compares the field dynamics, including field transformations over the period covered, of the respective structural field of contention, demonstrating the use and relevance of this analytical approach. Finally, Chap. 7 draws some implications of the analysis presented in the book, identifies some general lessons, and suggests some openings for future research.