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Results of the ERC Inhabiting Radical Housing (2020-2025)

My Inhabiting Radical Housing ERC project has come to an end. I was awarded the grant at the University of Sheffield – thanks also to the terrific support received at the Urban Institute, to which I am deeply thankful – in late 2019. In early 2020, a sudden major family event brought me to relocate at the Polytechnic of Turin, where the project officially ended on the 31st August 2025.

These past five years have been intense. While the relocation to Italy was beneficial for my extended family, it meant constant travel to the UK, where my partner lives, and a profound relearning of the administrative and cultural foundations of academic work. At the same time, working with my ERC research team has been rewarding both personally and professionally.

I believe we collectively brought to the fore a number of important contributions to the fields of urban and housing justice. All of this has unfolded against a backdrop of increased global uncertainty and structural border violence, which have deeply affected our collective work (I discuss this below). We have also taken part in and learnt from a renewed political mobilisation within and beyond academia — not least around its intersections with the military sector and its complicity in the ongoing genocidal project of the State of Israel in Palestine. Albeit not formally part of the project, these and other extended political commitments have been central to the way we operated individually and collectively in these years, and have informed our approach to the theme of ‘inhabiting radical housing’.

A full list of the published works coming out of the project is available on this page, and at the end of this blog post. Before turning to that, I would like to recall how we worked through the project’s objectives and what I consider to be some important achievements in that sense.

Project Team and Objectives

The project aimed to explore how housing and inhabitation struggles intersect with—and co-constitute—broader struggles against class, race, and gender injustice globally. Central to this aim was implementing a housing justice research approach based on three tenets: a decolonial and intersectional take on theory, ethnography oriented at situated engagement, and a committed approach to knowledge exchange.

The project Team members included: Dr Chiara Cacciotti, Dr Rodrigo Castriota, Dr Mara Ferreri; Dr Daniela Morpurgo; Dr Oluwafemi Olajide; Dr Veda Popovici, Dr Rayna Rusenko; Dr Ana Vilenica; and Dr Devra Waldman.

Each one of the Team member was supported in the development of their own project within the wider framework of the ERC programme of work. I believe that in this way, each Team member was able to pursue their own intellectual agendas, which ultimately contributed to the collective project’s outcomes.

This wonderful Team met and in several respects exceeded the project’s aims. Its five objectives were all achieved and produced substantive scholarly and practical outputs, which I am here briefly summarising, per objective:

1. Intersectional history: Researchers carried out a foundational, intersectional analysis of the historical lineages of housing injustice (focusing on class, gender, race and coloniality). Although this objective had no standalone deliverable, its findings underpinned all other work and inform our forthcoming edited volume Housing Justice. Situating Structures, Struggles and Politics (Manchester University Press).

2. Structures and politics of activist networks: Work by Ana Vilenica, Rayna Rusenko, Veda Popovici and Oluwafemi Olajide engaged with organising forms and politics across regions. Vilenica analysed tenants’ organising and internationalism across the Americas (Antipode; Radical Housing Journal conversations); Rusenko produced influential work on the coloniality of home/homelessness in Asia (Antipode; edited book on Malaysia); Popovici analysed European networks (outputs feeding collective research); Olajide’s Lagos work was curtailed by career changes but was important in informing team reflection.

3. Radical inhabitation practices: City-level ethnographies and case studies were completed by Rodrigo Castriota (popular economies and housing in Belo Horizonte, IJURR), Daniela Morpurgo (housing and sex work in three Italian cities, EPD, IJURR), Daniela Cacciotti (afterlife of eviction in Rome, IJURR), Devra Waldman (planning and housing in Delhi’s urban extension, PiHG), Mara Ferreri (decommodification of housing and grassroots housing action in Barcelona, EPD) and myself (homelessness policy and working-class housing struggles in Naples). Despite COVID-19 and border-instability limiting some international cases, these studies produced monographs, IJURR and other journal articles, policy-facing interventions and—in Ferreri’s case—contributed to a successful ERC Consolidator application.

4. Trans‑local knowledge exchange: The Beyond Inhabitation Lab and a programme of summer schools (Turin, Lisbon), workshops (Paris, Sheffield), seminars and conference panels established strong global exchange between scholars and a wider community of interest. See next section for details.

5. A new theoretical agenda: The project advanced conceptual thinking on ‘home’, ‘homelessness’ and housing through single‑author publications by team members, the edited collection, and my solo monograph For a Liberatory Politics of Home and a forthcoming co‑authored monograph with AbdouMaliq Simone, Beyond Inhabitation. Housing and Desire at the Edge (both with Duke University Press). These works set out interdisciplinary conceptual grammars for radical dwelling and housing justice.

Overall, the project delivered substantial empirical, theoretical and public‑facing outputs, strengthened international networks, and positioned new research agendas that link scholarship with activist and policy engagement.

Further extensions and engagements

There are at least five areas where the Team delivered substantial results beyond the project’s objectives.

Beyond Inhabitation Lab
The Lab was co-founded and it is co-direct by AbdouMaliq Simone and myself. It has facilitated extended international connections, events, and knowledge exchange. It also contributed to offer connections and opportunities to the ERC research Team. Albeit its activities and establishment were made possible by the ERC Radical Housing project, the Lab will continue its work beyond the project, providing an enduring legacy for its scholarship and approach. We are now in a phase in which we are going to restructure and retune the Lab’s mission – stay tuned by following us on our website: https://beyondinhabitation.org/

Academic knowledge exchange
Through the Lab, we have organised a high number of exciting international events in the past years. These included two intensive summer programs (in Turin and Lisbon, in partnership with the Urban Transitions Hub, with keynotes by Gilmore, Thieme, Osbourne, De Boeck, Alves and Simone), an extended collaborative workshop involving activists and academics (in Paris, conducted with ULIP), a concentrated two-day academic workshop (in Sheffield, in collaboration with the Urban Institute), and 25 lectures delivered by distinguished international scholars at the Lab, both in Turin and via digital platforms. All of these events are listed on the Lab’s website (here) and most of the international seminars have been recorded and are freely available on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@beyondinhabitationlab762/videos

Grassroots praxis
Each one of the researchers working as part of Inhabiting Radical Housing has pursued research work in a situated, politically oriented way. Many of the researchers have also been involved in direct actions and forms of housing justice organising, at various degrees and level according to their own context and intent. Beyond the concrete participation in political struggles and organising for housing justice, these grounded approaches also generated considerable knowledge production. Examples include the co-production and circulation or grassroots praxis (demonstrated through Vilenica’s extensive conversations with housing justice movements published in the Radical Housing Journal), active participation in public discourse around housing justice (reflected in Cacciotti’s scholarship on squatting practices in Rome and Ferreri’s work on housing regime transformations), direct participation in grassroots knowledge production (Popovici on European housing justice movements and Morpurgo on sex-workers activism in Italy) as well as co-produced popular working class histories of housing struggles (my own forthcoming work in Naples with the community of ex-Taverna del Ferro).

Policy involvement
Within the ERC program of work, I was able to establish a formal partnership between the Municipality of Naples and the Polytechnic of Turin, through which I have contributed to the design and development of an original housing-led policy for homeless people in the Municipality of Naples. The policy aims to provide 13 newly established group apartments and personalised emancipatory plans for selected homeless individuals during an initial two-year experimental period starting in the fall of 2025. It is based on the principle of harm reduction, non-medicalisation, and emancipatory approaches to the lived experience of homelessness. One of the group apartments will be specifically dedicated to people in gender transition facing precarious housing conditions. In my work, I have been providing written feedback on internal documentation, participating in local policy meetings, and offering ongoing guidance for policy implementation. I have also offered training to a considerable number of social workers and local organisations working with homelessness in Naples, on the operative principles underpinning the program of work.

Grant capture and further projects
My goal has been to use the project and the Lab as a space to nurture researchers in pursuing their ideas, also through further funding opportunities. The results of such an approach speak for themselves. During the project years:

  • I secured a four-year Italian Ministry of Universities project on “Precarious Housing in Eastern Europe” (€250,000), which expanded the geographical scope of the ERC project and included a further member of staff (Dr Chiara Iacovone);
  • Dr Daniela Giudici successfully obtained a Marie Curie Global Fellowship (three years, €280,000);
  • Dr Melissa García-Lamarca successfully obtained a Marie Curie European Fellowship (two years, €188,000);
  • Dr Syeda Jenifa Zahan, who successfully obtained an Urban Studies Foundation Fellowship (a three-year, £150,000 international fellowship);
  • One of the ERC project’s fellows, Dr Mara Ferreri, successfully won an ERC Consolidator Grant (€2 million over five years).

Through these activities, the ERC project has enabled many researchers to develop their careers and continues to do so, consolidating the work established through it at the Beyond Inhabitation Lab in Turin.

A note on the challenges we faced

The DIST Department has provided excellent administrative support to the PI, particularly in relation to the project setup and accounting. I am especially thankful to the Chief Administrator of the Department, Dr. Stefania Guarini, who was always available to help with the challenges associated with the deliverables of this large program of work.

However, the Polytechnic University of Turin did not offer adequate support for the issues that non-European researchers faced concerning visas, residence permits, and international travel. The complex, erratic, and racist Italian and European bureaucracy on these matters has made the lives of my researchers extremely challenging. The difficulty in obtaining the correct documentation for international travel—and for residency in Italy—not only slowed down the project but also caused profound psychological stress and trauma to the researchers and me. The Polytechnic University of Turin was often unable to help or did not provide effective assistance. The ERC should require host institutions to offer effective support to international researchers, or the global ambition of the program cannot materialize in practice. The challenges have been documented, and the Polytechnic – as well as the ERC – have been informed.

Published works (directly related to the ERC program of work)

All our published works can be obtained by writing to each of the authors, or by accessing the Polytechnic of Turin public repository: https://iris.polito.it/

Monographs

Lancione, M. and Simone, A. (Contracted, Forthcoming) Beyond Inhabitation. Housing and Ordinary Desire at the Edge. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Lancione, M. (2023) For a Liberatory Politics of Home. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (read the blur here)

Edited books

Lancione, M. (ed.) (Contracted, Forthcoming) Housing Justice. Situating Structures, Struggles and Politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Papers

Cacciotti, C. (under review). Learning through unhoming. Extended squatting time and agentic homemaking after squatting in Rome. City & Society.

Cacciotti, C. (2024) ‘Inhabiting Liminality: The Temporal, Spatial and Experiential Assemblage of Emancipatory Practices in the Lives of Housing Squatters in Rome, Italy’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 48(1).

Cacciotti, C. (2023) ‘Abitare liminale permanente. Pratiche di lotta e negoziazione quotidiana degli spazi in un’occupazione abitativa romana’, Antropologia Pubblica, 9(2).

Cacciotti, C. (2023) ‘Racializing the concept of ‘housing otherness’: The effects of temporary housing policies on squatters in Rome’, Radical Housing Journal, 5(1).

Castriota, R. (2024) ‘Housing Beyond the Metropolis: Inhabiting Extractivism and Extensions in Urban Amazonia’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 46(1): 32–53.

Ferreri, M. (Under review) ‘Housing decommodification as remaking the territory-property nexus’, EPD: Society & Space.

Lancione, M. (In submission) ‘Unfulfilled relations and public housing in San Giovanni, Naples’, EPD: Society & Space.

Lancione, M. and Simone, A. (2025) ‘Dispossessed exposures. Housing and regimes of the visible’, EPD: Society & Space, 41(1): 70–89.

Lancione, M. (2023) ‘Radical Housing Justice Within and Beyond Caring’, Antipode, 56(3): 841–846.

Lancione, M. (2022) ‘Inhabiting Dispossession in the Post-Socialist City: Race, Class, and the Plan, in Bucharest, Romania’, Antipode, 54(4): 1141–1165.

Morpurgo, D. (forthcoming) ‘The impossibility of home: Conceptualizing home a-making through the lens of sex work in Italy’, EPD: Society and Space.

Morpurgo, D. (forthcoming) ‘Reading housing as an urban infrastructure patterning the ‘whore stigma’’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

Morpurgo, D. (2024) ‘Il lavoro sessuale è di casa, spunti di ricerca tra geografie dell’abitare e prostituzione’, Rivista Geografica Italiana, 3(3): 5–30.

Vilenica, A. (2025) ‘Cross‐Movement Radical Housing Alliances in Argentina: For a Feminist Grammar of Tenant Organising’, Antipode, ahead of print.

Vilenica, A. (2025) ‘From Anti-Socialist Urbanism to Fostering Paths for Insurgent Global Urban Futures: Thinking from the (Post-)Yugoslav Perspective’, Eurasian Geography and Economics, June 8, 1–9.

Waldman, D., Lancione, M. and Iacovone, C. (Under review) ‘From Housing Studies to Geographies of Housing Justice’, Progress in Human Geography.

Chapters in books

Cacciotti, C. (forthcoming) ‘Evicting people, redistributing agency. The aftermath of the ‘housing political’ learned inside Roman organized squats’, in Lancione, M. (ed.) Housing Justice: Situating Structures, Struggles and Politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Cacciotti, C. (forthcoming). The afterlife of sgomberi in Rome. Political and affective frameworks of evictability in the lives of former and current squatters. In Clough Marinaro, I. & Haynes, W. (eds). Living Rome. London: Lever Press.

Cacciotti, C. (under revision). Unhoming and Becoming. Squatting’s Afterlives and the Making of Agency in Rome. In Alves de Matos, P. & Pusceddu, A.M. (eds). How do we become agents: towards an anthropology of distributed agency. London: Pluto Press.

Cacciotti, C., and Grazioli, M. (under revision). All Roads Lead to Rome: Navigating Activist and Academic Pathways through ‘Live-Along Methodologies’ in Self-Organized Spaces. In Clough Marinaro, I. & Wilcox, V. (eds). Routledge Handbook of Rome Since 1870. London: Routledge.

Castriota, (forthcoming) ‘Putting Home to Work in Belo Horizonte: Towards the Study of Housing and Popular Economies’, in Lancione, M. (ed.) Housing Justice: Situating Structures, Struggles and Politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Ferreri, M. (forthcoming) ‘Commoning housing futures: transforming intergenerational property transmission as a site for housing justice’, in Lancione, M. (ed.) Housing Justice: Situating Structures, Struggles and Politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Ferreri, M. (forthcoming) ‘Cens vitalici com a eina per desmercantilitzar les propietats individuals cap a una cooperativa dispersa (En. Life annuity as a tool for decommodifying individual property towards diffused cooperatives)’, in Sòl i habitatge: camins cap a la desmercantilització i cooperativització. Barcelona: Fundació La Dinamo.

Ferreri, M. (forthcoming) ‘Collective and self-managed property from anti-racist struggles: historical and contemporary insights in Europe’, in Emanuelli, S. and Rendón, G. (eds) De Gruyter Handbook of Housing Justice. Berlin: Germany.

Ferreri, M. and Vidal, L. (forthcoming) ‘Evolving policy communities for public-cooperative housing commons in new municipalist Barcelona’, in Russell, B. and Bianchi, I. (eds) Radical Municipalism: The Politics of the Common and the Democratization of Public Services. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

Lancione, M. (forthcoming), ‘Habitation’, in Hamlin, M. and Delclós, C. (ed.) Housing Justice: A Lexicon for Building Solidarity, London: Pluto.

Lancione, M. (forthcoming), ‘The colonies of home’, in Stratford, E. and Walsh, K. (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Home, London: Routledge.

Morpurgo, D. (forthcoming) ‘Housing stigma: Looking at inhabitation through the prism of sex work in Italy’, in Lancione, M. (ed.) Housing Justice: Situating Structures, Struggles and Politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Rusenko, R. (forthcoming) ‘The coloniality of state responses to homelessness: Racialized systems of enclosure and confinement in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 1880s to present’, in Lancione, M. (ed.) Housing Justice: Situating Structures, Struggles and Politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Vilenica, A. (forthcoming) ‘An autonomous tenant power internationalism for our time: Learning from the Los Angeles Tenants Union and Autonomous Tenant Union Network’, in Lancione, M. (ed.) Housing Justice: Situating Structures, Struggles and Politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Waldman, D. (forthcoming) ‘Inhabiting extensions and housing as extensions: housing and city building and Noida, India’, in Lancione, M. (ed.) Housing Justice: Situating Structures, Struggles and Politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Non peer-reviewed publications (partial list)

06000 Plataforma Vecinal y Observatorio del Centro Histórico and Vilenica, A. (2024) ‘Not One Neighbour Less: Temporalities of Tenants Organising in Mexico City’, Radical Housing Journal, 6(1): 153–60.

Alcocer, K., Vilchis, L. and Vilenica, A. (2023) ‘From the Politics of What’s Possible to the Politics of What We Want’, Radical Housing Journal, 5(1): 197–209.

Calvo, S. and Vilenica, A. (2024) ‘Dialogical Devices and Political Possibilities of Art: Occupy, Inhabit, Resist’, Radical Housing Journal, 6(1): 161–75.

Escudero, M. and Vilenica, A. (2023) ‘A Fighting Time and a Dreaming Time: Struggle for Right to Remain in LA’, Radical Housing Journal, 5(1): 185–96.

Flower Drive Tenants Association, Vilenica, A. and Albright, K. (2023) ‘Here to Stay: Building a Tenant Association Against Displacement’, Radical Housing Journal, 5(1): 211–22.

Galindo, R., Vilenica, A. and Montes De Oca Quiroz, P. (2023) ‘From Quiet Life to Political Activism: Memories of Tenants Rebellions in Mexico’, Radical Housing Journal, 5(1): 243–50.

Gaytan Santiago, P., Vilenica, A. and Montes De Oca Quiroz, P. (2023) ‘Against Whitening by Dispossession: A History and the Present of Tenants Rebellion in Mexico’, Radical Housing Journal, 5(1): 231–42.

Gray-Garcia, L. T. and Lancione, M. (2025) ‘A conversation around Lisa Tiny’s “WeSearch, Reparations and RiSearch”’, in Roy, A., Graziani, T. and Powers, A. (eds) Insurgent Ground: Land, Housing, Property. Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, Los Angeles.

Henry, I. and Vilenica, A. (2024) ‘Organising Enclaves under Black and Brown Leadership in New York City: Imani Henry of Equality for Flatbush (E4F) in Conversation with Ana Vilenica’, Radical Housing Journal, 6(1): 177–84.

Lancione, M. and Simone, A. (2025) ‘Tacit Alliances, Not Knowing Togetherness’, Lo Squaderno, 70.

Lancione, M. (2021) ‘Il Corpo e l’uso Politico Della Metafora Geografica’, Rivista Geografica Italiana, 4: 172–79.

Muñoz, G. (Inquilinos Agrupados), Vilenica, A. and Quiroz, M. (2024) ‘Dismantling Rentier Logic: Tenants Struggles in Argentina’, Radical Housing Journal, 6(1): 125–37.

Ortiz, E., Emanuelli, M. S. and Vilenica, A. (2024) ‘Tracing a Long History of the Habitat International Coalition and the Social Production of Habitat’, Radical Housing Journal, 6(1): 139–51.

Representatives of the Otomí community in Mexico City, Vilenica, A. and Guerra Arjona, F. (2023) ‘“This House Belongs to Everyone”: Otomí Community Occupation of the National Indigenous Peoples’ Institute (INPI) in Mexico City as a Struggle for Dignified Housing and the Right to the City’, Radical Housing Journal, 5(1): 251–63.

Roman, T., Quintanilla, B. and Vilenica, A. (2023) ‘Food Distribution as Solidarity and as a Tool for Building Tenant Power in Los Angeles’, Radical Housing Journal, 5(1): 265–70.

Further published works (whose writing was supported by the ERC – Partial list)

Alexandrescu, F., Powell, R. and Vilenica, A. (eds) (2025) Urban Marginality, Racialisation, Interdependence: Lessons from Eastern Europe. Routledge.

Amin, A. and Lancione, M. (eds) (2022) Grammars of the Urban Ground. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Cacciotti, C. (2024) Qui è tutto abitato. L’occupazione romana di Santa Croce/Spin Time Labs come esperienza abitativa liminale. Verona: Ombre Corte.

Castriota, R. (2024) ‘“Here, vale is the State”: neoextractivism and authoritarianism in the city, the countryside and the forest in the region of Carajás’, RBEUR (Brazilian Review of Urban and Regional Studies), 26(1): 1–30.

Castriota, R. (2023) ‘Preserve to extract, scam and dispossess: operational environmentalism and units of conservation in Carajás’ [In Portuguese], Revista Geografias, 18(2): 21–43.

Ferreri, M. (2025) ‘Non-linear feminist politics of/for social and spatial justice research’, Area.

Ferreri, M. (2024) ‘Housing Movements, Commons and ‘Precarious Institutionalization’’, Housing, Theory and Society.

Ferreri, M., Garcia-Lamarca, M. and Obra Social Barcelona (2023) ‘Radical methodological openness and methods as politics: reflections on militant research on squatting in Catalonia’, Antipode, 56(2): 469–491.

Ferreri, M. (2023) ‘Radical difference in ‘transitional commoning’: hidden histories of London’s squats to co-ops’, City, 27(3-4): 360-376.

Fernández Arrigoitia, M., Ferreri, M., Hudson, J., Scanlon, K. and West, K. (2023) ‘Toward a feminist housing commons? Conceptualising care – (as) – work in collaborative housing’, Housing Theory and Society, 40(5): 660-678.

Ferreri, M. (2024) ‘Housing struggles: dwelling in crisis economies’, in Hall, S. M. and Johns, J. (eds) Contemporary Economic Geographies. Bristol: Bristol University Press, pp. 275-288.

Ferreri, M. (2023) ‘Ethics’, in Lees, L. and Demeritt, D. (eds) Concise Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 140-144.

Lancione, M. (2025) ‘Post-socialist racial geographies studies’, in Alexandrescu, F., Powell, R. and Vilenica, A. (eds) Urban Marginality, Racialisation, Interdependence: Lessons from Eastern Europe. London: Routledge.

Morpurgo, D. (2023) ‘Problematising use conformity in spatial regulation: Religious diversity and mosques out of place in Northeast Italy’, Planning Theory, 22(2).

Popovici, V. (2023) ‘disavowal/ an accountable practice for delinking’, in Vilenica, A. (ed.) Decoloniality in Eastern Europe. A lexicon of reorientation. Novi Sad: New Media Center, Kuda.org.

Popovici, V. (2023) ‘The Ethics of Solidarity and Representing Evictions. A guide for the ethical representation of evictions’, in Ugron, N. (ed.) Handbook of Resistance Tactics Against Evictions. Collection of Tactics from Housing Justice and Anti-racist Movements in Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Germany, Portugal and Spain. Cluj Napoca: Desire Press.

Pražić, I. and Vilenica, A. (2023) ‘Gadji Feminism(s) in Serbia: Racial Privilege and ‘Intersectional’ Solidarity in an Eastern European Semiperiphery’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 44(2): 70–97.

Rusenko, R. (2024) ‘The Vagrancy Concept, Border Control, and Legal Architectures of Human In/Security’, Antipode, 56(2): 628–650.

Simone, A., Somda, D., Torino, G., Irawati, M., R., N., Bathla, N., Castriota, R., Vegliò, S. and Chandra, T. (2023) ‘Inhabiting the Extensions’, Dialogues in Human Geography.

Vilenica, A. and Vladimir, M. (2025) ‘Urbanisation of Racial Capitalism in Serbia: Transition, Racialisation, Evictions’, in Alexandrescu, F., Powell, R. and Vilenica, A. (eds) Urban Marginality, Racialisation, Interdependence: Lessons from Eastern Europe. Routledge.

Waldman, D. and Ghertner, D. A. (2023) ‘The enclaved body: Crises of personhood and the embodied geographies of urban gating’, Progress in Human Geography, 47(2): 280-297.

Waldman, D., Dao, M., Ceron-Anaya, H. and Giardina, M. D. (2023) ‘Ethnographic vulnerabilities: Power, politics, and possibility’, in Clift, B., Batile, I., Bekker, S. and Chudzikowski, K. (eds) Qualitative Researcher Vulnerability: Negotiating, experiencing, embracing. Routledge.

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Mara Ferreri, a core Lab member, wins ERC Consolidator Grant

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.

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Report from our ERC Inhabiting Radical Housing half-day conference + Video

On may 16th, 2023, members of the ERC Project Inhabiting Radical Housing (grant n. 851940, PI: Lancione) presented preliminary findings from research work conducted over the last 18 months. Marking the halfway point in this grant, this was an opportunity for us to share our progress thus far and where we are headed in the future. The event featured a range of interventions on the intersections of home and housing beyond typical conceptualizations of shelter, featuring a rich discussion across a variety of geographies and methodologies. In this blog post we recollect each contribution, while at the end we provide also the full video of the event. The conference was opened by a thoughtful introduction provided by Francesca Governa, where she situated this ERC-funded project within the broader institutional and disciplinary context in which we operate. She endorses the IRH as a project that goes beyond problem-solving approach of applied research, highlighting the fact that this project is one out of only two ERCs in Geography within the Italian context, and furthers an ethos of research based on critical and radical stances beyond a technocratic approach. By looking at the ‘minor’, this project focuses on emergent practices to open up spaces, showing the possibilities to go beyond given understandings of dwelling, attuning and searching for ways to politicizing the future. Following, the PI, Michele Lancione, provided an overview of the ERC-project, the collective goal to reframe the epistemologies of the ‘housing question’ beyond policy, the ambitions of the team to investigate the ways housing struggles articulate with other fights against class/race/gender inequalities, the collective study practices conducted through the Beyond Inhabitation Lab. Housing is then understood as a terrain of contestation and its related struggles allow for people to articulate other intersecting struggles. The first research intervention came from Mara Ferreri, where she invited us to rethink housing policy by asking how housing movements create infrastructures for decommodifcation, respond to deep-rooted mechanisms of dispossession, how they re-imagine inhabitation through and beyond emergent forms of resistance and policies. Providing reflections based on long-term situated research in Catalonia, and incipient research in Piedmont, she urges us to see these radical practices and emergence of new housing models as ‘making kin’, extending notions of commoning, and pushing the notion of policy beyond the containers of the state and the market. Next, came two thoughtful and reflexive presentations from Ana Vilenica and Veda Popovici on practices and politics of translocal organizing of housing movements. Focusing on the Americas, and reflecting on her experience as an activist and ongoing work with Tenant International in New York, Los Angeles, and Mexico City, Ana provided a wonderful discussion on the possibilities of research as organizing, ways to use conversations between organizers and intellectuals to enrich cross-border solidarities. This was followed by Veda, who situated her experience as an activist in the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and to the City and ongoing research within this organization to ask how transnational housing activist networks might assemble a transnational political consciousness. Particularly, she argued that the European Action Coalition provides space for witnessing struggles from other contexts in a rapport of both ‘otherness’ and ‘sameness’, consolidating subjectivities anchored in anti-capitalist and anti-racist politics, and radicalizing political work through building comradery. Conducting work in situated geographies, Rodrigo Castriota, Devra Waldman, Chiara Cacciotti, and Daniela Morpurgo, then presented preliminary findings from ongoing fieldwork. First was Rodrigo, intervening into the intersection of housing and popular economies in Belo Horizonte, Brazil by asking questions about the diversity of ‘home’ as an economic unit, the politics ‘home’ when acquires economic functions, and how the fight for housing articulates with the fight for work. He demonstrated the versatility of spaces in the home used for work (i.e. different rooms in the house, gardens, facades as stores) and different functions the home can provide (i.e. production, storage, exchange, services). Rodrigo also spoke about the ways in which the intersections of home and work impacts affective relationships between residents in the home through negotiations and disputes over use of space for economic activities. This was followed by Devra Waldman, who working at the intersection of housing and city planning/building in India, discussed how the ‘city’ is made/unmade/remade through housing interventions in the context of extended urbanization. She is interested in how different groups position themselves in relation to the housing and urban future of the city. Devra outlined how developers bet on speculation of the (non)city through starting but not completing large-scale housing projects, migrant laborers and urban-village landlords place bet on continued construction and demolition work circulating through the city, and how the state bets on being able to start over again by issuing approvals to acquire more land in the name housing development and city expansion. Next, Chiara Cacciotti turned our attention to experiences of squatters’ post-eviction contexts in Rome to ask how the housing political is articulated in the aftermath of eviction, and how these politics intersect with both homemaking and radical practices (such as squatting and housing activist movements). She demonstrated the complexity of practices post-eviction, ranging from a ‘retirement’ of political activist lives and radical practice, to turning to radical activist struggles for social justice (such as anti-racist organizations), to continued investment in the housing movements while managing feelings of loss of networks of sociality and mutual aid that were cultivated through living in squatted environments. Daniela Morpurgo closed out this part of the conference by discussing her ongoing research investigating the interconnections between sex work and inhabitation. She argued that the intersection between housing and sex work were varied, including that being a sex worker acted as a barrier to accessing housing; that the nature of the work led to feelings of insecurity of being evicted from secured housing; that even housing movements based in squats exclude sex workers due to stigmas associated with their work; that sex workers often face exploitative landlords who charge over market-price for flats; and that affective relationships with housemates are impacted and negotiated because some forms of sex work take place in the home. At the same time, networks of solidarity are formed around searching for housing solutions for exploited workers, and that affective communities around work and inhabitation can be grown. Following the interventions from the ERC researchers, we were lucky to be joined by Dr. Erin McEIroy (UT-Austin), Dr. Ryan Powell (University of Sheffield), Dr. Margherita Grazioli (GSSI), Dr. Nadia Caruso (DIST), and Francesco Chiodelli (DIST), who all acted as discussants. Each discussant posed thoughtful, sharp, and insightful feedback, questions, and points to consider in future work. Their comments included a reflection on the spatial dimensions of housing inequalities and the place-specificities of situated, ethnographic knowledges (Nadia); the position of the project within the geographies of housing and urban scholarship, teaching and activism in Turin and Italy (Francesco); questions of care in academic endeavours and the role of research in struggles (Erin); how the presentation of our work in progress is opening up the space to historicize relations of oppression and address further intersections (Ryan); and finally, how this project and its attunement to positionality and reflexivity sit both in relation to the urgency of activism and the timings of productivist academia. Because of the diverse backgrounds, geographies, and fields of expertise of the discussants, a rich dialogue transpired around the broad ambitions of the ERC project at large, the positioning of the project within the politics of the academic institution, issues of positionality and reflexivity across space and place, and issues of knowledge production. You can watch the video of the entire event at our YouTube channel.  
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Last position on my ERC project now available – RTDA

The last position available on my ERC ‘Inhabiting Radical Housing’ project has been advertised yesterday.
 
3- year research contract (RTDA) to work in Turin with a fantastic team of international researchers at DIST – Dip. Interateneo di Scienze, Progetto e Politiche del Territorio
 
The advert is here and it is self-explanatory: https://careers.polito.it/default.aspx?id=43/21/F/A (ENG at the top of the page)
 
I am on leave now, so I won’t reply to any email. If you have questions, get back to me after the 10th of Jan.
 
Deadline: 31st Jan 2022.
 
Peace!
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Announcing post-docs hired for my ERC Inhabiting Radical Housing project

I am very thrilled to be able to announce the post-docs joining (Jan22) my European Research Council #InhabitingRadicalHousing project at DIST – Dip. Interateneo di Scienze, Progetto e Politiche del Territorio.

Intersectional takes on #housingstruggles:

  • Devra Waldman, postcoloniality, India
  • Oluwafemi Olajde, pol economy, Nigeria
  • Rayna Rusenko, critical global policy
  • Rodrigo Castriota extended urban in the Amazons, Brazil

Devra, Femi, Rayna & Rodrigo have 3 years with us and are joined by

  • Chiara Cacciotti, wonderful ethnographer squatting (1y post-doc)
  • Daniela Morpurgo, on sex work-migration-housing (1y post-doc)
  • Saanchi Saxena new exciting PhD candidate working on women street vendors in Mumbai

Devra, Femi, Rayna, and Rodrigo have deep knowledge of their geographies and have contributed already to debates on decolonial, critical race, and intersectional urban studies in Journals such as Antipode, EPD, Urban Studies, and more. Chiara and Daniela have published extensively too, and Saanchi co-funded a platform to disseminate scholarship beyond academia. This is really an outstanding team.

On top of all this, in due course, we will also launch a new #BeyondInhabitation lab here in Turin with AbdouMaliq Simone (more soon!)

I want to thank the over 60+ applicants for these jobs: competition was very high and selection very difficult. I also want to thank the wonderful Stefania Guarini who solved so much of the bureaucratic mess that I had to face for these international hirings! Today I am celebrating, so I won’t say much about that..

A final 3-year senior research position (RTDA) will be advertised in the coming weeks – watch this space.

Peace & Power

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Beginning my ‘Inhabiting Radical Housing’ ERC Starting grant project

After some personal and COVID-19 delay, today we start my European Research Council (ERC) project on “Inhabiting Radical Housing”!

I look forward to the next 5 years of fieldwork, decolonial housing research & undercommons building and praxis across the globe. The project will allow for collaborations with old and new comrades, scholars and networks in several regions of the world. You can find a short presentation of the main aim of this work below.

In the next months, we’ll start hiring & launch new tools for engagement and direct support for action, at the Urban Institute in Sheffield. Also, some new manoeuvrings to be expected with my dear friend AbdouMaliq Simone. More info soon!


Project’s aims
According to UN-Habitat, each year millions of people face forced eviction from their homes, while a staggering 1.6 billion are inadequately housed. Forecasts suggest housing precarity will continue to grow in future, worldwide. In response, grassroots housing movements are becoming increasingly common. Crucially, these groups fight for more than just housing, often advancing critiques of wider societal inequalities. Yet little is known of the broader significance of these struggles, and research has failed to offer an understanding of geographically dispersed movements. The ways in which the fight for the right to housing operates is essential to understand contemporary urban life. The project will fill these critical gaps through a decolonial Inhabiting Radical Housing Approach and empirical research at a global scale.

First, the project identifies the importance of a historical understanding of dwelling precarity, to appreciate the relevance of housing struggles worldwide (Objective I). Second, it investigates and profiles prominent grassroots networks in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia to analyse their goals and organisational culture (Objective II). To appreciate the wider significance of radical housing resistance, the project deploys an ambitious ethnographic encounter with grassroots struggles in eight emblematic cities (Objective III). It then brings selected participants and activists together in a series of innovative action-oriented activities (defined from below), fostering the exchange of peer-to-peer knowledge and offering support to direct action (Objective IV). Finally, the project will gather these insights into an innovative critical and decolonial framework, which will lead to agenda-setting publications, interventions, and academic scholarship (Objective V).

The project will contribute to housing, urban and geographical studies, as well as to grassroots knowledge, opening a new phase in understanding the global fight against housing precarity.

 

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Awarded: European Research Council Starting Grant on ‘Radical Housing’

I am so happy to share that I am one of the 2019 recipients of the European Research Council Starting Grant, with my project “Radical Housing: Cities and the global fight against housing precarity”

This has been such a humbling experience and an honour!

I couldn’t have done it without the support received from the Faculty of Social Science at Sheffield. A huge thanks to my colleagues at the Urban Institute (now it’s two ERC recipients there with the wonderful Vanesa Castan Broto) and to my colleagues at USP (in particular John Flint and Ryan Powell). And also many others indeed — including the wonderful
Colin McFarlane and Paolo Boccagni who shared their projects and advised on how to go about this whole ERC business! Also a continuining thank you to my comrades of the Radical Housing Journal and of the Frontul Comun pentru Dreptul la Locuire for the continuing inspiration and solidarity.

Finally a huge thank you to my family and to my partner Leo for the patience and support. Below you can read the abstract and logo of this project, which will begin in Spring 2020.

 

Radical Housing: Cities and the global fight against housing precarity

According to UN-Habitat, each year millions of people face forced eviction from their homes, while a staggering 1.6 billion are inadequately housed. Forecasts suggest housing precarity will continue to grow in future, worldwide. In response, grassroots housing movements are becoming increasingly common. Crucially, these groups fight for more than just housing, often advancing critiques of wider societal inequalities. Yet little is known of the broader significance of these struggles, and research has failed to offer an understanding of geographically dispersed movements. The ways in which the fight for the right to housing operates is essential to understand contemporary urban life. RadicalHOUSING will fill these critical gaps through an innovative Radical Housing Approach and pioneering empirical research at a global scale.

First, the project identifies the importance of a historical understanding of dwelling precarity, to appreciate the relevance of housing struggles worldwide (Objective I). Second, it investigates and profiles prominent grassroots networks in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia to analyse their goals and organisational culture (Objective II). To appreciate the wider significance of radical housing resistance, the project deploys an ambitious ethnographic encounter with grassroots struggles in eight emblematic cities (Objective III). It then brings selected participants and experts together in a Global Forum of Radical Housing, fostering the exchange of peer-to-peer knowledge to generate further findings (Objective IV). Finally, the project will gather these insights into an innovative critical comparative framework, which will lead to agenda-setting publications, interventions, and academic scholarship (Objective V).

RadicalHOUSING is a ground-breaking project that will contribute to housing, urban and geographical studies, as well as to grassroots knowledge, opening a new phase in understanding the global fight against housing precarity.