The Common City Conference 2026

Please note that the last day for registration has passed.

The next Common City conference, titled Struggling for Urban Justice in a Time of Authoritarianism and Multiple Crises, will be held in Uppsala on 26–28 August 2026.

This is the follow-up to the first edition of the Common City Conference (September 2024), organized by the Housing & Urban Justice Project (HUJP) at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research (IBF), Uppsala University.

The conference aims to bring together scholars and activists concerned with struggles for the right to the city, housing, and urban justice. Given the success of the first edition—which enabled scholars and activists from diverse backgrounds and countries to meet and establish new collaborations and networks—the Housing and Urban Justice Project is now organising a second edition.

The 2nd conference aims to foster co-working among activists and scholars who are interested in promoting urban commoning and housing justice, and to engage theoretically, empirically, and methodologically with the current challenges facing the urban world due to the spread of authoritarianism and neofascist regimes. These regimes are normalising a war mentality, driven by imperialistic attitudes, which turn cities into highly militarised spaces. Furthermore, the destruction of the built environment and agricultural systems by predatory capitalism, environmental crises, and wars is, in some cases, leading to forms of urbicide. This is especially evident in the Gaza Strip, where the state of Israel has destroyed at least 92 percent of housing units, as reported in an Impact Snapshot Report (UN, Jan 2025) by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Therefore, we invite Palestinian movements to participate and, together with scholars, reflect on urban destruction.

Furthermore, we would like to challenge established understandings of the production of knowledge that, in light of totalitarianism and the deepening inequalities it fosters, have become obsolete. In this context, we believe that scholars have a responsibility to reimagine the urban fabric through the lens of the commons and of social and environmental justice. To inform this reimagination, methodologies from below, connecting urban research with social movements, are crucial for a knowledge production that contests the established one.