The financialization of housing and the resulting inequalities, expulsions and social contention are a central characteristic of today’s capitalist crisis. These two East European cities that fall outside the usual focus of urban movements research provide an illuminating case of similar structural conditions governed by different political constellations at the national and local scales.
This chapter investigates housing contention in Bucharest and Budapest in the period after the 2008 financial crisis. Our focus of attention is on the antagonisms and solidarities produced across different social positions within current mobilizations around housing. To account for the complexity of housing contention that we observe, we draw on the ‘field of contention’ notion, focusing sp…