How do global coalitions of civil society, non-governmental and community based organisations, social movements and academics, make visible, defend and produce habitat rights? This conversation with the President of the Habitat International Coalition (HIC), Adriana Allen, examines HIC’s perspectives on the practices, knowledges and pedagogies for translocal housing activism through reflections structured along several themes. These include understanding the horizontal democratic practices of working as a ‘network of networks’, with particular focus on how translocality can go beyond international mobility. The discussion also addresses the struggle for recognition and for pursuing epistemic justice, highlighting caveats and potentials of knowledge co-production and popular pedagogies; and the diversity of understandings of housing (including, radical housing) which the Coalition nurtures and reconciles. The conversation highlights the value of foregrounding an explicitly rights-based housing agenda, which has been continuously nurtured over the past 40+ years of HIC’s work on the social production of habitat.
