Ibid

researcher as the “housing privatization manifesto”, contains specific indications regarding reforms in Central European countries. Reading these indications gives an insight into the broader ideological assumptions underlying the entire report. We learn that in the former socialist and communist countries “the basis of housing policies [...] was the perception of housing as part of the public service sector rather than a productive sector of the economy,”9 which the authors see as the source of most of the problems plaguing this domain. A number of measures aimed at activating the economic potential of housing include, among others: reform of property rights, unlimited possibility of selling and exchanging apartments, raising rents in communal flats to the market level, limiting housing subsidies to the most needy households. In order to increase the supply of housing

→ Ruczaj Estate in Kraków, from the series Self-affirmation

9 S.K. Mayo, S. Angel, Housing. Enable markets to work, Washington: World Bank, 1993, p. 49. 10 Compare: L. Farha, When governments sell out to developers, housing is no longer a human right, The Guardian, 29.02.2020, https:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/ feb/29/governments-developers-housing-human-right (accessed: 15.03.2021). 11 R. Rolnik, op. cit. 12 J. Kusiak, Chaos Warszawa. Porządki przestrzenne polskiego kapitalizmu, Warszawa:

Fundacja Nowej Kultury Bęc Zmiana – Muzeum

Warszawy, 2017, p. 107. 13 Jolanta Brzeska was a tenants’ rights activist who fought against re-privatization. In March 2011 she was found dead in the woods in the vicinity of Warsaw. The circumstances of her death remain unclear. She soon became the symbol of Warsaw’s tenants movement. 14 S. Shields, “How the East Was Won: Transnational Social Forces and the Neoliberalisation of Poland’s Post-Communist Transition”, Global

Society 2008, vol. 22, p. 452. 15 More about this process in: K. Cupers, “Human

Territoriality and the Downfall of Public Housing”, Public Culture 2017, no. 29. 16 Compare: D. Jarosz, Mieszkanie się należy…

Studium z peerelowskich praktyk społecznych,

Warszawa: Oficyna Wydawnicza Aspra-JR, 2010, p. 101. 17 Compare: C. Jelinek, Uneven development, urban policy making and brokerage. Urban rehabilitation policies in Hungary since the 1970s, doctoral dissertation, Central European

University, Budapest 2017, pp. 61–62. 18 Compare: A.N. Dan, M. Dan, Housing Policy in

Romania in Transition: between State Withdrawal and Market Collapse, [in:] Globalization,

European Integration, and Social Development in European Postcommunist Societies, eds.

H. Rusu, B. Voicu, Sibiu: Psihomedia Publishing

House, 2003. 19 Compare: S.K. Mayo, S. Angel, op. cit., p. 128. in the private market, a gradual sell-out of public resources was proposed. It was also suggested that spatial and construction regulations should be “improved” and made dependent on economic conditions. The state was expected to withdraw from supporting the construction industry, and replace it with “making efforts to increase competition”.

This set of solutions was part of a broader political agenda to no longer view housing as merely “providing shelter” or merely as “part of social policy”. Housing as a “productive sector” was meant to increase the “efficiency of the entire economy”. Thus, the document does not mention housing as a human right, as a space necessary for physical and mental regeneration, ensuring a sense of security, enabling the fulfilment of human needs, creating and maintaining family ties and social bonds. From the specific goals set for the “productive” housing sector, it is clear that the wellbeing of individuals and social groups is subordinated to a wide range of economic indicators; only some of them contribute to its improvement, and not always in a direct way. Although the needs of tenants, here consistently referred to as consumers in accordance with the free market nomenclature, are described in detail, the report does not propose instruments that would help protect human rights in a situation where these needs are in conflict with the interests of financial institutions from the housing sector. The latter, on the other hand, are secured by a number of mechanisms.

We might say that in terms of “enabling the markets to work”, the report brought about tangible results. Undoubtedly, the “productive” potential of the housing sector has been mobilized, and not only in Central Europe. Real estate is now ranked among the most attractive investments. Its global value is three times higher than the sum of GDP of all countries in the world.10 Satisfying the needs of tenants, though, is not going so well. “Commodification of housing, together with the increased use of housing as an investment asset within a globalized financial market, has profoundly affected the enjoyment of the right to adequate housing around the world,” writes Raquel Rolnik.11

Neoliberalism commands violence

According to Joanna Kusiak, the limitations of this program were quickly revealed and subjected to critical evaluation even by experts working for the World Bank.12 So why did the Central European countries decide to implement housing policies that raised doubts from the very beginning? There were at least several reasons for this. Let us start with one of the most obvious and at the same time rather telling: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and many other international financial institutions made debt cancellation or granting new loans for development contingent on the implementation of the solutions they promoted. That is why the authors of the Romanian manifesto are calling today, among other things, that we “condemn and abandon the stabilization programs [...] imposed by large international organizations.”

Violence has accompanied the expansion of neoliberal doctrine since its inception, the most dramatic example of which is the coup d’état by General Augusto Pinochet in Chile in September 1973. The economic reforms implemented during his ruthless dictatorship became prototypes of solutions used later by Western governments, albeit the latter were elected in accordance with democratic procedures. There, too, economic changes were accompanied by violent social conflicts, and the Western authorities reacted by abusing the apparatus of violence, for example by suppressing strikes and breaking up the trade union movement. Yet another mechanism is the economic violence described above, which takes advantage of the unequal distribution of power between the state and international organizations within the global geopolitical system. Institutions such as the World Bank often resort to this kind of violence.

With the implementation of neoliberal reforms, individuals also experience various types of violence. Deprived of sufficient legal protection, tenants are condemned to living in precarious conditions, to abusive contractual provisions, sometimes even to physical violence. Intimidation or unlawful evictions – which we know, for example, from Polish re-privatization – seen from a broader perspective, also turn out to be a product of the functioning of this economic model. The murder of Jolanta Brzeska (ten years ago this March)13 can also be seen as a consequence of subordinating human life to the needs of ruthless profits and putting the right of private property above the right to decent housing.

Neoliberalism disguises itself well

Of course, neoliberalism is not only about violence, and exposing the mechanisms involved in its various forms is often a lengthy process. Both in Central Europe and in other parts of the world, free-market reforms were implemented with the support – often enthusiastic – from at least part of the population. This is partly because this doctrine, which we can define after Stuart Shields as the process of intensifying the commodification of social relations,14 is extremely effective in naturalizing its underlying ideological assumptions and transforming the accompanying norms and values into a widely shared, “common-sense” vision of reality. It is difficult to find an alternative to it, and it is shared by a wide spectrum of social groups, often against their most evident self-interest.

In the West, the ground for the introduction of pro-market, conservative policies had been prepared at least since the 1960s, when publications were gaining popularity that disavowed the idea of commons (like Garret Hardin’s famous Tragedy of Commons), or fostered the viewers’ belief that the pursuit of private property is embedded in human “nature” (like Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design by Oscar Newman). They were accompanied by TV productions documenting British council housing complexes, which have gone dilapidated during the crises of the 1970s. They suggested that a similar fate inevitably awaits all public space; therefore, privatization is the most effective way of managing it.15

It is worth looking at how neoliberal ideology worked its way in the countries of Central Europe. Before 1989, an ambitious housing policy was an essential element of the socialist political project. The authorities of most countries in the region built their legitimacy, among others, on the foundations of systematically implemented promise to provide housing for everyone, regardless of their profession, financial situation, or social standing. Considering the scale of destruction that the region experienced during World War II, and above all, the catastrophic condition of the economies and living conditions in these countries before the war, it would be hard not to appreciate the effects of this policy. The housing system in Central European countries was not without its drawbacks: flats were often built from the cheapest materials, their quality left a lot to be desired, the infrastructure accompanying the housing estates was built much more slowly than the residential buildings, so tenants sometimes had to wait for years until basic services would be provided in their area. The way the apartments were allocated was also controversial; nevertheless, during almost the entire socialist period in Central Europe, flats were built on a mass scale. In Poland, between 1971 and 1980, a total of about 2.5 million apartments were built, and in the record year of 1978, as many as 248,000 were put into service.16 In 1960, Hungary embarked on an ambitious “fifteen-year plan”. The plan was to build one million flats by 1975. It was implemented successively, and in the 1970s the number of new apartments was growing at a rate of more than one hundred thousand each year.17 In Romania, from the beginning of the 1970s, about one hundred and forty thousand apartments were built annually.18 Moreover, these countries tried to keep the costs of rent as low as possible. World Bank experts reported with dismay that on the threshold of transformation, rent in Hungary was only 3 per cent of household income.19