Mara Ferreri

Politecnico di Torino | polito · DIST - Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning

Issue 5.1 of the Radical Housing Journal (RHJ) examines the current state of struggles for housing and home amidst capital-accumulation-induced urban restructuring worldwide. The authors discuss the enduring impact of settler colonialism on land and housing rights, particularly for Indigenous peoples. Feminist, queer, and trans perspectives are bro...

Urban commons have emerged within the latest mobilization cycle, and have developed forms of everyday politics. Marxist and social movement scholars tend to see the urban commons/local state interactions that assemble commons’ material infrastructure as the prelude to commons being co-opted. Governance scholars uphold that these interactions can br...

Esta Conversación surge de la curiosidad y las reflexiones de colaboradoras del Radical Housing Journal sobre el creciente uso del término vecinas —en inglés, neighbour— en las luchas por la vivienda en Barcelona en los últimos años. Desde nuestra participación en la lucha por el derecho a la vivienda en esta ciudad, quisimos explorar más profundam...

This Conversation emerges from Radical Housing Journal collaborators’ curiosity and reflections about the growing use of the term vecinas —in English, neighbour— among housing movements in Barcelona in recent years. From our participation in the fight for the right to housing in this city, we wanted to more deeply explore the dynamics behind the wo...

In the continuum of intersecting housing crises, the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic are still testing individual and collective capacities to survive displacement, surveillance, precarisation and policing. Issue 3.2 emerges in the context of normalised new and old crises; both from and within the fatigue and normalisation of current ‘exceptional...

The eruption of disruptive digital platforms is reshaping geographies of housing under the gaze of corporations and through the webs of algorithms. Engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship on informal housing across the Global North and South, we propose the term ‘digital informalisation’ to examine how digital platforms are engendering new and...

This article explores the potential of community-led housing (CLH) in combatting loneliness, and represents a mixed-methods research project carried out from just before the beginning of the pandemic, through 2020. Methods comprised a nationwide quantitative online survey of members of CLH groups (N = 221 respondents from England and Wales), follow...

Temporary urbanism has become an established marker of city making after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The book offers a critical exploration of its emergence and establishment as a seductive discourse and as an entangled field of urban practice encompassing architecture, visual and performative arts, urban regeneration and planning. Drawing on...

Temporary urbanism has become an established marker of city making after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The book offers a critical exploration of its emergence and establishment as a seductive discourse and as an entangled field of urban practice encompassing architecture, visual and performative arts, urban regeneration and planning. Drawing on...

Temporary urbanism has become an established marker of city making after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The book offers a critical exploration of its emergence and establishment as a seductive discourse and as an entangled field of urban practice encompassing architecture, visual and performative arts, urban regeneration and planning. Drawing on...

Temporary urbanism has become an established marker of city making after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The book offers a critical exploration of its emergence and establishment as a seductive discourse and as an entangled field of urban practice encompassing architecture, visual and performative arts, urban regeneration and planning. Drawing on...

Temporary urbanism has become an established marker of city making after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The book offers a critical exploration of its emergence and establishment as a seductive discourse and as an entangled field of urban practice encompassing architecture, visual and performative arts, urban regeneration and planning. Drawing on...

Temporary urbanism has become an established marker of city making after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The book offers a critical exploration of its emergence and establishment as a seductive discourse and as an entangled field of urban practice encompassing architecture, visual and performative arts, urban regeneration and planning. Drawing on...

Cooperative housing is experiencing a resurgence of interest worldwide. As a more democratic and affordable alternative to dominant housing provision, it is often heralded as a blueprint for ‘housing commons’. Despite its long history, however, cooperative housing has rarely gone beyond a ‘niche’ in the housing market. Recent critical housing schol...

We came to this issue before the outbreak of Covid-19, and we release it amidst what feels like an entirely new, and yet also entirely known world-order-a place of multiple and multiplying crises that existed before the pandemic and continue, relentlessly, to render certain people, bodies and homes disposable. It is against this cruelty, but also w...

Low‐income municipal housing and its inhabitants have increasingly been construed as disposable within wider global dynamics of real estate speculation, leading to heightened housing insecurity, displacement and forced evictions. In Western cities urban regeneration programmes have long provided the framework for partial or wholesale demolition of...

Seemingly overnight, the use value of housing as a life-nurturing, safe place is at the center of political discourse, policy-making, and new governmentalities. The right to suitable and secure shelter has shifted from the “radical” margins to the object of unprecedented public policy interventions worldwide. Writing collectively from the relative...

Community-oriented temporary uses are a subset of interim use in vacant urban spaces, alongside creative and commercial practices. Its proponents argue that they can inform more incremental and residents-led local urban development. Under urban austerity, however, temporary uses can become vehicles for the short-term and conditional delivery of soc...

Housing (in)security plays a key role in the economic, social and political experience of residents across different urban settings. Today, millions of people are pushed to dwell under insecure conditions due to a number of factors. These include the financialization of land and housing, the growth of informal housing markets in rapidly urbanizing...

The chapter examines degrowth demands from neighbourhood community groups campaigning against the demolition of social housing in London.

In this paper, we examine the relationship between precarity, property and urban vacancy. Our main aim is to develop a conceptual framework that connects recent geographical scholarship on precarity to the production of vacant urban landscapes. The paper extends recent geographical scholarship on urban vacancy as a key site of antagonism for post-c...

Since the end of the 2012 Olympic Games, London’s residents and tourists have been awaiting the spectacular redevelopment of the former Olympic venue into the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (QEOP), which comprises the city’s ‘newest park’. As the most visible legacy of the Games, it has become a key test case for demonstrating the public interest of...

The ‘sharing economy’ has become a new buzzword in urban life as digital technology companies set up online platforms to link together people and un- or underutilised assets with those seeking to rent them for short periods of time. While cloaked under the rhetoric of ‘sharing’, the exchanges they foster are usually profit-driven. These economic ac...

Property guardianship, a form of short-term building security through temporary dwelling, has emerged in several European countries over the past 20 years. Despite being characterized by tenure insecurity and frequently substandard conditions, ‘living as a guardian’ has become a composite and polyvalent mode of inhabiting cities, rooted in the prod...

In this paper we examine the precarious everyday geographies of property guardianship in the United Kingdom. Temporary property guardianship is a relatively new form of insecure urban dwelling existing in the grey area between informal occupation, the security industry and housing. Young individuals, usually in precarious employment, apply to inter...

The demolition of social housing figures prominently in the most recent wave of state-led gentrification in London: fighting these processes as academics and activists presents ethical, methodological and strategic issues. We have chosen to address these issues by cautiously drawing a symbolic parallel between the conditions faced by social tenants...

This paper addresses the position of young arts graduates seeking to respond to the unequal access and precarity of jobs in the cultural sector by establishing artist-led temporary spaces. With the increasing dissemination of the discourse of pop-up urban uses in the United Kingdom since 2008, former genealogies of autonomous self-organised spaces...

Appropriating the genre of the campus map, graduate students at Queen Mary University London and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill have produced a countermap of the university. Elegant in design, yet multi-purposed, their mapping of alternative uses and critiques takes the form of a poster-sized doubled sided print which locates the universi...