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Keynote in Geneva at the Swiss Collaboratory City Network

Today, Friday 23rd May 2025, I will take part in the Swiss Collaboratory City Network event at the University of Geneva. I will give a keynote entitled “The Colonies of Home“.

I would like to thank Armelle Choplin and Blaise Dupuis, the Urban Hub, and the organizing team in Geneva for having me.

The colonies of home 

What does it mean to be at ‘home’, when ‘home’ is the expression of structural forms of violence, at the intersection of anthropocentrism, patriarchy, heteronormativity and racial capitalism? As the COVID-19 pandemic showed, home can be read as a juncture where many of the inequalities of our time come and are held together structurally; yet, at the same time, home maintains an attractive lure to itself, as a place one is called to defend or to work toward, in order to be freed from subjections that seem to render home impossible in the first place. In this talk, my aim is to stay close to this only apparent contradiction, which I would like to name the “impossible possibility of home.” With this notion, I interpret the unjust and violent foundations of home not as opposite to, but as foundational to, its capacity to allude to one’s own betterment in terms of belonging, security, and care. This means to say that the lure of home as a space of belonging is emerging from the foundations of home itself, rather than being a means toward salvation from its violence. The impossible possibility of home lies in home’s capacity to sell a diagram of liberation as a line of flight, a breakthrough from its unjust underpinnings, while in immanent, lived, and felt terms, that diagram is a very powerful function of those. 

Keywords: Home, Homelessness, Expulsion, Extraction, Housing Justice

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Insurgent Ground: Land, Housing, Property

I am glad to be part of the open-access volume “Insurgent ground: land, housing, property” curated by the wonderful Ananya Roy, Terra Graziani & Annie Powers.

The book emerges from a Freedom School held at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy in Summer 2024. From the Institute’s website:

Organized as part of the project, Housing the Third Reconstruction, the convening brought together movement and university-based scholars actively engaged in insurgent research and critical theorization as a part of, or as accompaniment to, freedom movements. Intended as inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of emancipatory land and housing, Freedom School 2024 took up the following issues and questions: 1) What is the present historical conjuncture of global racial capitalism and the attendant political economy and ideology of land and real-estate?; 2) How are movements undertaking land struggle, dismantling police-property relations, and enacting housing and spatial justice?; 3) How do we learn from “beautiful experiments” (Hartman 2019) of reconstruction, rematriation, reparation, and decolonization that are or have been underway? In the wake of mass protest movements that reveal possible futures while failing to materialize their aspirations, how can collective liberatory work learn from its recent and distant pasts in order to realize the world we imagine?; and 4) What are the ontologies of radical relationality, including kinship, presence, solidarity, and community, that are being created to counter social death and state-organized abandonment?

Download: https://challengeinequality.luskin.ucla.edu/2025/05/05/insurgentground/

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Recording of Dr Mahmoud Hawari’s lecture in Turin on Palestine, Settler Colonialism and Archeology

The Beyond Inhabitation Lab recently hosted Dr Mahmoud Hawari on “Palestine: Settler Colonialism, Archeology, and the Appropriation of Cultural Heritage”.

The recording of his powerful lecture is now available on the Lab’s YouTube channel and below.

Check what we do at the Lab here: https://beyondinhabitation.org/blog/

The event was organised by Pietro Battaglini, Tamara Taher and me.

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Against the Re-Arm Europe – in Turin, 7th april, 9pm

Tomorrow night, Monday the 7th at 9 p.m., against European rearmament, we boycott the war. At the Casa del Popolo – Estella.

Info from the organisers:

Caricare, puntare, fuoco!

La corsa agli armamenti sembrava retaggio di un passato lontano, mai ci saremmo aspettati appelli al riarmo, meno ancora in un presente afflitto da conflitti in tutto il globo. Gaza, Ucraina, Yemen, Libano, centinaia di migliaia di vite spezzate che meriterebbero una politica di distensione, disarmo e solidarietà. Il generale Ursula, invece, gioca ai soldatini, coadiuvata dai colonnelli capi di stato, gli stessi che ieri ci chiedevano sacrifici – tagliando servizi essenziali, sanità pubblica, istruzione – ed oggi ipotecano miliardi di euro in pugnali e bombe a mano.

In casa nostra governo e opposizioni si danno al doppio gioco, mentre Giorgia Meloni si batteva per un “rivoluzionario” cambio di nome del piano di riarmo, le voci del centrosinistra parlavano di pace “che intorpidisce” e di “spirito combattivo” dell’Europa. Risultato: tutti d’accordo, alle armi!

A provocare queste guerre non è la pazzia di Trump o di Putin, ma un modello sociale che cerca nella guerra l’uscita dalla crisi irriversibile in cui versa da tempo. Lo sfruttamento normale dei tempi di pace non basta più, la competizione per il controllo delle aree strategiche e delle materie prime, spinge le potenze imperialiste a tentare di estendere il proprio dominio e di rilanciare le proprie economie attraverso le spese militari.

La propaganda di guerra è così pervasiva che non si limita ai grandi media, ma penetra fin dentro alle scuole e alle università. La carriera militare e la guerra come strumento di risoluzione delle controversie vengono costantemente sponsorizzate nelle scuole, mentre nelle università la ricerca è sempre più spesso dominata da collaborazioni con aziende e settori militari.

Non si tratta solo di opporsi al bellicismo, ma anche di iniziare ad immaginare insieme una risposta diversa ad un mondo perennemente in crisi.

Ne parliamo con:

– Matteo Saudino – insegnante e autore di Barbasophia

– Michele Lancione – professore ordinario Politecnico

Lunedì 7 Aprile alla Casa del popolo – Estella

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Tacit Alliances, Not Knowing Toghetherness – with A Simone on Lo Squaderno

The new issue of the powerful Lo Squaderno is out now. It focuses on Alliances and Urban Precarity and it has been curated by the wonderful friends and comrades Cristina Mattiucci and Marina Volpe.

With AbdouMaliq, we wrote a short piece entitled Tacit Alliances, Not Knowing Toghetherness.

You can download Lo Squaderno for free here: https://www.losquaderno.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/losquaderno70.pdf

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In Detroit for the #AAG2025

Today #AAG2025 kicks off with the two panels I co-organised with Libby Porter on urban justice.

Later in the day, Land and Property with Vera Smirnova, Jonathan McCombs & Erin McElroy – in anger for what happened to Ranjani Srinivasan (sign below)

Thursday, For a Lib Politics of Home book launch organised by Natalie Oswin

In support of Ranjani: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScFrO9Zy-vi4BjpJ8cqIPmmuxA7DnhNgCP8Rp7ndtL-M6ugRg/viewform

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McFarlane, Amin, Brickell, McElRoy and Saxena review For a Liberatory Politics of Home in Urban Studies

I am deeply thankful to Urban Studies (and Michele Acuto) for the review forum they organised around my For a Liberatory Politics of Home (Duke University Press).

The forum comprises interventions by Colin McFarlane, Ash Amin, Katherine Brickell, Erin McElroy, Saanchi Saxena, and my closing reflection.

Freely available at: https://www.urbanstudiesonline.com/review/book-review-forum-for-a-liberatory-politics-of-home/


Excerpts:

Colin McFarlane: “Michele Lancione’s For a Liberatory Politics of Home is a rare and remarkable piece of scholarship. It breaks new ground and will likely make a lasting impact in Geography and Urban Studies. It does what all great books do: inspires new kinds of thinking, and does so by mobilising a deceptively straightforward argument, the kind of argument that when you read it the topic in question seems to have shifted on its axis.”

Ash Amin: “I cannot think of another book that offers such a profound reformulation of home-lessness, and it does so with breathtaking mastery of critical theory, the political economy and biopolitics of capitalist dispossession and expulsion, and evidence from around the West of what the machinery of home and homelessness produces on the ground.”

Katherine Brickell: “For a Liberatory Politics of Home is a monograph which is extremely rare – to stunning effect Michele combines the conceptual, empirical, personal, practical, philosophical and political […] It turns homeless studies on their head by shattering the oppositional frames of home and homelessness and centring an anti-capitalist critique of housing. The feminist-routing of the book also weaves through its pages, including the author’s critical and self-reflexive discussions of his own place in geography, and indeed academia more broadly.”

Erin McElroy: “[T]here is something hauntological about the way in which housing gets troubled throughout the book, for instance in Lancione’s exploration of the extractive spectres of Italian Catholic patriarchal fascism which creep into Italy’s housing present. […] It is not ‘the housing question’ as much as ‘the question of housing’ that he argues we need to further interrogate. […] What does it mean then, to move beyond inhabitation, or to radically inhabit housing? Attempting to guide readers in exploring this question, Lancione opens up space to theorise a housing future yet to come.”

Saanchi Saxena: “[A] brilliant, thought-provoking contribution to the fields of urban studies and critical geography. Where the book shines is in its proposal of a radical epistemology that breaks the dichotomy of home and homelessness, reads those occupying the sites of homelessness as performing their own politics of inhabitation, advocates for a structural overhaul of the way we think of housing and housing interventions, and on a broader scale, prompts us to rethink our understanding of urban inhabitation.”

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A review of For a Liberatory Politics of Home in Antipode, by Samantha Thompson

I am grateful to Samantha Thompson for her insightful review of my book For a Liberatory Politics of Home (Duke, 2023) out now in Antipode.

In closing her review, Samantha writes:

“For a Liberatory Politics of Home illuminates the necessity of intimate and collective thinking when writing about housing in order to reckon with the violence of housing systems and imagining, and fighting for, radical and just housing futures. The book itself embodies this approach: throughout each chapter, Lancione engages intentionally and deeply with those he is thinking with, enacting collectivity in citational practice. For a Liberatory Politics of Home offers gentle guidance and care as we wrestle with questions that are difficult and can cause us to wonder if the housing futures that we dream of are indeed possible. I suspect that for me and many others, this monograph will become a consistent bookshelf companion that we return to time and time again.”

You can read the full piece here: https://antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Book-review_Thompson-on-Lancione.pdf

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Aru, Governa, Grazioli and Mezzadra review For a Liberatory Politics of Home (in Italian)

I am thankful to my dear friend and colleague Silvia Aru for organising a forum on my For a Liberatory Politics of Home (Duke, 2023) on the Rivista Geografica Italiana.

The forum, published last December, includes essays on my book by Silvia, Margherita Grazioli, Francesca Governa and Sandro Mezzadra. It is freely available in Italian, here: https://journals.francoangeli.it/index.php/rgioa/article/view/18974/3101

The forum developed from a public seminar we held at the Beyond Inhabitation Lab in May 2024, where all reviewers were present and engaged in debate around the book.

Thanks also to the Rivista for allowing the publication of these essays and my response.