After zooming in on two capitals on Europe’s peripheries, Budapest and Bucharest, it is time to zoom out and ask what we have learned that is relevant beyond these two cases. What insights have we gained for understanding and theorizing about global housing and other social struggles?

We chose these two cases for their analytic relevance beyond the region to demonstrate how social movement and urban studies can benefit from closer attention to movements in Central and Eastern Europe, deliberately making space for theorization from and on the region. While our study of the politicization of structural changes related to the financial crisis in this local context is important in its own right, this book should also be read as a response to the increasing number of calls for giving experiences from Central and Eastern Europe a more central role in the global circulation of knowledge in urban studies (e.g., Baća, 2021; Grubbauer & Kusiak, 2012; Jacobsson, 2016; Jehlička & Jacobsson, 2021; Müller & Trubina, 2020; Tuvikene, 2016). We believe that our study makes a number of contributions to this discussion at different levels.

First, one insight from this study relates to the need for unpacking the relationships between broader structural-political processes described in contemporary housing literature through the concepts of neoliberalization, gentrification, and financialization and the movements that react to them. While critical literature on housing tends to imply that researchers’ critique of these processes coincides with what housing movements see as their target, the relations we found were less unilinear. Instead of a transparent and direct relationship between structural processes and housing movements, our analysis shows different forms of local institutionalization and diversified, often contradictory modes of political reactions embedded in longer histories of local social integration into global capitalist processes. We see this complexity not as specific to our Eastern European cases but rather as an empirical basis from which we argue that both research and political thought on housing conflicts would benefit. Moreover, we see this complexity beyond the cases of housing movements. From this empirical base, we develop tools that allow us to think of mobilization not as a direct reflection of and reaction to abstract diagnoses of structural processes but instead to address movements and their environments in terms of the complex constellations on the ground through which general processes are manifested locally. Thus, we have proposed that a more complex approach—here offered in the form of the structural field of contention approach—is needed to address the relations between financialization processes, their local institutionalization, and politicized reactions. These cannot be fully understood without the longer histories of integration into global capitalist processes—since the nineteenth century in our cases—that shape neighborhoods, housing conditions, arrangements of uneven development, the absence or presence of certain institutions and laws, different housing needs and opportunities for different social categories, as well as the power constellations of different social categories.

Second, a large part of the literature has focused on progressive cases of anti-financialization and anti-gentrification housing movements, as well as anti-austerity protests more generally, which in many respects share researchers’ analysis of these processes and have political agendas with which researchers can identify. As a consequence, social movement studies and general political thought struggle to understand nonprogressive responses to crisis effects. Our analysis of the Hungarian and Romanian cases reveals movements to be a complex and dynamic field of actors on the wide spectra between progressive and nonprogressive responses and between politically visible and invisible forms of contention, changing in time as actors interact—among themselves and with power structures at different levels. Again, as we see citizen mobilizations at various ends of the ideological spectrum appearing in an increasing number of countries in all parts of the world, we are in urgent need of frameworks to allow an integrated way of analyzing contemporary social contention in its complexity.

The framework offered in this book is not intended to formulate general hypotheses regarding the nature of the movements in the contemporary crisis but rather to provide a perspective from which the movement-based politicization of crisis effects can be understood in relation to the local structural and political constellations of the crisis process. This can be especially useful in the frame of the crisis effects enhanced by the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to new rearrangements of struggles, alliances, conflicts, parallelisms, and silences. In terms of general diagnoses of momentary constellations of visible mobilizations, this finer-grained work may produce fewer spectacular statements than narratives that consider unilinear relations between structural crises and progressive movement responses. Nevertheless, we believe that the heuristic tools we build through our comparative study may enable more realistic assessments of local movement politics and their advancement within the broader crisis process.

Third, the comparison of the two case studies demonstrates that our structural field of contention approach offers a framework for comparative analysis of social (such as housing) conflicts and movements that is sufficiently flexible yet systematic to enable meaningful comparisons across structural and political contexts. Our cases showed that the same main areas of housing tensions become politicized in different configurations in contexts defined by similar structural backgrounds, yet with different political regimes. Tracing connections between contention forms and the respective aspects of structural transformations to which they are linked or they address revealed a broader contextual understanding of different forms of housing politicization. This showed us not only the differences between specific instances of contention but also how they are linked differently into the same broader crisis process. We think of the structural field of contention as a heuristic approach to guide research questions on the relationships between crisis and movement responses and make both the embeddedness and complexity of these relations visible. As argued above, we do not think of this potential as the mere addition of details on crisis-induced mobilizations; rather, we think of it as a necessary approach to understand the complexity of crisis politics.

Fourth, in this research, we offer a distinct contribution to field approaches in the study of social mobilization and social movements, allowing an integrated analysis of a multiplicity of actors whose mutual relations and structural embeddedness are key factors in shaping movement dynamics. The first point that we stress here was the multiplicity of actors, as emphasized by the longer tradition of field approaches. The second concerned relations between actors, including those that are unintentional or not reflected in movements’ ideological frameworks. A third related point was that next to movements that politicize structural tensions in highly visible political forms, less visible forms of contention and political silences on existing structural tensions were also considered to be part of field dynamics. We believe that taking silences into consideration is key to assessing the extent to which more visible forms of contention give voice to existing structural tensions. This fourth aspect highlighted relations between actors’ structural positions and the types of movement agendas and coalitions they develop. We contextualized these by examining their mutual interactions (alliances, rejections, conflicts, and absence of interaction), as well as interactions with actors of established power (the state, certain political parties and electoral movements), thus revealing their significance relative to other actors in a dynamic field. The fifth contribution of our analysis to field approaches in social movement studies is related to the transformations of field relations, which can (unintentionally) influence actors’ conditions as well as their internal frameworks and agendas, and our sixth point of emphasis concerns how movements and contention relate to the multiple scales of structural transformations.

Finally, ever since Castells (1978, 1983), there has been great optimism over what urban movements can achieve. After 2008, progressive responses to the crisis have been celebrated as new ways of acting together in the name of equality and democracy (e.g., Flesher Fominaya, 2020; Karaliotas & Swyngedouw, 2019). While our analysis cautions us to restrain that optimism somewhat, we have also shown that cross-class and cross-group alliances that hold solidaristic agendas are nonetheless possible in an ideologically polarized world. Tracing how long-term global structural processes, local sociopolitical constellations, and activists’ efforts combine into contemporary geographies of politics can also provide better assessments of the space of maneuver for progressive crisis responses.

Our main insight regarding housing contention in our two cases was that despite different configurations of contention, long-term field-level dynamics reflected the same two main areas of housing tensions, namely housing poverty at the bottom of the housing hierarchy and limited housing access for low-to-middle income households. Field dynamics were limited by a main field-level division marked by the duality of policy interfaces, that is, social housing policies addressing the poor, and market-oriented policies addressing the low-to-middle income categories. Regarding the potential of movements to surpass this duality, we pointed to instances of movement-based institution building where contention produces the infrastructure that enables the formulation and upholding of new agendas other than those suggested by interfaces for politicization marked by duality of policy and provided by existing institutions. We hope that this point, together with our general emphasis on multi-actor fields and field-level dynamics—including politically silent aspects of the field and their historical-structural background—can open up new paths for political imagination as well as for comparative urban research.