Housing and the grounded city: Rent extraction and social innovations

This chapter questions the contemporary forms of civil society engagement about housing, starting from the assumption that the concrete importance of specific initiatives of social innovation should be assessed in relation to existing problems. Since the basis of housing problems is not only the decline of public housing policies, but the increasing strength of rent extraction on urban land, the contributions from communities and the civil society should be assessed based on their ability to counter the extraction of unearned rents from urban land. Referring mainly to Italian cases, the chapter shows that many experiments tackle some symptoms or side effects of this trend, and some alleged social innovations are even an integral part of the problem. However, some experiments can be considered as examples of a radical progressive vision on housing, as they switch from the idea of property to one of access, and prevent the capture of urban land value.