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Media release from “The Right to the City” housing justice group in Timisoara<\/strong><\/p>\n We have declined the award that we received in the essay competition hosted by the Beta Architecture Biennale, in order to draw attention to the fact that inviting developers, banks and real estate agencies as experts, and promoting workshops and guides where people are educated on \u201chow to buy\u201d a house (and engage in a lifelong debt), is very problematic. Beyond the paternalistic attitude, this is about the uncritical promotion of private homeownership \u2014 described as \u201cnatural\u201d in the Biennale exhibition \u2014 as a solution to the housing crisis. These issues are accompanied by the absence of any critique that would expose the violence through which property was and continues to be retroceded, through which city factories and other common goods were sold off for meager sums, amidst corruption scandals, in order to make way for real estate developments (some of which presented also at the biennial expo), and poor residents of large cities are evicted on a monthly basis in order to make way for urban development. Romania is a country of profound inequalities, a country where the population was and continues to be dispossessed and systematically impoverished, while banks and real estate developers make record profits – the biggest in Europe. These things are normalized exactly through this type of discourse, a discourse that seems objective, unsituated and neutral, but which conceals the violent processes of evictions and dispossession on the one hand and marginalizes current struggles for housing rights on the other. For the reasons above, we feel that accepting the Beta award would validate and perpetuate the silence around these issues, and hope that our refusal to accept it raises awareness with the organizers and the larger public around the urgency of exposing the real and most pressing issues around housing in Romania.<\/p>\n Dreptul la Ora\u0219 (Right to the City) is a member of the Blocul Pentru Locuire (Block for Housing)<\/a> federation, whose groups are also part of the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and to the City<\/a> – a European network of activist groups fighting for housing rights.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n