PLAT + Beyond Inhabitation Lab together for a public event on radical housing in Bologna (3 Nov 2023)

“La casa: un incrocio di lotte” is a join initiative of PLAT (an autonomous Social Intervention Platform based in Bologna, Italy) and the Beyond Inhabitation Lab. With it, we want to discuss the political nature of the ‘house’ in its being a market good, with an exchange value, and in its being a fundamental component of human habitation, with its use value.

We are particularly interested in discussing how housing is, inevitably, a relational question, that is, a question of struggles that have to do with issues that run through, but are not reduced to, sheltering. How can we think about housing justice when it is inextricably linked to issues of gender, racialising processes, ecological and economic extractions? What struggle is needed to imagine a new emancipatory way of inhabiting the world, putting the home at the centre?

We propose here a reflection that interweaves the world of academia with that of social struggles, with a set of interventions that start from the question of housing on a global scale to focus on Italian struggles.

The meeting will take place from 2pm to 6pm on 3rd November, 2023, at PLAT in Bologna. All the logistics detail can be found on Facebook.

Program – In Italian

Prima sessione (14:30-16)
– Introduzione – PLAT
– La questione della casa nel mondo urbano globale – Michele Lancione (Beyond Inhabitation Lab)
– Questione abitativa e mobilitazioni sociali a Lisbona – Marco Allegra (ICS Lisbona – Sirigaita/Habita)
– Mercati e vissuti: la questione casa in Italia – Sarah Gainsforth (giornalista)

Seconda sessione (16:30-18)
– Introduzione – PLAT
– Dal conflitto urbano al cantiere sociale: percorsi di autorecupero, l’esperienza di Firenze – Dariuche – Dowlatchahi (architetto)
– Occupazioni e lotta abitativa a Roma – Margherita Grazioli (Gran Sasso Science Institute)
– Queering your home! Lavoro di cura e riproduzione sociale nelle s/famiglie queer – Lab. Smaschieramenti Bologna

Conclusioni
Apre la discussione: Maurizio Bergamaschi (UNIBO)

Beyond Inhabitation – 2023 Spring-Summer Events

Today, AbdouMaliq Simone and I are pleased to announce the Beyond Inhabitation Lab’s 2023 Spring-Summer Seminar Series, as well as my ERC Inhabiting Radical Housing project conference.

All events are free to attend in person in Turin, or online by registering at the links below, and all sessions will be recorded and made available on our website. For more details and the individual events’ posters, check our events page at: https://beyondinhabitation.org/events/

• The first seminar will occur on 13 April 2023, 5 p.m. CET, with Cristina Cielo’s presentation Cultivation, reproduction, and disputes for diverse commons. To attend online register at: https://polito-it.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMrcu-uqz0tEtdH3a60F7cizmIvQ1d-SiBz

• The ERC Inhabiting Radical Housing Conference will happen on 16 May 2023, 2 p.m. CET, with presentations from some of the Lab’s Core Team members, discussed by local and international experts. To attend online register at: https://polito-it.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYkduygpzkoE9LIc85_rb1Plzz3gQXMt_sh

• The second seminar will take place on 18 May 2023, 5 p.m. CET, with Erin McElroy’s Becoming and Unbecoming Silicon Valley: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times. To attend online register at: https://polito-it.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIqcemurjMiGNUhNWeD63_vYUejXohLDDpd

• In our third and final seminar, on 22 June, 5 p.m. CET, we will have Asha Best‘s Envisioning Just Urban Futures: Using Visual Methods to Trace Geographies of Policing. To attend online register at: https://polito-it.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwtceCorj4tH9MTacHma_COw6psr9sGv6FO

We look forward to having you join us!

Urban Life at the Extensions – Paris, 17-21 April – Lab event at ULIP

The Beyond Inhabitation Lab invites you to Paris, April 17-21 for a week of collective discussion and engagement on “Urban Life at the Extensions“.

The event, organised by our co-director AbdouMaliq Simone with Lab’s support, will be hosted at the University of London in Paris (ULIP). Dozens of speakers from all over the globe will be engaging in a conversation around urban studies, struggles for inhabitation, issues of homing and housing justice, conceptualisation of extended urbanisation and racial capitalism.

Attendance is free. Check the program at: https://www.london.ac.uk/institute-in-paris/research/research-seminars-and-series/urban-life-extensions

Picture credit: Miya Irawati

Launching the Winter 2023 Beyond Inhabitation Lab online Seminar Series

Today we are launching our Beyond Inhabitation Lab 2023 online Seminar series!

We are going to host three wonderful speakers:

  • 26 Jan 2023 with Tanzil Shafique on “The Myth of the Bottom-Up in Precarious Housing: Lessons from the Largest ‘Informal’ Settlement in Dhaka”
  • 23 Feb 2023 with Melissa García-Lamarca’s “Life and Struggle with Mortgage Debt: New Theorisations from Lived Experiences”
  • 16 March 2023 with Joanna Kusiak on “Law and Politics, or the Politics of Law”

All seminars will begin at 5 p.m. (CET) and will take place online.

For info and registration links: https://beyondinhabitation.org/beyond-inhabitation-lab-2023-winter-seminar-series/

 

 

Beyond Inhabitation Spring 2022 Seminars Series

Today at the Beyond Inhabitation Lab we are announcing our 2022 Spring Seminar Series! In our first set of interventions and collective conversations, we are very excited to host three distinguished scholars here in Turin, exploring how ideas of inhabitation are being reimagined through urban struggles in diverse geographies.


The first event will occur on 19/05, with Irene Peano’s presentation Thinking Through Radical Inhabitations in Italy’s Encampment Archipelago: Geographies, Genealogies and Militant Research. To attend online register at: https://polito-it.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcud-qtpjsrGdJYu3v0rTI4j0OYsu2P3tpp


The second event will take place on  30/06, with Alana Osbourne’s Decolonial Tours: Quilting Time for Living in a Fractured City. To attend online register at: https://polito-it.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYod-2uqTIqG9LuhvTXFWoVOGbrMYqLDWlj


In our third and final Spring session, on 14/07, we will have Wangui Kimari intervention, “We Are All Taxonomists”: Vernaculars of Geological Time From Southern Margins. To attend online register at: https://polito-it.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMkdeiprj0qGtVVyL_Jau2t2dgE_ZQmpUTM


All events will be at 4:30 p.m. (CET). Participants can attend online (registering at the above links) and in-person (DIST, Castello del Valentino, Torino). All sessions will be recorded and made available afterwards on our website.

Below you can find the Spring 2022 Seminar Series flier, while specific ones for each talk will be posted on this blog in due course. Looking forward to having you join us!

Spring seminar series Flyer

Launching “Beyond Inhabitation: A Collective Study Lab”

Today, after a year of preparation, we are launching our “Beyond Inhabitation: A Collective Study Lab” based at DIST in Turin, Italy.

This is our beautiful website: https://beyondinhabitation.org

Through the Lab, we aim to provide an infrastructure to investigate how inhabitation is re-worked from the ground across geographies in everyday life endurances that can morph, often silently, into struggles against contemporary and historical forms of dispossession. Activities will include collective study and writing; an international seminar series; extended working groups; and a program of activists and scholars in residence.

The Lab is co-directed by Michele Lancione and AbdouMaliq Simone, and its core team comprises nine Post-doctoral Research Fellows based in Turin. It also features an outstanding international Steering Committee, made up of 10 leading scholars of our time and a group of Turin Associates based at our hosting department (DIST).

Much work of love and joy has gone into preparing this Lab and its future activities. Please browse our website to know more about us, and follow us on Twitter to keep posted about our forthcoming events and opportunities. You can also subscribe to our blog to receive updates, here: https://beyondinhabitation.org/blog/

If you’d like to get in touch, please drop us a line at info@beyondinhabitation.org. We look forward to hearing from you.

Michele Lancione and AbdouMaliq Simone, for The Beyond Inhabitation Lab’s Team

The Lab is hosted at DIST, Polytechnic of Turin
Supported by ERC grant n. 851940 (PI: Lancione)