We are excited to share the news that our Mara Ferreri has been awarded a prestigious ERC Consolidator grant of nearly 2 million for her proposal: “Enacting Decommodified Housing in Southern Europe: crises, family relations, and the future of collective property”.
The project is transnational, transdisciplinary and multilingual. It acknowledges new demands and imaginaries emerging from housing movements and professionals in Southern Europe that challenge dominant speculative housing dynamics. An experienced research team will be created to generate situated knowledge from Southern Europe to urgent urban debates on housing decommodification as a transformative pathway for greater urban and housing justice.
This is what Mara had to say:
This achievement would not have been possible without the unwavering support of Michele Lancione, of all the great researchers and affiliated scholars at the Beyond Inhabitation Lab, of my colleagues in the editorial collective of the Radical Housing Journal, and at DIST in Turin, as well as all those near and far who have spared time and energy to give me feedback and advice over the last year and a half.
Mara is currently a senior researcher within our co-director Michele Lancione’s ERC “Inhabiting Radical Housing” and is due to commence her new project in the summer of 2025, running until 2030. According to Michele:
Mara is one of the leading housing scholars of her generation, and this important award is just another testament to the value of her scholarship, dedication and approach. In the last three years, core team scholars of the Lab have been awarded two Marie-Curies, one Urban Studies Foundation Fellowship, a FARE project from the Italian Ministry of Universities and now this ERC. We are proud of what we have done and extremely happy for Mara: a terrific achievement for a project that will have long-lasting impacts to our understanding of housing decommodification.
Below, you can read the abstract of Mara’s project.
Enacting Decommodified Housing in Southern Europe: crises, family relations, and the future of collective property
Faced with increased housing inequalities worldwide, calls are emerging for housing models that are resident-led and non-speculative. ‘Decommodified’ housing – such as co-operative rental and limited equity ownership – is seen as a pathway for a more caring and just urban future, in contrast to global crises of housing affordability in ‘homeowning cities’. Such housing models aim to transform economic, social, and political relations by challenging the role of housing in wealth inequalities, and by outlining paradigm changes in shared living and housing governance.
To date, international scholarship on decommodified models has focused on countries with strong housing welfare mechanisms, neglecting practices in ‘familistic’ housing regimes, such as Southern Europe. The EnactDECOM project will challenge the myth and academic paradigm of the cultural and economic inevitability of individual homeownership by learning from neglected innovations in housing enacted by historical and new (<10 years) decommodification movements in the region. It will break new ground conceptually, empirically, and methodologically in urban and housing scholarship by filling substantial research gaps on past and present housing decommodification in six key Southern European countries.
By pioneering a new interdisciplinary framework, the EnactDECOM project will examine how decommodified housing practices enact transformative responses to intersecting crises and established relations to property. It will generate novel knowledge on 1) neglected histories of decommodification at risk of disappearance; 2) place-specific responses to social, economic, and political crises; 3) changing family property relations, and 4) local and transnational cultural visions of collective property. The project will test the potential for decommodification in contexts marked by deepening wealth inequalities, familism and limited housing welfare, to advance global debates on enacting urban and housing equity.
