October 2023
Philosophy of the City. Brooklyn NY

In 2019, the Government of Canada recognized the right to adequate housing under the National Housing Strategy Act (NHSA). The conceptual framework of the right to housing, the funding opportunities through federal investments, and the new accountability mechanisms under the NHSA have generated new opportunities for community-led and non-profit organizations. Housing has become a key strategic issue around which to mobilize both funding and advocacy agendas in support across a diverse array of social services and supports. The housing journeys of criminalized women and gender-diverse people reveal some of the deepest forms of economic, social, and spatial marginalization. Through lived experience and empirical evidence, we know there is a correlation between the varying ways that housing insecurity is experienced by women and gender-diverse people and the pathways to their involvement with the criminal justice system. Both feminist and abolition frameworks reveal critical intersections between the prison industrial complex, the non-profit industrial complex, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the housing sector. In my work with a national non-profit organization who provide housing and housing-related supports to criminalized women and gender diverse people, I proposed the following question inspired by Dolores Hayden: “what would a rights-based strategy to intersectional feminist and abolitionist housing be like?” The question holds space for critical engagements with feminist planning and abolition geography as part of the work of finding solutions to the housing crisis and working towards spatial justice and a world without prisons. This paper elaborates on these theoretical frameworks and arguments in setting up the design of participatory counter-mapping and speculative co-creation workshops with administrators, staff, and people with lived experience to imagine more-than-adequate housing that better respond to the needs of criminalized women and gender-diverse people, and that fundamentally work towards dismantling the systems that create pathways to both homelessness and incarceration.