ABOUT - PARSONS HOUSING JUSTICE LAB

The Housing Justice Lab is a platform for dialogue, research, and strategic design that advocates for equitable neighborhood development. It brings together students, faculty, researchers, activists, community-based organizations, housing experts, and local politicians committed to housing justice and community-driven development across cities. Combining academic and popular knowledge, this collaborative laboratory aims to expose the damaging aspects produced by the current housing system such as discrimination, tenure insecurity, displacement, and homelessness as well as exploring practices and policy frameworks emerging as a response that pursue housing justice through the promotion of tenant protections and rent regulation, new forms of access to adequate housing, capacity building for collective action, cooperative models of housing and community development, and other social alternatives for housing and equitable development. Through public programs, this laboratory seeks to amplify the efforts of communities, housing coalitions, urban movements, and policy platforms promoting housing justice. Building on the exchange of current experiences and emerging practices, the ultimate goal of this platform is to facilitate university-community partnerships to produce new knowledge, methodologies, and instruments to advance local efforts bringing about social and spatial justice.

COMMUNITY ADVOCACY

Multi-year neighborhood-based research and design-driven projects developed in collaboration with local communities, grassroots groups, and nonprofit community-based organizations are central to this initiative.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

Public programs are organized connecting students, young professionals, activists, citizens, grassroots groups, community-based organizations, and experts who are interested or actively involved in social and spatial justice.

ORAL HISTORY

This project seeks to honor, amplify, and preserve the voices, stories, and movements from all of those New Yorkers whose past and present organizing efforts have shaped the city and its history.

We are friends of The Shape of Cities to Come Institute (SCCI). SCCI invites organizers, activists, thinkers, cultural workers, writers, science nerds, and artists from across New York City's grassroots communities and movements to work collectively as peers on shaping our cities through the STUDY. PLAY. ACT program. SCCI peers exchange experiences and knowledge, collectively unpack urban processes, build capacity through narrative organizing, workshop issues, and nurture relationships with other committed folks. This journey culminates in projects in communities across the city that grow on the peers’ existing work and practices. The institute offers a stipend and resources to participate in public programs, study sessions, retreats, and collaborative initiatives. WANT TO LEARN MORE?

We listen to Politics In Motion, a new nonprofit anti-capitalist media platform that offers piercing insights and thought-provoking analyses on political, social, spatial, cultural, environmental, and economic issues through a range of engaging mediums, including YouTube streams, podcasts, and live events. Politics In Motion strives to educate, challenge, and motivate by pushing the very boundaries of critical discourse in pursuit of inspiring radical change, actively informing the growth and development of mass movements fighting for social and environmental justice. Its broadcast includes Anti-Capitalist Chronicles by Prof. David Harvey, Cities After by Miguel Robles-Duran, Cultural Counterpower by Laura Raicovich, and Mercados Populares by Ana Rodrigues. INTERESTED? FOLLOW THEM.

We support the Radical Housing Journal (RHJ), an open access, free online publication and collective that seeks to push the boundaries of how we think about housing, understanding it as a practice in the making, a space of contestation, and as a politics in and of itself. The RHJ accessible content comes from both academic and non-academic contributors, and their peer-review process also involves both scholars and self-defining housing activists. As a collective, they also promote a non-exploitative, anti-capitalist, ecologically oriented, antiracist, feminist, decolonial, and horizontal politics in their own structure and functioning. The RHJ wants to create a space that challenges the study of conditions and processes that render housing alienable, combining heterogeneous theoretical standpoints from across the world. DISSEMINATE YOUR RESEARCH AND WORK!