In Chaps. 1 and 2, we laid out a proposal for a structural field of contention approach to housing movements. This approach examines contention in terms of interactions between multiple actors and their structural contexts, including non-intentional relations and tensions that remain politically silent. Chapter 3 overviewed the historical dynamics of housing conditions in Budapest and Bucharest in terms of their long-term structural contexts of uneven development. Chapters 4 and 5 looked at housing contention in Budapest and Bucharest, showing how different actors have politicized housing-related tensions across the structural and political transformations since 1989. Below, we discuss lessons from comparing the two cases, pinpointing the relevance of the conceptual tools that follow from the structural field of contention approach.

Our arguments in this chapter are organized around specific insights into two cases where the structural field of contention approach revealed a relationship between movements’ politicization of housing tensions and their structural background. We also show how the comparison of the two case studies clarifies the specific benefits of this approach. We do not offer these conclusions as generalizable theoretical statements, nor do we claim that our conclusions from the perspective of a structural field of contention cover all possible aspects of the empirical state of housing contention in the two cases. Instead, we conceive them as specific heuristics following from a field of contention approach to movements that may be of use to anyone who seeks to understand how politicized responses to structural pressures are formed.

Structural Areas of Tension

Our first conclusion after reviewing the connections between forms of housing contention and their background in housing conditions was that in both Budapest and Bucharest, macro-level processes produced specific areas of tension that were relatively constant throughout the decades following 1989, and were at the center of contention after 2008. These were housing poverty, accumulating at the bottom of the housing hierarchy, and the problem of housing access for low- to middle-income groups. These areas of tension are similar in the two cases, owing to the similarities of postsocialist housing systems. Despite small changes that relieve or intensify some aspects of these systems at certain points, they constitute lasting characteristics following from an unbroken tendency of commodification across different postsocialist regimes. These tensions are addressed by different forms of housing contention at various points, and are relegated to political silence at others.

As described in Chapter 3, the macro-level conditions of housing in Hungary and Romania have been characterized by long-term tendencies toward uneven development, the dominance of owner-occupied housing after 1989, and recent global trends of housing commodification and financialization. In line with these global trends and exacerbated by the crisis of state socialist systems, state funding for housing plunged with the collapse of socialism. The rapid privatization of state housing after 1989 resulted in a housing system characterized by extremely high levels of homeownership—a high level of owner-occupied housing, very limited public housing, and a weakly regulated, often informal rental market. In this system, the main route to housing access became homeownership, which entailed a need for increased household borrowing, leading to exposure to debt risks. Another aspect of commodification concerned urban regeneration programs. Unlike socialist regeneration projects, urban regeneration after 1989 became primarily market-driven. Market priorities in urban regeneration remained an important driver of housing tensions in the two capital cities, from the destruction of historical heritage buildings to the marginalization or outright eviction of poorer dwellers.

Tensions around Severe Forms of Housing Poverty

The most visible tension that followed from this structural environment was the production of severe housing poverty at the bottom of the system. The privatization of housing transferred growing utility and maintenance costs to residents who often lost their jobs owing to the transition crisis. This was coupled with a lack of social housing or access to housing for those who could not buy. Moreover, the risks of utility and mortgage debt rose over time, pushing many into worse dwelling conditions, or ultimately to the streets. Despite the development of social assistance systems, the problem of homelessness that shocked the public when it appeared in 1990 became a stable characteristic of postsocialist housing. Another, less visible form of severe housing poverty, which also existed under socialism but was reinforced and expanded after 1990, was informal housing. This involved self-built, low-quality dwellings in peri-urban areas as well as squatting or semi-legal occupations of empty apartments. Struggles around the dwindling supply of social housing were another characteristic form of the politicization of housing poverty. Evictions became a specific point where these tensions transformed into open conflict—from the privatization of social housing to evictions related to utility or mortgage debt or the forced destruction of informal dwellings.

In both Hungary and Romania, intersections with ethnic divisions constituted an important aspect of postsocialist housing poverty. As described in Chapter 3, owing to long-term structural conditions, poverty levels are especially high among the Roma, and ethnic discrimination contributes to their material and social marginalization. Consequently, the Roma have been among those most severely affected by postsocialist housing poverty. The effects of housing peripheralization—the concentration of poor households in low-quality housing areas, peri-urban informal housing, or poor areas of the countryside—hit Roma communities particularly hard in both countries. Contention around these situations often arose when ethnic and social characteristics intersected, as they did in anti-eviction struggles or in urban regeneration programs where the social effects of commodification created lines of ethnic division.

The Problem of Housing Access for Low- to Middle-Income Groups

Another main area of housing tension was the situation of those in low- to middle-income groups who had relatively stable incomes but could not afford to buy a home. This tension was manifested in two main domains. The first was the problem of rental housing, which could have provided an alternative form of housing access and therefore surfaced recurrently as a focus of housing contention. The other main domain in which this tension was manifested was in household debt, owing to the reliance of people in these social strata on loans to buy or repair homes. While this issue manifested as a lack of loan accessibility in the years following the regime change, in the 2000s, the accumulation of risky household loans grew into a major problem that burst into the open after the 2008 crash. The solutions proposed by state and market actors did not resolve the structural gap that promoted the accumulation of household credit risk, and has remained a constant characteristic of the two housing systems ever since.

The main forms of politicization of this housing tension in the two countries differed significantly. In Romania, the forex mortgage boom of the 2000s generally remained limited to relatively well-situated middle-class households, whereas in Hungary, it penetrated large segments of the lower middle class. Consequently, in Romania, the problem of forex debt after 2008 was expressed in the relatively well-positioned self-advocacy of middle-class debtors. By contrast, in Hungary, the problem of forex mortgages constituted a social crisis involving hundreds of thousands of families and was widely politicized at a national level—first by vocal support in conservative politics, and then by debtors voicing their discontent with debt-management measures. The period after 2008 also saw a wave of politicization of the housing access problem of low- to middle-income groups in Romania. Yet here, instead of an issue of forex debt, this basic tension came to be thematized as a problem of incomes not covering housing costs. After 2008, there were repeated waves of union demonstrations over wages, and collaborations between unions and leftist housing groups particularly emphasized housing access as part of the wage struggle. Meanwhile, in Hungary, parallel with debtors’ movements, new alliances between leftist housing groups, middle-class youth under pressure from rising housing costs, and progressive opposition politicians started to thematize low- to middle-income groups’ housing problems in terms of the state regulation of accessible rentals.

Different Political Contexts of Housing Contention after 2008

In both Hungary and Romania , the 2008 crisis produced changes in national politics and new waves of political mobilizations, both of which influenced the conditions of housing contention. Yet, while the macrostructural background of housing-related tensions was relatively similar in the two countries, the characteristics of the political changes induced by the crisis differed significantly. These differences were linked to the specific political evolution of local regimes across late socialist and postsocialist structural transformations and they produced different conditions for the political orientation and alliance options of housing movements in the two capitals.

From Postsocialist Liberal Hegemony to the Opposition Movements against the Orbán Regime in Post-2010 Hungary

In Hungary, regime change was dominated by a liberal power bloc. It consisted of an alliance between liberal dissidents and their post-1989 party, Western capitalists and international lender organizations, ex-socialist managers and technocrats interested in privatization, and the strong reformist section of the Socialist party that governed socialist marketization reforms. This alliance established an FDI (foreign direct investment)-led model of external integration that shifted toward debt-led development in the 2000s. The contender power bloc, which preferred protectionist policies and the accumulation of national capital, remained in a dominated position throughout these years, from which it developed a right-wing anti-neoliberal discourse. This discourse became a vocabulary for the expression of social discontent in popular right-wing anti-neoliberal protests by the late 2000s.

The effects of the 2008 crisis sealed the implosion of an exhausted and de-legitimated liberal hegemony, leading to the sweeping victory of the Fidesz party in 2010. Relying on a parliamentary supermajority, Viktor Orbán’s government engaged in a type of crisis politics that simultaneously served to manage the crisis of capital from core countries, created room of maneuver for state-backed domestic capital, and diversified financial dependence away from Western sources. In this context, while pre-2010 anti-austerity protests were channeled into a conservative political victory, post-2010 demonstrations targeting crisis effects merged into a more general stream of liberal protest against the supermajority Orbán regime. In face of the regime’s explicit anti-poor stance, these protests included social issues among their demands. Nevertheless, these were subordinated to a pro-democratic, pro-Western, pro-market agenda, characteristic of the political discourse of the (previously dominant) liberal bloc.

The Alliance between Post-2008 Movements and Liberal Politics in Romania

In Romania, in contrast to Hungarian socialist marketization, the socialist regime reacted to the problem of indebtedness with a policy of extreme austerity serving debt repayment to retain independence and resist international lenders’ pressure for marketization. Instead of opening up, the Romanian regime maintained intensive industrialization and centralized power. This provided no scope for the development of a pro-liberalization power bloc like that in Hungary. After the 1989 regime change, former socialist cadres who gained power continued the politics of delayed privatization and protectionism. This direction was changed when contender liberal forces were strengthened through external alliances during the EU and NATO accession process in the late 1990s, and subsequently, neoliberal reforms were accelerated. In this process, neoliberal politics formed an alliance with liberal intellectuals and employed a strong anticommunist discourse in their struggle against the Social Democratic Party. This alliance presided over the debt-ridden growth of the 2000s, and the austerity-led crisis management of the years following 2008.

The aftermath of 2008 brought intensified conflict between liberal coalitions supported by macrostructural conditions and socialists attempting to salvage their power by relying on domestic capital and political networks built in previous decades. In this context, protests that initially combined anti-austerity stances with expressions of disillusionment with postsocialist politics were channeled into support for liberal parties in their struggle against socialists. In this struggle, socialists were described as communist traditionalists who blocked Western-type development, supported by a network of corruption and a political alliance with the uneducated poor. Unlike the situation in Hungary, this framework was explicitly dissociated from the social perspectives of post-2008 middle-class protestors and it combined pro-liberal statements with antagonism toward the poor.

Positioning of Leftist Housing Groups in Various Post-2008 Political Environments

In both countries, the wave of post-2008 middle-class politicization strengthened leftist segments of middle-class activism, including activist groups with leftist affiliations who built alliances with disenfranchised groups and thematized housing-related grievances in political terms. For these actors, the varied contexts of post-2008 politics offered different possibilities for alliance formation. In Romania, leftist housing activists came into conflict with demonstrators’ shift toward right-liberal positions. This was manifested in both general protest politics, as well as in specific instances of conflict in housing campaigns, such as a clash with heritage protection groups over the eviction of a Roma family from a heritage building. As a result, leftist housing activism separated from the general wave of post-2008 demonstrations and continued to pursue the more marginal but ideologically explicit politics of cross-class advocacy and alliance making.

In Hungary, by contrast, the social demands of leftist housing activism were included and amplified in the general wave of post-2010 middle-class protests. Similar to previous socialist dissident liberalism which also emphasized social demands, post-2010 oppositional liberalism became open to leftist stances. Housing in particular was an issue where oppositional politics met social demands. This was due to the advanced frameworks of leftist housing activism prepared by a group named The City is for All, including their good relations with and recognition by liberal circles. It was also due to the deepening of the housing crisis, which had also affected educated middle-class youth. Leftist housing activism made the right to housing a slogan to embrace both severe housing poverty and new middle-class anxieties. While Romanian leftist housing activism went on to build a network with an explicit anticapitalist and antiracist profile, separate from the political institutionalization of post-2008 middle-class politics, in Hungary, it was integrated into the dynamics of wider opposition politics. This included founders of The City is for All entering political positions after opposition victories in the 2019 local elections, as well as various collaborations with new opposition local governments. In this context, the relationship of Hungarian groups to market-oriented oppositional politics took the form of tactical collaboration or parallel action rather than open conflict.

Integration of Debtor Groups into Various Fields of Post-2008 Politics

Debtor advocacy provides another illuminating example of post-2008 political contexts marking the positioning of housing mobilizations in the two countries. In both countries, debtors who took on forex loans before 2008 and suffered spikes in debt repayments owing to post-2008 changes in currency rates mobilized to claim state relief for their situation. In both countries, debtors’ groups focused on retaining homeownership and optimizing their situation under the conditions provided by the system. However, differences in the distribution of forex mortgages and in alliance options offered by different post-2008 political contexts produced very different forms of debtor politics in the two countries.

In Romania, debtors’ struggles were mainly limited to individual bargains and litigation, with the notable exception of households with CHF-denominated loans, who organized collectively and staged several protest events. Debtors’ attachment to existing models of homeownership was evident in their support for some austerity measures (in the hope that these would ameliorate currency rates and maintain asset prices). Moreover, although mortgage defaulters were few, their middle-income position and better interest representation capacity allowed them to lobby successfully for certain favorable legislative changes. These, in turn, allowed them access to the very limited public housing stock, thus placing them in direct competition with precarious social housing applicants. Among more affluent and nondefaulting mortgage holders who bought to rent and hoped to improve their situation as landlords, this effect was even more prominent. Living in urban centers with better paid jobs, often in multinational firms, they were integrated into the right-liberal framework, supporting the anticorruption protest wave against socialists and the poor. Thus, they came into opposition with leftist housing activism. While they organized to secure their positions, their struggles implied no connection to the defaulting and struggling debtors, whose visibility thus waned.

In Hungary, the large number of CHF-denominated mortgages led to a major social crisis after 2008 that affected a large number of lower-middle and working-class households. This coincided with the collapse of the liberal power bloc and the run-up to the successful election campaign of Fidesz in 2010. In this context, debtors’ activism, which spoke the language of the right-wing anti-neoliberal movements of the 2000s, was embraced and promoted by Fidesz’s electoral campaign as part of the “economic freedom fight” it promised against the dominance of Western capital. However, after 2010, Fidesz’s management of the debt crisis pursued financial stabilization supported by domestic actors in financial markets instead of social goals. While the more affluent debtors were saved, debtors whose problems were not alleviated turned against Fidesz. This phase of the struggle, however, was effectively silenced by the government.

Debtors and Leftist Housing Groups: Two Cases of Political Fracturing of Post-2008 Housing Movements

Unlike Western or Southern European cases where anti-debt housing movements became a major reference point for anti-austerity and prodemocracy movements, in Hungary and Romania, debtors’ mobilizations did not develop a significant connection with leftist housing movements. While debtors’ groups in both countries maintained a right-wing tendency bound to the idea of homeownership, they connected to different versions of conservative and liberal right-wing politics. In addition to a reluctance to engage with right-wing frameworks, leftist housing groups’ distance from debtor politics also reflected the class-based character of housing movement alliances. While leftist housing groups prioritized alliances with those struck by the most severe forms of housing poverty, debtors’ activism represented middle- and lower middle-class segments. These segments occupied intermediate positions in housing hierarchies, which could sometimes be considered to compete with the needs of the poor as much as to support their demands for housing rights. This ambiguity of potential political positions came to be decided by political support for right-wing versions of post-2008 politics, facilitated by debtor groups’ preferences for homeownership and participation in former right-wing movements.

The fracturing of housing movement alliances across different patterns of post-2008 politics in the two countries contradicts the dominant narratives on post-2008 housing activism. Referring to examples of progressive movements such as PAH in Spain, these narratives consider post-2008 reactions to housing-related tensions an organic part of progressive anti-austerity movements (e.g., Di Feliciantonio 2017; Fields 2017). In our two cases, groups who address housing issues from leftist perspectives need to work with or deal with right-wing tendencies in post-2008 movements. These appear either in the form of explicit conflicts as in Romania, or implicitly, as in Hungarian housing groups’ oppositional alliances. Meanwhile, the issue of mortgage debt, which has been framed by Western progressive movements as a major point of anticapitalist mobilization, was not integrated with leftist frameworks in these cases, and debtor movements remained caught between right-wing political alliances and marginalization.

Translating Tensions into Politicized Demands: The Role of Middle-Class Expertise and Institutional Interfaces

Our case studies confirmed the long-term insight of social movement studies that structural tensions do not generate movements by themselves. Although the areas of tensions described above characterized both postsocialist housing systems, neither the long-term presence of these tensions nor their intensification in certain periods led to mobilizations in themselves. Instead, we found that tensions were politicized in specific moments when they intersected with the formation of activist and political alliances between different types of actors.

In some cases—such as the birth of a new participative model of homeless advocacy in Hungary in the 2000s or art projects in gentrifying neighborhoods that formed the basis for later anti-eviction campaigns in Bucharest—the formation of these alliances was not linked to changes in housing tensions. Instead, it followed from changing conditions of activist mobilization through the arrival of a new generation of educated but often precarized middle-class leftist activism that sought new forms of participative politics beyond existing structures such as social assistance, volunteering, or institutionalized art spaces. In most other cases, politicization occurred at points where tensions were intensified, for example, during evictions, the spike in homelessness in the 1990s, or the mortgage debt crash following 2008. However, even in these cases, resistance by those directly affected seldom led to forms of contention that would express structural problems as a political issue, formulated in such a way as to address institutionalized levels of political debates. Instead, educated middle-class activists’ capacity to translate instances of conflict into broader institutional–political frameworks was key to the formation of politicized forms of housing contention. Debtors’ groups, especially the production of expertise in Hungarian debtors’ circles, provide the closest example to movement frameworks produced by the affected groups themselves. Yet, here too, the help of professional allies was key to interpreting debtors’ situations and translating their problems into institutionalized vocabularies (predominantly litigation). Conversely, the lack of expert allies impeded the expression of debtors’ demands in terms of broader critical frameworks and arguably made them more vulnerable to cooption and silencing by right-wing politics.

Reviewing the development of housing contention in the two countries, we found that all points where long-lasting areas of tension became politicized were linked to connections between three main factors: some form of housing deprivation, (educated but often precarious) middle-class political activism and expertise, and institutional interfaces where structural tensions could be projected in terms of demands tailored to definitions of public interests and their institutionalized management. In each of the cases we reviewed, middle-class expert activists played a key role in translating housing tensions to demands that fit existing institutional frameworks.

The existence of institutional interfaces with which housing activists could directly engage in relation to their problem—such as social housing for housing poverty, litigation for forex debtors, or municipal regulation for anti-Airbnb campaigns—appears to have been a crucial condition for politicized expressions of housing contention. At the same time, these interfaces also restricted contention to forms that fit their institutional logic—a fact often criticized within housing activist groups. Such criticisms were made by The City is for All in the case of the formal system of homeless assistance, by debtor activists in terms of the inadequacy of solutions achievable through litigation or political advocacy, and by renewing initiatives for noncommodified forms of housing to provide alternatives to the redistributive or market-based solutions offered by existing institutional systems.

What stands out regarding activist groups’ potential to make headway against these limitations are examples of movement institutions that, once established and solidified, could become actors in their own right, able to define agendas beyond existing institutional interfaces and create new institutions backed by some form of social power to maintain those frameworks. In several cases, such initiatives could facilitate longer processes of politicization across changes of structural contexts and transformations of the contention field. Some illustrative examples are the new wave of homeless advocacy organizations in Hungary that was established in the 2000s and then came to the forefront of resistance to anti-homeless legislation after 2010, or the similar alliance between middle-class activists and people affected by evictions in Romania, which later could engage with new types of challenges such as the World Bank program for housing formalization. The enduring capacity of the Hungarian National Alliance of Housing Cooperatives to act as an interest representation body in the field of housing policy, decades after the collapse of the socialist system that set it up, is another example of advocacy-based institutional capacity. New initiatives for building institutional frameworks for cooperative or social rental housing explicitly aim to create such movement institutions.

Dynamics of Alliances in Politicizing Issues of Housing Poverty

In homelessness-related organizing, which became the main form of contesting severe forms of housing poverty in Hungary, the first wave of politicization in the 1990s happened through collaboration between homeless people’s own mobilizations, low-income volunteers, and (liberal and, respectively, conservative) political activists. It was the expertise and political connections of the latter that helped—and dominated—the translation of the issue of homelessness into the frameworks of institutionalized politics and subsequently into the organizational frameworks of homeless assistance. In the 2000s, a new generation of middle-class activists formulated a critique of this system’s embedded hierarchies. In combination with affected actors’ own criticisms, this wave of activism created a model, embodied by The City is for All, that attempted to combine the mediating capacity of middle-class activists with majority control by affected members. In the 2010s, the importance of middle-class alliances was reinforced by The City is for All being open to middle-class housing problems and its collaboration with broader opposition networks. After opposition victories at the 2019 local elections, the group continued its work in closer collaboration with middle-class movements and opposition politicians, with some activists entering local government positions and the issue of homelessness becoming an explicit collision point between oppositional and governmental politics at the national level.

In Romania, the issue of homelessness did not become thematized at the level of political contention and remained relegated to political silence and the regular work of professional charity organizations. Instead, the issue of ethnicized housing poverty, with the harshest form being evictions, became a central topic of housing contention. During the 2000s, educated low- to middle-income activists sympathetic to left-wing critiques of postsocialist development formed alliances with Roma activists and with people affected by evictions. These alliances provided a standpoint that strongly linked leftist housing activism to people discriminated against in housing hierarchies. Similar to The City is for All, these movement alliances sought to balance middle-class capacities for political representation with the influence of directly affected members. Unlike in Hungary, the political line established by this alliance collided with the politics of post-2008 demonstrations, including direct conflicts with the urban heritage movement.

In Hungary, the issue of ethnicized housing poverty did not become directly politicized as such. However, as an underlying structural area of tension, it did produce political manifestations in various forms. The “trickling down” of housing poverty to the countryside after 1989 produced pockets of poverty in rural areas, many of which also became ethnically segregated. With the reduction of state funding for housing, social housing benefits paid to such population segments constituted a remaining stream of subsidies that continued to be paid to the poorest. In the escalation of ethnic conflicts in rural areas during the 2000s, this type of state assistance was described as unfair, with claims that working Hungarians received no benefits during this period. The far-right Jobbik party’s successful anti-Roma campaign, which helped it enter parliament in 2010, provided one way whereby this tension found its way into politics. Other cases involved intra-city developments within Budapest. The peripheralization of poor residents by market-based regeneration programs had a strong ethnic character in the inner districts. The social regeneration model of the Magdolna program aimed to establish an inclusive model in this respect. Despite its limited success, it produced the basis of local civil society organization that came to play a significant role in the opposition community campaign’s success in the 2019 local elections. In the case of the Hős street segregated area, Fidesz’s local policy of development, its more general anti-Roma, anti-poor, and pro-policing approach, together with a plan to encircle the segregated area with a fence (reminiscent of the anti-migration campaign that included building a fence on Hungary’s southern border) clashed with a coalition that linked local social workers’ advocacy to broader public indignation and larger frameworks of oppositional political communication.

Concerning informal housing, no major form of politicization had developed in Budapest so far, with both residents’ and local governments’ hardships remaining under the radar of political discussions. In Bucharest, however, an occasion for politicization was created when a group of NGOs, in partnership with the World Bank, initiated a legislative proposal to facilitate the formalization of informal neighborhoods at the national level, which would have criminalized new informal housing. New leftist housing activist groups from the Block for Housing reacted by stepping up as mediators between affected communities and institutionalized negotiations over formalization, in which they could participate based on their credentials earned during earlier advocacy work. They advocated against pushing costs of formalization on residents and instead emphasized the need to address the problem of housing poverty causing informalization. This instance of politicization was thus based on a local initiative to implement the World Bank’s global agenda for formalization, to which middle-class activists could respond as mediators based on their knowledge of affected communities and previously gained access to the lower ranks of institutional negotiators.

Dynamics of Alliances in the Politicization of Social Housing

The issue of social housing has been repeatedly addressed by housing contention in both countries by different constellations of alliances. In Hungary, liberal and leftist housing activism has provided relatively continuous support for social housing since the 1990s, including instances of collaborations with affected groups. From the 2000s on, resistance to evictions from social housing formed a regular element of the new participative wave of leftist housing activism, and demanding better social housing remained a major way to translate the general idea of housing rights into specific demands in public campaigns. Despite these connections, social housing and evictions did not become a major convergence point of movement agency and politics, as they did in Bucharest. There, anti-eviction actions were key to forming lasting political and emotional links between the affected people and middle-class expert activists. The struggle by affected movement members to access social housing directly connected aspects of direct action, institutional advocacy, and political demands. The case of the most prominent Roma activist in the Vulturilor eviction is illustrative, as she has been constantly blocked from accessing social housing owing to her political visibility. At the same time, leftist housing groups continued to provide emotional and material support for her struggle. Since leftist housing groups’ national convergence in the Block for Housing in 2017, emphasis is placed on the right to social housing of all those earning below the national average income, who are not and have never been homeowners, with the aim of opening the field for wider class alliances around social housing.

Politicization around Urban Regeneration Projects

In the case of urban regeneration, we saw the following patterns of making and unmaking alliances in the politicization of regeneration-related tensions. In Hungary in the 1990s, the harmful social impact of market-based regeneration programs was not expressed politically, but was noted by experts. By the 2000s, this expert capacity combined with the possibility of EU-funded social regeneration projects produced the Magdolna program, which became a widely known reference point for inclusive regeneration. In 2010, the anti-poor aspects of urban development advanced by local Fidesz governments encountered political opposition from a broader coalition of affected groups, leftist housing activists, opposition activists, and opposition politicians. It is worth noting that this inclusion of the social aspect in political debates on urban development occurred in an environment of opposition campaigning, where a politically heterogeneous opposition was forced to collaborate to confront a supermajority government. In this context, contradictions between market-based and socially oriented development could be temporarily subdued in the convergence of symbolic messaging, while in the programs of different parties, demands for accessible housing coexisted with market-based approaches such as the “Smart City.”

In Romania, the tension between market-based regeneration projects and evictions became central to the formation of the housing rights movement. In the mid-2000s, opposition to evictions linked to the market-based regeneration project in Rahova-Uranus was foundational for the housing movement in Bucharest, bringing together evictees, families at risk of eviction, those fighting to keep their homes, Roma and anti-racism activists, artists, and social researchers. This initial cross-class coalition was also the grounds for collaboration with the heritage protection movement interested in conserving areas near the city center. The alliance broke up because of the latter prioritizing market-oriented urban development over social rights. The breakup clarified the housing rights movement’s position on class alliances, putting it in opposition to the heritage protection movement increasingly absorbed by right-liberal frameworks and development projects.

Dynamics of Alliances in the Politicization of the Low- to Middle-Income Groups’ Housing Needs

In both countries, low- to middle-income groups’ housing access has been a source of tension ever since the regime change; but this tension intensified after 2008, leading to two main forms of political expression: debtors’ contention (framed in conservative/liberal frameworks) and housing right groups’ leftist and liberal political alliances.

In Hungary, tenants’ groups expressed the problems of this segment in the years of the regime change according to a framework tied to previous socialist institutional structures that lost its contours with privatization. The Alliance of Housing Cooperatives used its institutional capacity developed during the socialist era to represent the interests of this segment, even if this was mainly in closed-door negotiations and with decreasing power over the years. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, these groups’ structural need for rental housing has been promoted by the Alliance as well as by thinktanks connected to liberal politics. By the late 2010s, this need had been aggravated, and it affected a politically active urban middle class, who were included in the coalition between leftist housing activism and opposition politics. Meanwhile, the same need for rental housing started to be addressed by state and market actors with distinct positions of interest. On the level of housing activism, a parallel stream was the formation of new experiments and expertise in cooperative housing projects, involving coalitions with labor unions. While these developments linked the issue of rental housing to leftist and liberal political projects, the same problem of housing access for low- to middle-income groups was also expressed in right-wing political terms by debtors’ groups.

In Romania, the precarization of low- to middle-income segments strongly encouraged political activism in the post-2008 mobilization cycle. However, the politics of these activists diverged between leftist housing groups on the one hand and the mainstream trend of political mobilization on the other. Those in the latter movements eventually joined the broader liberal trend of large political demonstrations, embarking on technocratic or party-oriented careers. Meanwhile, new leftist activism, with a highly educated but rather materially precarious background, mostly relied on voluntary work and solidified its anti-systemic stance. This stands in contrast to the Hungarian case, where leftist housing politics became more integrated into formal politics after 2019. Similar to the situation in Budapest, leftist housing activism also produced projects for cooperative dwelling as well as new coalitions with unions.

In terms of social housing policies, the contexts of leftist housing activism differed between the two countries. In Hungary, these policies implied a decreasing stream of funds directed solely toward the neediest, while state support for low- to middle-income housing was mostly channeled into market-based tools such as mortgage subsidies. In Romania, the redistribution of state support for housing was increasingly directed toward young families on stable low or middle incomes. In this context, low- and lower-middle income groups (from below the poverty line to below the national average income) had to compete for very limited public housing stock. This made it challenging for leftist housing activist groups to build solidarity. Moreover, debtors’ demands for state help, and especially their successful lobbying for privileged access to public housing, was seen by leftist housing activists as conflicting with the needs of the poorest.

Translating between Multiscalar Processes and Political Demands

Conceiving local housing-related grievances in terms of multiscalar, transnational processes and building the capacity to address them politically has been a specific challenge for housing activists. In most of the cases we followed, the multiscalar aspects of structural tensions came to be politicized where there was a direct institutional connection between scales and activists that used specific capacities and alliances allowing them to connect local grievances to processes on other scales. In Hungary, for instance, the issue of social inclusion was introduced into urban regeneration projects through programs linked to international institutional frameworks (EU-funded social urban regeneration) and by expert groups translating between local and European institutional contexts. In the politicization of informal housing in Romania, a similar example to the simultaneous presence of an interscale institutional connection and activist translation capacity was provided by the World Bank formalization project and leftist activists’ knowledge of local affected groups, local administrations, and international criticisms of World Bank developmental projects.

Debtors’ activism exemplifies the limitations of translating capacities across scales. While the problem of mortgage debt was deeply connected to the international dynamics of financialization in both countries, debtors’ politics remained limited to litigation and demands for protection addressed to the state. In Hungary, debtor activists did not interpret the local debt crisis as part of broader international dynamics, and instead, tended to follow right-wing politics’ focus on a specific collision between foreign financial interests and Hungarian national interests. Government programs that did not help debtors in arrears were included in debtors’ narratives as a case of treason within this conflict, repeating a narrative that in earlier forms had been applied to Socialist-Liberal governments serving Western interests. This framework could not provide a functional differentiation between Western and Hungarian capital or engage effectively with the government’s maneuvers to reorganize relations between the two. Hungarian debtors’ activism in relation to the EU provides a similar example. Owing to hopes placed in EU-level litigation after domestic possibilities were removed and to impressions of better consumer protection in Western countries, debtors saw the EU as a potential guarantor and good example of debtors’ rights. Despite recurrent references to Western finance as the cause of debtors’ suffering, debtors’ groups could not interpret and engage with the structural hierarchy between European and national scales of the debt problem and its regulation.

In terms of building capacity to address multiscalar aspects of housing tensions, it is also important to mention activist groups’ relations with international partners and their various forms of institutionalization. In the case of the Hungarian movement The City is for All, the New York-based homeless advocacy group Picture the Homeless played an important role in the conceptualization of its organizational model. Other international connections of The City is for All constituted an important tool for applying pressure in its campaign against anti-homelessness legislation. Lessons from the Spanish housing and municipalist movement were later used by The City is for All members in Eighth district community electoral campaigns. For Romanian leftist housing groups, similar connections developed with the European Action Coalition for The Right to Housing and the City, in which the Common Front for Housing Rights and Social Housing NOW from Cluj have been increasingly active. Although international collaborations and support actions have been undertaken since the early years of the Romanian leftist housing groups, the European Action Coalition constituted the first common movement institution through which local groups directly engaged with multiscalar and multisited aspects of housing tensions. This largely contributed to their political conceptualization of local grievances as linked to structural conditions on multiple scales. In the case of leftist housing groups’ cooperative projects, the international wave of cooperative urbanism that followed the 2008 crisis, and particularly the foundation of the East European cooperative housing network MOBA, played an important role as a forum for international collaboration, a source of inspiration, and an institutional reference frame for both Hungarian and Romanian local projects.

Field Dynamics

In both countries, we have seen that relatively constant and similar structural tensions were politicized over time by a multiplicity of actors with different political frameworks and alliances. In descriptions of other local fields, this characteristic was identified as the long-term fragmentation of housing struggles (Sebály 2021). This section describes some heuristic tools from the structural field of contention approach that we found useful to grasp some key aspects of this multiplicity.

Some of these tools are used to examine the variety of relations between actors (from alliances or conflicts to parallel action), whereas others are used to examine relationships between structural tensions and their politicization that are typically less visible in the movements’ own narratives. An example is the structural predominance of political silences, or instances where the mode of politicization obscures some structural contradictions in the tensions that become politicized. A third heuristic that we found useful concerned transformations in the field as a whole, whereby certain contextual changes impact all actors and their relations, thereby changing the forms of housing contention without necessarily being reflected in groups’ intentional strategies. Finally, the end of this section describes a field-level division in the politics of housing contention that we found characterized both cases.

Explicit Alliances, Explicit Conflicts, and Parallelism between Movements

Examples of explicit alliances included those between evictees or those at risk of eviction, the leftist (precarious but educated) middle-class, and Roma activists in Romania. In Hungary, they involved homeless activists and liberal/leftist middle-class activism and expertise, as well as the coalition between leftist housing activism, new middle-class movements, and oppositional politics after 2019. Explicit conflicts involved cases such as tenant conflicts with state maintenance companies in Hungary, leftist housing groups’ struggles against evictions, a lack of social housing, new legislative mechanisms for housing formalization, anti-homelessness policies, and conservative urban development. They also involved debtors’ struggles against banks’ demands for higher installments or expropriation.

The most striking example of parallelism between movements was that between leftist housing activism and debtors’ movements in both countries. In Romania, this remained an issue that we characterized in terms of leftist activism not engaging with the debtors’ relatively narrow, technical, and politically conservative efforts to maintain homeownership. In Hungary, this parallelism was recognized by both sides as a problem, but remained in place despite recurrent efforts to build bridges. Here, top-down penetration by right-wing politics and other political cultures produced different political perspectives on this problem in debtor and leftist activist circles.

The other main form of parallelism we saw was the relative distance of leftist (and in Hungary, liberal) housing activism from low- to middle-income groups’ housing access problems. In some instances, this distance was even manifested as a conflict, such as when liberal housing activists in Hungary transformed workers’ homes into homeless shelters or when leftist activists in Romania opposed redistribution models that favored young middle-class professionals. While parallelism between debtors’ groups and leftist housing activism mainly concerned the conflict between left- and right-wing political frameworks and their respective alliances, a deeper layer of political parallelism was based on these groups’ different approaches to homeownership. When leftist housing activists thematized the problem of housing access, they did so in terms of social housing, rental housing, and cooperative housing, all of which were formulated in line with anti-privatization, pro-redistribution leftist agendas. This ultimately went against the dominant system of homeownership. Meanwhile, debtors’ groups maintained the goal of housing access through homeownership, as prescribed by the super-homeownership system, in an attempt to resist its effects on indebtedness rather than its property aspects. The different political frames and respective sensitivities regarding the idea of homeownership kept these two streams of activism in parallel. These frames were wired into their constituents’ broader political ideologies as well as their positions. While debtors’ groups primarily sought to save their own investments and homes, for educated lower- and middle-class leftist activists housing struggles were linked to their broader engagement with political agendas for left political change.

The Structural Predominance of Political Silences

The most striking cases of structural tensions being concealed by political silences were those of informal housing in Hungary and homelessness in Romania. Although ethnic discrimination as an element of housing poverty was sometimes addressed in Hungary by leftist or liberal housing groups and by Roma advocacy, it remained beyond the focus of the dominant frameworks of housing contention, unlike in Romania. Next to these most evident cases, we also found that processes of politicization generally did not cover the full scope of the underlying structural tensions, even cases where the latter were explicitly thematized by political initiatives. Instances of politicization typically remained visible but exceptional in relation to the scope of structural tensions they addressed, both in terms of continuity (as seen, e.g., in the rent issue in Hungary, intermittently thematized over time by various groups and alliances) and in their extent (as illustrated by the small number of activists in the leftist coalitions concerned with homelessness or ethnic housing poverty in both countries).

The relatively small scope of politicized activists compared with the number of people directly affected by the issues that activist groups addressed was characteristic of leftist housing movements as well as debtors’ groups. The significance of such groups regarding the larger, politically silent base of tensions they addressed was typically enhanced by their access to policy negotiations. The role of Hungarian dissident activists in establishing postsocialist institutions of homeless assistance or the recent case of Romanian leftist housing activists entering negotiations over the World Bank program of formalization are good examples. A major exception from the generally large gap between instances of politicization and their broader structural base is the Alliance of Housing Cooperatives in Hungary, which entailed all housing cooperatives in the country in 1990 and continued to include cooperatives plus a significant proportion of condominiums in subsequent decades. The Alliance also involved an imbalance in terms of political activity, distributed between a small active leadership and a large but mostly passive membership. Nevertheless, it is the only organization covered in this book that had an institutional membership relationship with the majority of the people affected by the situation it addressed.

Contradictions Not Reflected in the Politicization of Housing Tensions

We observed that the structural contradictions that defined the conditions of contestation addressing a certain area of tension were not necessarily reflected in the frameworks of politicization that respective actors built around them. We consider such relationships to be highly illustrative of the way the dynamics of politicization relate to underlying structural and political conditions.

An illustrative example of structural contradictions that defined housing groups’ politics, but is not reflected in their political frameworks, is provided by the tenants’ movement during the late socialist era and during the regime change in Hungary. This movement was based on the possibility of forming civic associations, permitted by the liberalizing reforms of the late 1980s. Using this window of opportunity, the Tenants’ Association contested deficiencies of maintenance by state housing companies, owing to a lack of funds following from the burden of public debt repayment—the same situation that made later socialist political liberalization possible. Although tenants mobilized to pressure state maintenance companies to do long-delayed repairs, such pressure could not change the macrostructural conditions that caused the gaps in maintenance. With the progress of economic liberalization, tenants’ different positions within the privatization process manifested as a political contradiction within the association itself, which broke into opposing camps favoring privatization versus the continuation of tenant advocacy.

In middle-class housing activism, we found another type of structural contradiction that attracted no political reflection outside the leftist scene but played an important role in the divergent strategies and frameworks of different middle-class substrata and activist groups. This arose from emancipatory politics by those from middle-class backgrounds (ranging from educated but precarious to higher positions), whereby political demands made in the name of general aims (such as urban development or housing rights) sometimes converged or collided with middle-class activists’ own positional interests. These especially included the problem of professional precarity and the potential to link housing activism to politicized expert careers (Gagyi 2017). On the level of political messages, those on either side of this contradiction could appear to be organically harmonious, with middle-class activist expertise representing broader interests, including those of the deprived. However, the potential conflict between these two aspects was also manifested in various forms in our cases.

In the Romanian leftist housing groups’ conflict with heritage protection activism, we saw two trajectories of different segments of politicized middle-class expertise conflicting through different political alliances and the respective career options. In this case, the structural contradiction between potentially emancipative political aims on the one hand and middle-class career interests on the other was politicized by leftist housing activists. They pointed out that middle-class urban activism allowing members to enter political expert positions ultimately hurt the housing interests of deprived groups. In both Romania and Hungary, leftist housing groups allied with deprived groups reflected this contradiction in their political agenda and made the control of middle-class privileges within their own alliance structures part of their organizational practice. However, despite this similarity, in Hungary, the positioning of leftist housing groups relative to the same structural contradiction of middle-class politics played out differently, as the activists integrated into opposition politics after 2019. A similar but thus far less politically visible form of the same relationship involves middle-class initiatives for housing cooperatives that are building expert positions and collaborating with local opposition governments while striving to control the effect of expert careers tied to dominant institutions by building horizontal relations with affected groups.

Transformations of the Field

In addition to the dynamics between actors, we also found field-level transformations that affect the positions of each actor to be important in terms of field dynamics. One such transformation includes the 2008 crisis, which accelerated social polarization and sharpened housing tensions, especially in the areas of severe housing poverty, housing debt, and fluctuating mid-level incomes. The post-2008 field-level transformation also involves the political aftermath of the crisis, which solidified different (neoliberal and nationalist authoritarian) regimes in the two countries, leading to different dynamics in the political alliances of post-2008 movements.

Further examples of field-level transformations in Hungary include the Fidesz government’s anti-homelessness and anti-NGO campaigns. In a context where anti-homelessness legislation became the primary example of the conservative government’s punitive attitude toward poverty and where NGO-level civil activism was seen as increasingly unable to reverse ongoing trends, the non-NGO-based participatory politics of leftist housing activism gained a central symbolic role in opposition politics. In Romania, a similar transformation involved the mainstreaming of the liberal branch of post-2008 mobilizations in electoral politics, which resulted in the Save Romania Union (USR) becoming the third largest political party in 2016. The USR raised its anticorruption agenda above any other social and economic demands and further advanced an approach to social benefits and services, such as housing, dedicated to the deserving poor. These transformations of the field increased competition among low- and low- to middle-income groups for public visibility and access to social and public housing, imposing new limitations on cross-class alliances. However, they also laid the groundwork for social and economic struggles on the margins of the mainstream neoliberal agenda to interconnect, beyond, and sometimes against, the anticorruption trend. Thus, Romanian leftist activists began to address housing accessibility and costs in connection with labor/wage struggles, and vice versa.

Resistance to Deprivation Versus Housing Access Activism for Low- to Middle-Income Groups: A Field-Level Division

Contemplating the relations between structurally induced housing tensions and processes of their politicization, we noticed a major division that we perceived to be a key characteristic of the way in which housing tensions become politicized in both countries. This was the division between a strain of politicization whereby coalitions between affected groups and progressive (educated but often precarious) middle-class activists address severe forms of housing poverty and the politicization of housing access by stable low- to middle-income populations. This division was most often expressed by silence or parallel action, and sometimes through more or less explicit conflict.

On the level of relations between activist group politics, this division can be characterized in terms of differences in movement alliances and activists’ positions, in education and political culture, or in relations to homeownership. However, the overall field of housing tensions suggests that the consistency of this division follows from not only differences in the characteristics and politics of movement groups, but also major political trends defined by the structural characteristics of housing commodification.

In both countries, the parallel processes of housing commodification and the waning of state funding for housing created a system that constantly produces housing poverty at the bottom and makes it difficult for low- to middle-income groups (who have inherited no extra resources) to access housing. In national policy, the division between these two main areas of tensions is reflected in what Jelinek and Pósfai (2020) described as the duality of postsocialist housing policies. The first and dominant branch of this duality involves using state intervention to promote market-based housing solutions—for instance, through state support for mortgages. As Pósfai (2013) emphasizes, for the housing access of low- to middle-income groups, this area of policy provides state help that allows these groups’ housing needs to be channeled to the market. In terms of politicization, it creates specific tensions tied to economic boom–bust cycles and related political unrest when such augmentation of housing marketization strikes back in the form of a debt crisis. The other branch of the dual policy structure addresses severe forms of housing poverty produced at the bottom of the system. This type of policy falls close to classic redistributive models targeted at social needs, but it is increasingly limited by the scarcity of dedicated funds. A consequence of reducing funding is the proliferation of restrictive conditions of access, as well as the politicized tensions around those conditions.

This diagnosis of postsocialist housing policies by Jelinek and Pósfai (2020) resembles what Wahl (2011) identified as a false political dichotomy generated by the neoliberalization of Scandinavian welfare systems. Wahl (2011) argued that the social power of organized labor to impose decommodification of various segments of social life after World War II, including housing, was defeated during the 1970s. As a consequence, state policies were divided into policies of marketization and a waning branch of welfare policies that were expected to take care of those who fell through the gaps of market-based opportunities. This double policy frontline, argued Wahl, helped to obscure the main underlying conflict: that the commodification of key areas of reproductive conditions increased market control over social functions and necessarily contributed to misery at the bottom while simultaneously narrowing the capacity of the remaining redistributive welfare policies.

The forms of activism targeting housing poverty and activism concerned with homeownership access that we reviewed above both addressed issues arising from the broader commodification process. However, the positionality of the housing problems that the groups addressed and the division between the two policy levels that they could address affected the ways the activists could politicize these problems. As we argued above, the politicization of housing tensions involved not only expert and political alliances (which helped translate experiences of housing problems into political and expert vocabularies), but also specific interfaces of existing institutional arrangements where political and expert demands could be addressed. In housing poverty activism, the main institutional interface was redistribution targeted at the bottom of the housing system, the second branch of the dual housing policy defined by Jelinek and Pósfai (2020). Addressing this level of housing politics, activist groups could connect specific instances of housing needs to broader political narratives of housing rights formulated at the level of state redistribution. At the same time, these frameworks remained difficult to connect with struggles of housing access fought on the level of housing access through market-based homeownership, as in the debtors’ struggles. For the latter, the policy interface to which their situation was tied was the market-oriented branch of the dual housing policy structure. Differences between the political frameworks invoked by the two groups—envisaging the solution to housing needs through state-based redistribution models or by guaranteeing housing access through homeownership—in essence replicated the dual policy system. We can see this division as a field-level version of structural divisions that define forms of housing politicization not reflected in the respective political frameworks.

By acknowledging this division as a long-term characteristic of both housing contention fields, we do not mean to suggest that activist groups would never recognize the connection between different levels of housing problems or try to connect these issues through a broader critique of commodification. In both Romanian and Hungarian leftist housing groups, the idea of housing as a human right and the criticism of commodified housing as a means of capitalist extraction and an engine of social inequality have always been present as a broader framework of action. Even in liberal activism, as with Hungarian experts assisting the homeless, the contradiction between sweeping housing marketization and the dwindling capacity to resolve housing poverty has sometimes been explicitly recognized. What we aim to emphasize is that despite such reflections, the structural and political division of the field made it extremely difficult for housing activists to politicize housing issues in ways other than those already designated by this division. In both Hungary and Romania, the main forms of housing activism presented in this book mostly fit into either one category or the other.

In both Hungary and Romania, new leftist groups have attempted to connect growing housing tensions since 2008 with initiatives for new infrastructure as part of a political movement concerned with the decommodification of housing. Examples include institutional models of rental cooperatives, as well as collaborations with unions, linking workplace struggles to the reproductive issue of housing in terms of both political demands and practical cooperative projects. These initiatives go beyond connecting specific actions targeted at existing institutional interfaces through an abstract critique of commodification, and instead strive to build new organizational infrastructures of contention that can define conflicts of interest in terms of commodification. These efforts highlight the importance of movement agency in the politicization of structural tensions. They particularly show how activists’ politicization work also involves building the organizational and institutional conditions for posing questions in a different way than those prescribed by existing institutional infrastructures.

Conclusion

This chapter reviewed lessons from a comparison of Hungarian and Romanian housing contention fields with a focus on the concepts and heuristics that illustrate how the structural field of contention approach can be applied to understand the politicization of social tensions following from structural contradictions.

In terms of the structural background of housing contention, we identified two main areas of tension that are similar across both cases and that remained constant during the postsocialist period, with some instances of amplification (such as the post-2008 debt crises). The first such area involved the problems of housing poverty accumulating at the bottom of the housing hierarchy, and the second concerned the housing access problems of low- to middle-income groups with insufficient savings to follow the main available route to housing access through homeownership. Contention around homelessness, evictions, and social housing developed around tensions in the first area, while struggles around rent, maintenance, cooperative housing, and mortgage debt characterized the second.

Reviewing the political context of housing contention in the two countries, we concluded that post-2008 political developments created vastly different political environments that allowed different openings and alliance options for housing groups. In Hungary, movements opposing the Orbán regime after 2010 created an environment wherein leftist housing groups allied with middle-class opposition movements and progressive opposition politicians. In Romania, post-2008 demonstrations were channeled into support for neoliberal party politics. As a consequence, leftist housing groups chose a more marginal but less compromising line. Meanwhile, mortgage debtors who suffered losses after 2008 were embraced and then silenced by right-wing politicians in Hungary. In Romania, more affluent debtors supported neoliberal policies, while others remained mostly politically silent.

Turning to the ways in which different forms of housing contention translated structural tensions into politicized forms of expression, we concluded that each case we considered involved multi-actor alliances, including middle-class experts who could translate housing grievances into claims against public institutions in a form they could understand. Conversely, each of these cases involved an institutional interface that this translation capacity could address—from social housing systems to courts or political parties. We noted that the enabling capacity of these two factors can also be seen as a limitation, as they tied housing contention to existing institutional interfaces and allowed middle-class experts and their political alliances to dominate the channels of politicization.

A specific group of heuristics that we highlighted was linked to the dynamics of the contention field, one of which involved a variety of relations between actors (from explicit alliances or conflicts to parallelism). Another group of insights concerned relationships between politicization and the structural background which are less visible in approaches that focus on single movements or intentional relations, such as political silence or structural contradictions that escaped political reflection. A third heuristic we found useful was that of transformations of the field as a whole that affected all actors at the same time.

Finally, a field-level dynamic we considered to be of specific importance in terms of the politicization of housing tensions was a specific form that we called a “field-level” division of housing contention. This implied a split between left-liberal forms of activism that addressed issues of extreme housing poverty and formulated demands in terms of redistributive policies and debtor activism that joined conservative forms of pro-market policies to demand state assistance to maintain or access homeownership. In terms of the institutional interfaces they addressed, these two main branches of contention corresponded to what Jelinek and Pósfai (2020) identified as a duality of market and socially oriented housing policies after 1989. We concluded that the long-term reproduction of this split across the two countries’ political geographies revealed a specific limitation in articulating political critiques of the process of housing commodification, which bound the politicization of housing tensions to existing institutional interfaces of the dual policy structure. In this respect, we found initiatives for new or renewed movement institutions to bridge different constituencies experiencing different types of tensions and construct capacities for a broader anti-commodification agenda beyond existing institutional interfaces to be particularly relevant.