Housing Justice: A Lexicon for Building Solidarity

Madeleine Hamlin, Carlos Delclós

PM Press, May 5, 2026 - Social Science - 304 pages

Housing Justice: A Lexicon for Building Solidarity provides accessible, future-facing language for housing scholars, practitioners, and activists.

At a time when the housing question is being reshaped by financialization, dispossession, displacement, and resistance across global contexts, this volume offers a critical vocabulary grounded in contemporary scholarship and struggle. Emerging from the eighth Antipode Institute for the Geographies of Justice, and shaped by a translocal editorial collective, the book draws together contributions from scholars and organizers working across multiple geographies and traditions of housing activism. Rather than offering closed definitions, each entry synthesizes current debates while tracing the political genealogies, conceptual tensions, and geographic specificities that shape how terms are used—and contested—across contexts, movements, and disciplines. Contributors draw from case studies and organizing experiences around the world, foregrounding the complex entanglements of housing with racial capitalism, settler colonialism, migration control, and state violence.

The result is not a static reference work, but a living archive of concepts that circulate within and between academic inquiry and political practice. From foundational terms like “eviction,” “property,” and “social housing” to emergent ones such as “carceral shelter,” “digital/material,” and “déracinement,” Housing Justice: A Lexicon for Building Solidarity illuminates how language mediates the spatial, institutional, and affective dimensions of housing injustice.

This book is both a resource and a provocation: it supports critical reflection, interdisciplinary dialogue, and coalition-building, while inviting readers to think with and beyond existing frameworks. For anyone engaged in the theorization or practice of housing justice, it offers a shared starting point for imagining—and organizing—alternative housing futures.

Contents

• Introduction: 1
• Abolition: 5
• Affordable Housing: 10
• Bordering: 15
• Carceral Shelter: 21
• Colonias: 28
• Cooperative Housing: 33
• Decommodification of Housing: 39
• Democracy: 44
• Déracinement: 51
• DigitalMaterial: 58
• Displacement: 63
• Dispossession: 71
• Domicide: 78
• Enteignen: 84
• Eviction: 92
• Financialization: 98
• Gentrification: 107
• Habitation: 114
• Homelessness: 121
• Housing First: 128
• Housing Justice: 133
• Housing Precarity: 139
• Informal Housing: 143
• Infrastructure: 149
• International Tenant Power Movement: 155
• Land: 161
• Land Banks: 167
• Landlord: 174
• Landlord Tech: 181
• Manufactured Housing: 188
• Migration: 195
• Mortgage: 201
• Property: 206
• Racial Capitalism: 211
• The Real Estate State: 218
• Rent: 221
• Rent as Theft: 228
• Residential Segregation: 234
• ShortTerm Rentals: 240
• Social Housing: 249
• Squatting: 256
• Vacancy: 263
• About the Authors: 269
• Index: 282

About the author

Madeleine Hamlin is assistant professor of geography at Colgate University, where she also occasionally teaches in regional prisons. Her research examines the intersection of housing and the carceral state in US cities. In 2021, she was named an Emerging Scholar by the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation. Her work, which has also been supported by a fellowship from the Society of Woman Geographers, has been published in Antipode, Progress in Human Geography, and Urban Geography, among other outlets. Her forthcoming monograph with University of Chicago Press examines how policing shaped the trajectory of Chicago’s public housing over time, as well as the daily life of its residents.

Carlos Delclós is a Serra Hunter Fellow in Sociology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He obtained his PhD in political and social sciences at the Pompeu Fabra University, where he specialized in sociodemography and received the distinction cum laude for his doctoral thesis, Cultural and Structural Explanations of Fertility: The Spanish Case at the Beginning of the 21st Century. He is an associate researcher at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs and participates in numerous international research projects. Through mixed methodologies, his work focuses on social stratification, urban sociology, political sociology, and social policy. His work has been published in international scientific journals such as European Urban and Regional Studies, Housing Studies, European Population Research, PLoS Medicine, International Journal of Epidemiology, and International Journal of Public Health.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Housing Justice: A Lexicon for Building Solidarity
• Editors: Madeleine Hamlin, Carlos Delclós
• Publisher: PM Press, 2026
• ISBN: 9798887441757
• Length: 304 pages
• Subjects: Social Science / Activism & Social Justice; Social Science / Human Geography; Social Science / Sociology / General