In 2019 we organized a conference casting light on the housing crisis and especially on the historical and contemporary organization of tenants to contest housing inequalities. By placing housing struggles and tenants’ organization at the centre of the debate we aimed at exposing and politicizing current capitalist development and, hopefully, at proposing a different view of how housing can be organized and imagined by discussing how resistance can be used, with what effects and how it can be connected to other struggles. This special issue is a result of this conference dealing with tenants’ organization in different contexts examining how tenants organize(d), why and what could be learned from it. In this introducing text we give an overview of this field of research by asking why tenants’ mobilizations are important to study, what is still under-studied in the field and which perspectives are important to raise in future research.

The first decade after the fall of state socialism in Poland was characterized by moderate aspirations to reform or oppose the dominant (neoliberal) rhetoric by social movements in the country. In the last decade, a turn toward more informal grassroots activity has been observed by scholars, above all in the field of urban activism. This article looks into this recent development in urban activism and focuses especially on the hitherto neglected grassroots, noninstitutionalized, and nonformalized forms of activism that take place in Polish cities aimed at urban change. It will be argued that this form of urban activism developed as a reaction to professionalization and NGO-ization of social movements, defying the (until now) established forms of organizing collectively. The analysis is built on qualitative data gathered in 2014–2015, including 36 in-depth interviews with urban activists in informal initiatives and groups in different Polish cities.

Here we introduce the special issue of Partecipazione e Conflitto concerning the theme "Squatting and Urban Commons: Creating Alternatives to Neoliberalism". In particular, we present the context and origins of this edition, the rationale behind these theoretical and empirical concerns, and the main contents of the gathered articles.

During the last three decades processes of urban development have spread speedily across the globe, transforming hundreds of cities into primary sites for the implementation of a neoliberal agenda. As expected, this global phenomenon brings with it a number of negative consequences for the lives of disadvantaged urban residents. Privatization and commercialization of public space and housing stocks, increasing gentrification of neighbourhoods and deregulation of the housing sector are only a few examples of the adverse scenario that people from less well-off backgrounds have to face. These processes constitute capital-driven strategies that have been enforced by displacing, evicting, marginalizing and criminalizing communities who are, at the same time excluded from any participation in the decision-making process of the urban restructuring. These actions, carried out by corporations, investors and developers and closely backed up by entrepreneurial governments (Mayer, 2009) or “centaur-states” (Wacquant, 2012) are embedded in an accelerated process of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2008) that has exacerbated inequality and widened the gap between the rich and the poor. The effects of this growing polarization in the distribution of power and wealth can be easilyobserved in the spatial forms of the cities, in which gated communities, glittering city centre developments and privatized areas under non-stop surveillance coexist in sharp separation with favelas, precarious and informal settlements and impoverished working class neighbourhoods (Harvey, 2012; Lipman, 2011).

Two Polish cities, Warsaw and Poznań, are studied in the article to examine how external structures are handled and used by squatters in these two settings. The aim is to analyze opportunity structures that condition the emergence and development of squatting and how squatters respond to and utilize these opportunities. Our ambition is to understand why squatting has developed differently in the two cities by emphasizing the duration and cohesion of the squatting scene as pivotal for the different trajectories of squatting. It is argued in the article that the durability of the squatting environment abates tendencies to open the squatting scene to external coalitions and establish more institutionalized forms of political struggle.

Radical social movements are more and more often the subject of academic inquiry, where their agenda, identity-building processes and repertoires of action are examined vis a vis the dominant discursive opportunity structures. The case study presented in this articleis the squatting movement in Poland. We interpret this movement, its actions and in particular alliance-building strategies, through the perspective of radical flanks of broader urban social movements environment.