Questioning the ‘freedom of contract’

Contract disobedience and the tenant struggle in Barcelona

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8253259
AutoresMarta Ill-Raga (0000-0002-6933-1540, autor de correspondencia)
Año2024
Volumen56
Número1
Páginas83-107
Fecha de publicación2024-01-02
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaLegal Pluralism and Critical Social Analysis (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2770-6869 • E-ISSN: 2770-6877
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/27706869.2024.2310363
PMID38766529
OpenAlexW4391428149
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas8
Referencias citadas30

In the past decade, rental housing has emerged as a new field of financialization, highlighting the importance of rent to understanding contemporary urban dynamics. Despite rental markets expressing juridical relations, empirical research on the articulations between law and rent is absent in the existing literature. In light of critical legal approaches, the paper addresses this gap through an ethnographic exploration of conflictual residential rent relations in Barcelona. The paper argues that contracts are not only legal objects crucial for the existence and articulation of rent, but their constant opening and closing, enabled by property law, result in both judicial and invisible evictions, which increase tenant turnover, thus securing incremental rental-based streams. The contract disobedience strategy enacted by the tenant movement in Barcelona has exposed how contracts are tools of domination and poses a critique of the political and legal doctrine of the 'freedom of contract'. This mobilisation has simultaneously articulated a political demand for implementing rent controls, which are placed in a broader, gradually emerging legal countermovement to protect habitation that finds its epitome in parliamentary debates and legislative processes

Doctrine · Economics · Freedom of contract · Law and economics · Legislature · Political science · Politics · Property rights · Renting · Sociology · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Urban Planning and Governance