CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Amon, Katalin |
|---|---|
| Title | The Mortgage Debtor, the Neighbor, the Homeless Citizen, and the Family: Understanding Citizenship and Housing Through Citizen Imaginaries |
| Summary | The Great Recession of 2008 directed political attention to the global problem of housing exclusion, especially in Spain and Hungary, which were severely affected by the mortgage crisis. Citizens’ engagement with specific housing issues has produced new ideas and practices for inclusive and affordable housing in these countries. This research explores how these diverse ideas and practices, shaped by the citizens’ interpretations of their socio-economic context, emerge through the co-constructions of citizenship and housing in post-crisis Spain and Hungary. I weave through theories of housing and citizenship, the collected data, and my own experiences as a housing activist to develop the concept of the citizen imaginary as a reflexive iterative research strategy (Montgomerie, 2017). Based on Selbin and his concept of the revolutionary imaginary (2010), I define citizen imaginaries as compelling stories connecting sense-making, relating to others, inspiration, and political visions through a citizen protagonist whose claims of justice, political socialization, political visions, and housing simultaneously produce narrative connections and limitations on housing interpretations. I embark on a narrative method to reconstruct the citizen imaginaries of the key political actors of the housing struggles, based on 53 semi-structured interviews and the websites of the key political actors, the Plataforma de Afectador por la Hipoteca, Guanyem Barcelona, Barcelona En Comú, A Város Mindenkié, and a group of Hungarian conservative family organizations. The research sheds light on how specific meanings and practices of housing have been constructed in the citizen imaginaries. The citizen imaginary of the mortgage debtor demonstrates how the reinterpretation of the mortgage crisis as a mortgage scam has enabled universal connections to the mortgage debtor and housing as a site of empowerment and a means to enact redistributive justice. In the citizen imaginary of the neighbor, housing and political crises have inspired a citizen imaginary transforming the city into an urban commons, connecting the claims of justice of the neighbor to be protected from exclusion to an activist citizen identity of the neighbor as a member of the commons participating in and accessing political and policy care through municipal housing policies. The imaginary of the homeless citizen reinterprets homelessness as a crisis of care and democracy and housing as a site of emancipation and a vision of a solidary society. The citizen imaginary of the family constructs the family as a fundamental social unit whose claims of justice about the recognition through family and housing policies, guarantee the nation’s survival. The empirical findings include identifying shared narrative connections in citizen imaginaries between the structural, personal, value-oriented, needs-based, universal, particular, conceptual, practical, abstract, concrete, present, and future dimensions of citizenship and housing. Citizen imaginaries also involve shared narrative limitations that constrain these connections. I have theorized these constraints as universal dilemmas about interpreting crises, the citizen protagonist, and the mutual limitations between political and housing visions. The citizen imaginary deconstructs the dichotomous view on opportunities and barriers of inclusive housing practices as outcomes of the domination of the external forces of the market or the political establishment on the liberating activist engagement with housing. It offers a tool for researchers, practitioners, and activists to reflect on how their interpretations and practices produce these potentials and limitations and to navigate through them. |
| Supervisor | Krizsan, Andrea |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/amon_katalin.pdf |
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