August 2024
International Geographical Congress. Dublin.

The housing journeys of criminalized women and gender-diverse people reveal some of the deepest forms of economic, social, and spatial marginalization. For many, their home is a site of personal, systemic, and intergenerational trauma. The lack of access to safe, affordable, appropriate housing is a significant contributing factor to women and gender-diverse people getting caught in the “revolving door” of homelessness and incarceration. This paper reflects on our experiences of co-designing aseries of housing journeys workshops with community co-researchers to share stories of housing insecurity, gender, and criminalization. The recognition of the right to adequate housing by the Government of Canada in the National Housing Strategy Act is a critical moment for reframing housing as more than an asset or service to be provided. It asserts housing as fundamental to our individual and collective wellbeing. And yet, the confirmation of a legal right to housing and the evidence-based policy directions being offered have limited transformative value when rooted in the legal, political, and social systems that perpetuate social and spatial injustice. Our workshops combine community engagement methods using storytelling, counter-mapping, and speculative design that were selected for the ways they make space for exploring complex socio-political contexts, interpersonal relationships, emotions, and experiences. The co-creation, collection, and analysis of these housing journeys will inform collective speculative designs of community-led and care-based housing to better meet the needs of criminalized women and gender-diverse people, and that offer transformative housing justice practices to disrupt cycles and systems of criminalization and homelessness.