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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
