Poy, L and Rolf, H (Eds).
(2025)
Rent Strikes: A history of collective tenant actions across the world.
[Book].
WORK AROUND THE WORLD: STUDIES IN GLOBAL LABOUR HISTORY.
UCL Press: London, UK.
![[thumbnail of Rent-Strikes.pdf]](https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/style/images/fileicons/text.png) |
Text
Rent-Strikes.pdf Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 5 November 2025. Download (3MB) |
Abstract
Since the nineteenth century, working-class families have predominantly relied on tenements for housing, with rents often consuming a large portion of their household budgets. There is a long and contested history of tenants taking collective action across time and in many contexts, including their involvement in rent strikes, but international comparisons have been scarce. Rent Strikes: A history of collective tenant actions across the world is a collaborative effort by 16 contributors from diverse countries to identify common patterns and global trajectories in the rich history of tenants’ strikes, spanning a period of almost 120 years from the early twentieth century to the Covid-19 pandemic. It brings together local, national and comparative case studies to illustrate the history of tenant mobilisation for the general public, connecting with existing scholarship and laying the groundwork for future research. Adopting a transnational perspective, it examines episodes of tenant struggles in North and Latin America, Northern and Southern Europe, and Oceania. In doing so, the book explores a range of actions, including petitions, demonstrations, boycotts and legal actions, and has a special focus on the part played by women in these movements. The contributors examine the role of ethnic, national and gender differences between tenants and landlords, while situating their studies within a broader historical context and addressing the larger questions posed in the first chapter.
| Type: | Book |
|---|---|
| Title: | Rent Strikes: A history of collective tenant actions across the world |
| ISBN-13: | 9781800089822 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/111.9781800089822 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800089822 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Collection © Editors, 2025 Text © Contributors, 2025 licence. Details of the copyright ownership and permitted use of third-party material is given in the image (or extract) credit lines. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. If you would like to reuse any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright owner. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. This licence allows you to share and adapt the work for non-commercial use providing attribution is made to the author and publisher (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work) and any changes are indicated. Attribution should include the following information: Poy, L and Rolf, H. 2025. Rent Strikes: A history of collective tenant actions across the world. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800089822 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ |
| Keywords: | rent strikes, tenant organisation, rent control, collective action, housing activism |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10215940 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
