Book of sessions

Panel organizers:
Juan Pérez Ventura, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Submit paper/contribution proposal to:
juaper12@ucm.es

Session type:
Thematic session

Across much of the Global South, processes of gentrification and urban revalorisation unfold in ways that challenge dominant assumptions in critical urban theory. While much of the literature developed in Global North contexts implicitly assumes that gentrification operates
through the gradual eradication of informal housing, economies and practices, empirical realities in cities across Latin America, Africa and Asia point to more hybrid, contradictory and politically charged trajectories. Informality often does not disappear; instead, it coexists
with, is selectively reconfigured by, or becomes instrumentalised within processes of urban revalorisation.

This thematic session aims to critically interrogate the relationship between informality, gentrification and urban authoritarianism in the Global South. We understand authoritarianism here not only as an attribute of political regimes, but as a broader mode of urban governance characterised by top-down decision-making, securitisation, selective legality, repression of dissent and the normalisation of exception in the production of urban space. Within this framework, informality is not merely tolerated or repressed, but strategically governed: at times criminalised, at others aestheticised, commodified or
mobilised as a symbolic resource for tourism, place-branding or investment attraction.

The session seeks to bring together scholars and activists to explore how these dynamics reshape displacement, belonging and the right to remain in the city. Rather than treating displacement solely as direct eviction, we are particularly interested in forms of indirect, deferred or exclusionary displacement, where residents remain physically present while losing access to housing, livelihoods, public space or future reproduction in the neighbourhood. These processes are often intensified by authoritarian urban practices that limit participation, silence contestation and frame revalorisation as inevitable or technocratic necessity.

At the same time, the session foregrounds struggles, resistances and everyday practices that challenge these transformations. In many contexts, residents, grassroots organisations and urban movements do not only resist gentrification, but actively produce alternative urban
commons through collective housing practices, informal economies, cultural initiatives and spatial reappropriations. These practices raise critical questions about the possibilities and limits of counter-hegemonic urbanism under conditions of financialisation, securitisation and
political repression.

The thematic discussion will revolve around several interconnected questions: How does informality operate within contemporary processes of gentrification and revalorisation in the Global South? In what ways do authoritarian modes of urban governance shape the selective incorporation or suppression of informal practices? How are displacement and exclusion produced beyond direct eviction? And how do grassroots struggles and forms of urban commoning negotiate, resist or transform these dynamics?

Methodologically and epistemologically, the session also seeks to challenge Eurocentric frameworks of urban analysis by foregrounding situated knowledges, comparative perspectives and methodologies from below. By fostering dialogue between academic research and activist experience, the session aims to contribute to more grounded and
politically engaged understandings of urban justice, informality and the right to the city in times of authoritarianism and multiple crises.

Session organizers:
Aravind R., Doctoral Candidate, KREA University
Tridib Mukherjee, Doctoral Candidate, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati
Dr. Rama Devi, Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre De Sciences Humaines
Shatarupa Paul, Coordinator, Masculinities Programme (Mardo Waali Baat), The YP Foundation

Submit paper/contributon proposal to:
aravind_raveendran.phd23@krea.ac.in
tridibmj@gmail.com

Session type:
Regular panel

Urban spaces are associated with the visibility of “deviant sexualities,” evident in queer neighbourhoods, cruising spaces, red-light areas, Pride events, and other sites enabling sexual diversity. These “heterotopic” spaces (Foucault, 1967) are produced through the social and spatial practices of queer, trans* and sex worker communities, and are tied to the movements that made them possible—unsettling the heteropatriarchal moralities of residents and city planners (Yeros, 2024; Ghaziani, 2020; Hubbard et al., 2015). These spaces, however, are being transformed by the interrelated forces of neoliberal capital and
authoritarian governance. These forces are reshaping urban life through intensified policing, gentrification, moral regulation, cultural appropriation and the criminalisation of informal livelihoods. Such transformations have disproportionately affected queer, trans, and sexually marginalised populations whose survival depends on informal economies, precarious housing, and fragile urban commons.

The impact of such transformations are visible globally. Across urban centres such as Vancouver, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, and Bangalore, redevelopment and “revitalisation” schemes have displaced or criminalised cruising and sex-work sites, intensifying policing,
and generating new vulnerabilities for queer, trans*, and sex-worker populations (Weitzer, 2009; Ross & Sullivan, 2012; Lyons et al., 2017; Di Lisio et al., 2019; Neethi & Kamath, 2022). Other practices such as corporatisation of Pride events and consumerist queer visibility point out to the appropriation of queer identities by capital, often pushing agendas
variously described as “pinkwashing” and “rainbow capitalism”. Such practices have privileged consumerist sensibilities while marginalising the working-class queer subjects who had historically shaped and led queer spaces (Horton, 2020; Conway, 2024; Tandon, 2023).

This panel, thus, examines such questions of urban transformations induced by neoliberal capital and the rise of authoritarian, neofascist regimes and their impact on the “sexual deviants” in the urban space. We are looking for contributions from various regional contexts
which map these transformations, while being attentive to the intersections of citizenship, race, class, caste and labour. The panel also attends to papers which document how queer subjects—especially those engaged in informal and sexual labour—navigate, resist, and rework such authoritarian–neoliberal urban landscapes.

We particularly welcome empirical and methodological work grounded in “methodologies from below”—ethnography, life histories, activist research, and collaborative knowledge production with grassroots movements—and seek to create a space where activists and scholars can think together about urban struggles, solidarities, and futures.

Possible themes and questions include (but are not limited to):

1. How are capital– and state–led gentrification practices reshaping and shrinking spaces of queer-cruising, solicitation, and public sex?
2. How does housing precarity including evictions (formal and informal),
   displacement, gentrification and landlord violence reshape the queer urban life, and the production or erosion of queer urban commons
3. How sex workers and their participation in the informal economy is being affected by the “revanchist” practices of the state and the propertied classes which frame them as a threat to the urban order
4. How do digital queer intimacies and forms of online sexual labour such as social media, dating apps, live streaming, and platform based sex work- reshape urban belonging, vulnerability and community formation within increasingly surveilled and neoliberal authoritarian urban spaces or cities?
5. What forms of queer and trans* kinship and chosen family emerge in authoritarian and neoliberal urban landscapes, and how do these relational practices sustain care, survival, and collective belonging under conditions of exclusion?
6. What forms of resistance, refusal, and everyday negotiation emerge as queer and sexually marginalised subjects confront intensified repression?
7. How do the corporatisation of Pride, the rise of consumerist queer visibility and pinkwashing strategies reconfigure participation, belonging, and the politics of queer representation in the urban spaces?

By placing queer, trans, and sexually marginalised lives at the centre of urban analysis, this panel expands debates on urban justice beyond infrastructure and housing to include questions of desire, intimacy, embodiment, informality, and survival. It reimagines the “common city” not as a harmonious or stable entity, but as a continuously contested terrain shaped through struggle, care, and collective becoming.

Panel organizers:
Robinson Chivila Jambo, Taylor Torch Media Practitioner & Peacebuilder
– Kenya Together in Transition Initiative | Acha Gun Shika Mic

Submit paper/contribution proposal to:
chillarobay@gmail.com

Session type:
Creative session

Across the world, struggles for urban justice are increasingly fought not only in courts and council chambers but in studios, streets, and digital platforms. Music, murals, memes, community radio, theatre, and grassroots journalism have become everyday infrastructures through which residents contest policing, housing dispossession, xenophobia, gendered violence, and authoritarian control. Yet these creative practices are rarely recognized as forms of knowledge production within urban studies.

This session proposes to treat art, storytelling, and cultural production as urban commons collective resources through which communities imagine alternative futures and defend the right to the city. Rather than centering a single geography, the session invites contributions
from diverse contexts where creatives negotiate multiple crises: gentrification in European cities, racialized policing in the Americas, displacement in the Middle East, and violence prevention in African urban margins.

The convenor’s initiatives from Kenya Together in Transition and Acha Gun Shika Mic will be presented as one entry point among many, illustrating how drill music, spoken word, and community media can be redirected from narratives of fear toward languages of dignity and
care. The broader aim is to develop comparative conversations on how creative methods:

• Produce situated knowledge about injustice
• Build solidarities across fragmented urban publics
• Challenge authoritarian aesthetics and propaganda
• Create safer civic spaces where formal participation is closed

Focus on Methods
We invite papers and interventions that engage with:

1. Art as Research – creative practice as a way of knowing the city beyond surveys and statistics.
2. Storytelling as Infrastructure – community media, oral histories, and digital narratives as tools for claiming rights.
3. Cultural Production and Power – how music, fashion, humor, and images are used both by oppressive systems and by resistance movements.
4. Ethics of Co-Creation – protecting storytellers in securitized environments and avoiding extractive research.
   

Who Should Apply
Activists, artists, scholars, community journalists, urban planners, and organizers working on housing, migration, policing, climate justice, disability, gender, youth cultures, or violence prevention. We especially welcome collaborations between researchers and grassroots collectives.

Guiding Questions for Applicants

• How can creative practice function as a form of urban commons and collective care?
• In what ways do artists translate lived experiences of injustice into political voice?
• How are aesthetics mobilized by both authoritarian power and grassroots resistance?
• What methodologies allow researchers to work with creatives rather than extract from them?
• How do music and digital cultures reshape identities in neighborhoods marked by stigma?
• Can storytelling create early-warning systems for urban conflict?
• What risks do creatives face under surveillance and securitization?
• How can cities support cultural workers without co-opting them?
• How do gender, class, race, and migration shape who is allowed to create the city’s image?
• What does decolonizing urban knowledge mean in artistic terms?

Session Design (100 minutes)

• Opening provocation – “The City as Studio” (10 min)
• Method labs rotation (45 min)
  ○ Narrative remix
  ○ Community newsroom
  ○ Sound & slogan lab

• Live creative intervention (15 min)
• Dialogue with paper presenters (20 min)
• Collective output: Creative Commons Toolkit (10 min)

Expected Outcomes

• Cross-regional exchange on creative methodologies
• A co-produced “Creative Commons for Urban Justice” toolkit
• Network between activists, scholars, and artists
• Contributions for a special issue or exhibition

This session seeks to expand how the conference understands urban justice, recognizing that the right to the city is also the right to imagine, narrate, and create it.

Session organizers:
Kehinde Adegboyega, Human Rights Journalists Network Nigeria
Deji Akinpelu, Rethinking Cities
Buhle Booi, Ndifuna Ukwazi

Submit paper/contribution proposal to:
kehinde@hrjnet.org

Session type:
Thematic session

In an era marked by authoritarianism, financialised capitalism, and multiple overlapping crises, housing has become a primary site of urban struggle. Across cities in the Global South and beyond, housing systems are increasingly reorganised through speculative development, securitised urban renewal, and violent displacement. The se processes erode housing as a social good and reconstitute it as a commodity, while
normalising eviction, informality, and spatial exclusion as governance tools.

This thematic session is co-hosted by Human Rights Journalists Network Nigeria (HRJN), Rethinking Cities Lagos, and Ndifuna Ukwazi (South Africa). It speaks directly to the concerns of the Housing & Urban Justice Project by centring housing justice, urban commons, and methodologies from below in contexts shaped by authoritarian and quasi-authoritarian urban governance.

The session starts from the premise that contemporary housing injustice is not only material but epistemic. Authoritarian urbanism operates by controlling how housing crises are represented, measured, and explained who is counted, whose losses matter, and which forms of urban violence are rendered invisible. Informal settlements are erased from maps, evictions are framed as “development,” and resistance is criminalised. In this context, grassroots documentation becomes a critical arena of struggle.

We conceptualise community-based documentation and media activism including participatory mapping, investigative journalism, legal storytelling, activist archiving, and documentary filmmaking as practices of urban commoning. These practices generate shared knowledge infrastructures that enable collective claims to land, housing, and the right to remain. They also challenge dominant technocratic and market-oriented forms of urban knowledge production that underpin housing dispossession.

Invited speakers from housing movements, civil society organisations, and academia will offer short opening reflections (5–10 minutes) engaging with:

• Housing dispossession, forced evictions, and displacement under authoritarian and financialised urban regimes.
• The relationship between housing, policing, militarisation, and the normalisation of urban violence.
• Methodologies from below that connect urban research with social movements, including participatory action research, community lawyering, and activist media practices.
• Comparative perspectives on urbicide and large-scale housing destruction, including reflections informed by Palestine and other sites of extreme spatial violence.

The session is designed as a dialogic and collaborative space, rather than a conventional paper panel. Following the initial interventions, facilitators will guide an open discussion with participants, focusing on methodological tensions, ethical risks, and possibilities for
transnational collaboration between scholars and housing justice movements. Particular attention will be paid to how academic institutions can contribute to counter-hegemonic knowledge production without reproducing extractive research relations.

Panel organizers:
Ana Vilenica, Södertörn University
Dominika V. Polanska, Södertörn University/Stockholm University

Submit paper/contribution proposal to:
vilenica.ana@gmail.com
dominika.v.polanska@gmail.com

Session type:
Regular panel

This session explores infrastructures for activist research and how scholar-activism can contribute to building infrastructures of commoning within housing and urban struggles. In an era of deepening housing crises, privatization, urban inequalities, militarization of space and urban warfare, researchers are increasingly engaging within and beyond academia, (co)producing knowledge for and with movements, grassroots organizations, and people in struggle.

We ask: What does it mean to create infrastructures for activist research? How can research become part of the infrastructures that sustain collective urban struggles?

The session will bring together scholars and activists to discuss:

• Collaborative methodologies for housing justice research.
• Institutional and extra-institutional infrastructures that enable activist scholarship.
• Political challenges in co-producing knowledge with and for movements.
• Examples of infrastructures for activist research: from community archives and mapping projects to legal advocacy and policy interventions.

By focusing on housing and urban struggles, we aim to highlight practices that resist financialisation, war and militarisation and reclaim the urban space as a common.

Panel organizers:
Federico Smania, University of Milano-Bicocca
Silvia Cesa-Bianchi, Sciences Po Paris

Submit paper/contribution proposal to:
federico.smania@unimib.it

Session type:
Regular panel

Mega-events, such as Olympics, World Cups and Expos, have become key devices for restructuring cities and territories through exceptional governance, accelerated urban development and the intensification of touristification, real-estate speculation and policing. While critical scholarship has extensively documented the socio-spatial impacts of
mega-events (Lenskyj 2002; de Oliveira Sanchez and Essex 2017), less attention has been paid to the political and discursive crossings between two increasingly salient fronts of contention: (1) movements mobilising against overtourism (Milano 2019) that confront mega-events as accelerators and legitimising frames; and (2) movements opposing
mega-events (Boykoff 2020) that increasingly name overtourism as a central stake and a harmful, long-term legacy.

This panel invites contributions that explore how these struggles intersect, learn from each other, and operate within overlapping arenas of conflict around housing, displacement, public space, labour, and the right to the city. We are particularly interested in how "overtourism"
travels across contexts as a contested problem definition - sometimes as an entry point for broader critiques of extractive urbanism, sometimes as a depoliticised managerial category - and how mega-events re-propose tourism growth as a desirable legacy, even when it
translates into a harmful urban regime. Alongside empirical case studies, we welcome methodological reflections on movement-engaged and collaborative research in contexts marked by shrinking civic space and criminalisation of dissent. How can militant, participatory, and co-research approaches help grasp the cross-framing dynamics between
anti-overtourism campaigns and anti-mega-event mobilisations, and support the production of usable knowledge without flattening internal tensions and unequal power relations?

We welcome papers that address, for example:

• How do anti-overtourism movements frame mega-events as catalysts of touristification, rent inflation, and security regimes?
• How have recent mobilisations (from Barcelona's protests against the America's Cup to opposition to Milano-Cortina 2026) articulated these connections?
• How do movements against mega-events treat overtourism as a "toxic legacy"?
• How is the tourism question articulated with housing justice, labour struggles, and critiques of growth-led governance?
• What forms of alliance, translation, and friction emerge when these movements interact across different territorialities (inner cities, mountain regions, "heritage" districts) and social compositions?

We particularly encourage contributions engaging with case studies of resistance to mega-events, as well as comparative or translocal perspectives. We also welcome interventions by activists reflecting on collaborations with researchers, and on the alliances, frictions, and asymmetries that shape these encounters. By bringing together scholars and activists working at the crossroads of overtourism struggles and mobilisations against mega-events, this panel aims to open a space for collective reflection on how to produce knowledge that not only interprets tourism-led urban transformations, but also strengthens
struggles for urban commons, housing justice, and the right to the city. At a moment when mega-events are multiplying globally despite mounting evidence of their extractive impacts, and as resistance is met with criminalisation and securitarian responses, understanding how
movements build power across these interconnected fronts becomes urgent both analytically and politically.

Panel organizers:
Timothy Joubert, University of Sheffield

Submit paper/contribution proposal to:
t.joubert@sheffield.ac.uk

Session type:
Regular panel

In the past decade, ‘new municipalist’ projects across Europe and elsewhere have sought to involve the local state in nurturing and expanding the urban commons (Bianchi, 2025; Bianchi and Russell, 2026). Municipalist movements rooted in the ideals of the commons
have strategically engaged with local government, moving beyond a traditional divide in activist theory and practice between ‘the streets’ and ‘the institutions’, forging a new practice that re-articulates the relationship between local governing institutions and civil society
organisations (Bianchi and Russell, 2026; Roth, et al., 2023). A hallmark of these governing experiments, in certain paradigmatic cities of the new municipalist wave such as Barcelona (Bianchi, 2022; Pera and Bussu, 2024), Zagreb (Thompson, et al., 2025), Naples and Bologna (Bianchi, 2018; Kioupkiolis, 2022; Vesco and Busso, 2024), has been the attempt to
use the tools of the local state to support the expansion of collective ownership and self-management in the urban economy. Studies of these radical governing projects have surfaced a concept of ‘public-commons partnership’ that suggests state involvement in new institutional forms for incubating, funding, de-risking, and coordinating the commons as a
fruitful pathway for expanding the commons sphere and enacting transitions to post-capitalism (Bianchi, 2025; Russell, et al., 2022).

Yet in most places, urban activists find their commoning ambitions blocked by non-cooperative, and even hostile, local states tied in to orthodox economic development approaches and developer-friendly planning regimes. In most cities, local governing institutions are seeking aggressive growth strategies that privilege extractive capital investment and revanchist urban policy, or are attempting to pragmatically grapple with the harsh consequences of local government austerity and fiscal crisis (Barnett, et al. 2020; Phelps and Miao, 2019), both of which undermine prospects for local state sponsorship of the commons.

This session seeks to explore the theory and practice of expanding the urban commons in these ‘ordinary’ governance contexts. What forms of local state engagement, practice, and innovation are being encountered and experienced by urban commoners under prevailing conditions of heightened inequality, austerity, and the privatisation and financialisation of land and other assets, resources, and infrastructures? Outside of the few cities where urban commoning might be ‘state-led’ (Katsigianni, et al., 2025) or otherwise involve intra-state ‘institutional activists’ (Abers, 2019; Vestergaard and Schmid, 2026), how are state actors enabling or constraining commoning processes? What tensions and synergies arise
between local state and commons-based governance in ‘ordinary’ places? How are local state institutions being experienced as enablers, blockers, or co-opters (or a mixture) of commoning activity? Short of achieving ‘collaborative governance’, what forms do mediation between community initiatives and municipal governments take? What are the prospects for public-common partnerships when local institutions exhibit disinterest, hostility, or incapacity?

We welcome both conceptual and empirical contributions that address the above questions, from any disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological approach and a variety of geographical settings. We particularly welcome contributions that develop or problematise these
frameworks with insights from beyond Europe and in the global South, and we welcome both scholarly submissions and contributions from urban activists.

Panel organizers:
Sander van Lanen, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

Submit paper/contribution proposal to:
s.van.lanen@rug.nl

Session type:
Regular panel

In recent years, academic and policy debates saw a proliferation of the concept ‘social infrastructure’. Following Klinenberg’s definition as the physical spaces that make social life possible, it’s conceptual scope has widened to include a diversity of phenomena, ranging from physical places like café’s and libraries to street furniture and social networks
themselves. Social infrastructure is argued to benefit social networks, social cohesion, and trust. Against such overly positive conceptions of social infrastructure, critical voices start to call attention to the politics of social infrastructure, asking questions about whose interests,
social relations, and activities are served by social infrastructure, and whose are not.

These debates mirror discussions about the commons, their benefits, and their conditions of exclusion and inclusion. Therefore, this session delves into the relationships between social infrastructure and the commons. These include;

• Are commons a form of social infrastructure?
• Under what conditions can social infrastructure to be part of the commons?
• Is a commons approach useful to politicise social infrastructure?
• How can the debate on the commons enrich the conceptualisation of social infrastructure?
• What connections, socialities, and activities do the commons facilitate?
• What are the relations between inclusion and exclusion in the commons and social infrastructure?

To have this debate, this session invites both theoretical and empirical contributions that (partially) answer these and related questions. As such, it welcomes papers using various methods (traditional and creative) that explore different types of social infrastructure and
commons in a variety of locations.

Panel organizers:
Geaney Marissen, Utrecht University

Submit paper/contribution proposal to:
geaneymarissen@hotmail.com

Session type:
Regular panel

This session proposes more-than-human commoning as a critical and generative framework for rethinking housing and urban life beyond human-centered, market-led, and state-authoritarian logics. Drawing inspiration from alternative housing practices, such as ecovillages, or community land trusts, self-built settlements, and cooperative housing, the session explores how forms of commoning that explicitly include non-human actors (land, water, soil, energy systems, species) offer situated yet scalable insights for imagining a “common city.”

The session invites contributions that examine how alternative housing initiatives enact collective governance, care, and stewardship across human and more-than-human relations, often in tension with regulatory regimes and authoritarian urban policies. Particular attention is paid to how such initiatives negotiate power, inclusion, exclusion, and conflict, and how they interact with urban struggles for housing justice and democratic participation.

Themes:

• More-than-human commoning and multispecies urbanism
• Alternative housing models (ecovillages, co-housing, cooperatives, CLTs) with a focus on multispecies care
• Property, governance, and collective ownership beyond the state/market binary, focussing on post-humanism
• Care, maintenance, and everyday practices of commoning beyond just the human

Possible research questions:

• How do alternative housing initiatives practice more-than-human commoning in urban and peri-urban contexts?
• In what ways do land, soil, water, plants, animals, and infrastructures actively shape practices of collective dwelling?
• How do more-than-human relations challenge human-centered notions of home, property, and belonging?
• What forms of governance and political subjectivity emerge through collective dwelling?
• How do these initiatives confront or reproduce inequalities related to class, race, gender, and citizenship?
• What forms of governance emerge when commoning practices include more-than-human actors?
• What tensions arise when multispecies ethics encounter legal, financial, or planning regimes grounded in human exceptionalism?
• What can urban struggles learn from ecovillages without romanticising them?

The session would welcome diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, including but not limited to political ecology, feminist and decolonial theory, commons theory, multispecies ethnography, participatory action research, architectural and planning research,
and activist scholarship.

NOTE: While proposed as a regular paper session, this panel could also take the form of a roundtable or other collaborative and dialogical format, depending on the nature of the contributions and interests of participants.

Panel organizers:
Joseph Edward Alegado, The Australian National University
Aksha Fernandez, PhD Student, Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto SOKENDAI University, Japan
Dr. Justin See, Lecturer in Development Studies School of Social and
Political Sciences | Faculty of Arts University of Melbourne

Submit paper/contribution proposal to:
joseph.alegado@anu.edu.au

Session type:
Creative session

The era of the Capitalocene, characterised by capitalism’s relentless drive for power and accumulation, achieved through cheap nature (eergy, labour, and resources) and colonial history, has manifested in multiple calamities, as we have witnessed recently through financial disasters, climate crises, pandemics, and genocides (Roy, 2025). The Capitalocene
manifests in urban spheres through the systematic invisibilization of workers whose labour sustains metropolitan life. As scholars researching waste economies, climate adaptation in the Philippines, and garment workers in India, we find that the growth regime entangled with
authoritarianism erases the workers whose bodies, time, and knowledge make these systems function. This persists despite scholarly calls to acknowledge the vast diversity of work globally (Johnson et al., 2023) and reconsider which activities and locations are deemed significant when analysing labour and agency (Strauss, 2020).

Yet these workers persist, resist, and create alternative urban commons despite systemic erasure. Our workshop asks, "What would cities look like if they were mapped from the standpoint of the invisible labourers who sustain them?" We invite practitioners and researchers from diverse disciplines and geographies to engage in a ‘counter mapping’ (Peluso, 1995) workshop session that challenges dominant power structures. Critical cartographers and social movements have developed mapping approaches that contest colonial, racist, and capitalist frameworks by illuminating alternative understandings and relationships previously marginalised or suppressed, thereby challenging structures of power, oppression, and displacement (Oslender, 2021; Tubino de Souza et al., 2025). Counter-maps can serve as a significant instrument to reconfigure inequitable social structures that official maps produced by government agencies do not capture (Ruzol and Dayrit, 2023).

Using a political ecology and environmental justice prism, we seek to uncover the power structures that contribute to the Capitalocene while also learning how communities resist and demand/search for justice. We aim to co-produce a counter-map with the participants' knowledge based on their field sites and the methodologies they use to learn how
‘Capitalocene’ is woven with authoritarianism and experienced by communities. The workshop will involve practitioners sharing their sites of study through insights and narratives to be plotted onto the map. The mapping exercise is to go beyond ‘scale’ and ‘measurements’ but to capture the essence, the experiences and the perceptions of the
communities and of the practitioner/researcher. We propose counter-mapping as a decolonial methodology for rendering visible the labour, knowledge, and spatial practices that official maps exclude. We will ask participants to map:

• Sites of invisible labour
• Geographies of displacement and adaptation of labour
• Spaces of resistance and commoning

The broader goal/intention of the countermaps exercise is to learn, interact, and communicate with diverse geographies and build networks of solidarity. The vision is to build pluralistic knowledge while addressing and staying with the tensions.

Panel organizers:
Daniela Cocco Beltrame, University of Manchester
Teurai Nyamangara, Dialogue on Zhelter Zimbabwe

Submit paper/contribution proposal to: daniela.coccobeltrame@manchester.ac.uk

Session type:
Creative session

In times of widespread authoritarian governance, environmental devastation, and deepening socio-spatial inequalities, youth-led social movements have emerged as crucial sites of radical imagination and transformative praxis. Across African cities - and increasingly worldwide, young people living in informal settlements and other historically marginalised contexts are not merely mobilising against exclusionary urban development but actively reshaping how knowledge is produced, shared, and mobilised in struggles for the right to the city.

This panel positions young people as present-day political actors and epistemic agents who co-produce urban knowledge alongside elders, women's groups, and grassroots organisations. In doing so, we seek to challenge established hierarchies of knowledge production that privilege academic and institutional expertise over lived experience and situated understanding, and we create space to reimagine methodologies from below that connect urban research with social movements, particularly urgent as authoritarianism and militarised urbanism threaten collective spaces of resistance.

This panel centres on the engagement of historically marginalised youth in urban social movements through the lens of knowledge production “from below”. Drawing on practices exemplified by networks such as Slum Dwellers International - including horizontal learning rituals, community-led data collection, and intergenerational organising, we seek
submissions that highlight how youth from historically marginalised backgrounds - particularly those living in informal settlements, build solidarity across lines of age and gender while contesting hegemonic development paradigms that render their communities invisible or disposable.

The panel invites critical exploration of several interconnected themes: How do youth activists generate alternative data practices and counter-narratives that challenge dominant representations of informal settlements? What forms of intergenerational solidarity enable
sustained urban commoning, and where do tensions around power, voice, and recognition emerge? How do youth navigate the challenges of sustaining movements amid violence, precarity, and displacement? And crucially, what can scholars learn from youth-led methodologies to decolonise urban research and foster more accountable knowledge
production?

We welcome submissions that contribute to these reflections through diverse theoretical perspectives, empirical cases, and practical experiences. Topics may include but are not limited to: youth-led mapping and data activism; intergenerational alliances and their
contradictions; gendered dimensions of youth organising; creative resistance strategies (art, music, digital media); the role of care and mutual aid in sustaining movements; and comparative insights across urban contexts facing authoritarianism and environmental crisis.

Structured as a horizontal learning exchange, this panel embraces diverse submission formats to foster genuine dialogue between activists and scholars. We welcome papers, practitioner reflections, visual presentations, video documentation, and creative interventions that speak to the panel themes. While emphasising informal settlements in urban Africa, we are open to contributions examining youth-led knowledge production in historically marginalised contexts globally, particularly those that illuminate shared struggles and possibilities for transnational solidarity.

By centering youth voices and grassroots epistemologies, this panel seeks to advance the conference's commitment with co-produced knowledge between activists and scholars, contributing to meaningful engagement of academia with the urgent realities facing communities on the frontlines of urban injustice.

Panel organizers:
Maria Wallstam, IBF Uppsala University
Nikos Vrantsis, IBF Uppsala University

Submit paper/contribution proposal to:
maria.wallstam@ibf.uu.se

Session type:
Thematic session

Urban research has largely focused on the political economy of space and accumulation through the built environment, with particular emphasis on finance and rent, while paying far less attention to the construction sector and the labor processes that materially produce
urban space.

This session shifts analytical and political attention toward construction and the social relations through which urban space is produced, as well as historical and contemporary efforts to decommodify this production. Construction sits at the intersection of multiple crises. It is a major driver of global emissions and resource extraction, and it depends on deeply fragmented, precarious, and often brutal labor relations.

The session starts from the premise that studying urban space production means examining how labor is mobilized, disciplined, and decomposed to fix value in the built environment. Urban space production is understood here in material terms, encompassing construction, demolition, maintenance, control, and expansion, rather than symbolic representation.

Drawing on critical political economy and labor geography, the session treats the antagonism between capital and labor as central to understanding urbanization under capitalism. While labor is indispensable, it is continuously governed through fragmentation, precarity, and spatial control. Accumulation-oriented urban development, combined with wage suppression, penetrates social reproduction, turning struggles over labor, housing, and everyday life into potential sites of refusal and collective power.

We invite empirical, historical, and theoretical contributions that engage with questions such as how profit-driven space production under rentier capitalism reshapes labor relations, supply chains, and environmental harm; how accumulation regimes shape the forms of urban space being produced; and how state policies, planning regimes, and property
relations structure both domination and resistance in construction.

We are particularly interested in analyses that trace the antagonism between labor and capital across the wider production chain of urban space, including the forms of struggle that have emerged within the construction sector and the historical efforts by workers, unions,
and communities to decommodify construction and space production. Contributions may also examine the role of cooperatives, union ownership, and commons-based production in reorganizing labor practices and ecological outcomes, and explore how housing, labor, and
climate justice can be articulated together through struggles over the production of space.

By bringing housing justice into dialogue with labor struggles and material production, the session aims to expose the social and ecological costs of contemporary urban development and to open space for collective imaginaries and practices of just and sustainable
urbanization.

Panel organizers:
Z. Ezgi Haliloğlu Kahraman, Cankaya University & Geneva Graduate
Institute

Submit paper/contribution proposal to:
ezgi.kahraman@graduateinstitute.ch

Session type:
Regular panel

Cities across the globe have become sites where multiple crises—economic instability, forced displacement, environmental degradation, and authoritarian governance—are no longer exceptional but embedded in everyday urban life. For many urban residents, living with crisis has become routine. For refugees, however, crises are experienced repeatedly and across different places, shaping a life marked by uncertainty, precarity, and constant navigation and negotiation.

This panel focuses on refugees’ everyday urban experiences, particularly in crisis-ridden cities, with particular attention to housing, settlement, and access to urban resources. While the settlement process in host cities often begins with urgent goals such as finding work, housing, and basic services, it frequently evolves into a persistent fear of loss—of housing, neighbourhoods, and the city itself. Uncertainty and crisis management thus become integral parts of everyday life.

The panel explores how refugees develop diverse everyday practices to cope with and navigate these conditions, and asks when and how such individual struggles turn into collective forms of urban commoning. How do refugees themselves define and experience urban commons? Can collective navigation of housing markets, services, and neighbourhoods generate collective capacities and contribute to struggles for urban justice? How are these capacities shaped by different political, economic, and urban contexts?

Bringing together empirical contributions from different cities and regions across the world, the panel aims to discuss transformative experiences of urban commoning from below and the methodologies used to make these practices visible. By foregrounding everyday life as a
key terrain of struggle, collective navigation, and commoning, the panel contributes to broader debates on urban justice, housing, and commoning in times of authoritarianism and multiple crises.

Panel organizers:
Verena Lenna, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Submit paper/contribution proposal to:
verena.lenna@vub.be

Session type:
Regular panel

Balancing social and environmental justice is rarely straightforward and often fuels conflict and wicked problems in our cities. Should we preserve sites that have been reclaimed by nature, or should we use the land to develop urgently needed social housing? Can profit-oriented dynamics coexist with socially inclusive programs? Should we prioritise
environmentally friendly renovation materials or opt for more affordable solutions? Green or accessible?

The hypothesis this panel seeks to explore is that commons-oriented approaches to resource governance offer promising strategies for addressing wicked problems. Commons-oriented initiatives, because of their ecological complexity and interdependency-based dynamics, are particularly well suited to addressing wicked problems, as they imply an ecosystemic perspective and continuously experiment with adaptive approaches responding to ever-changing environmental conditions. Specifically, commoning often establishes knowledge-exchange frameworks that facilitate a better understanding of diverse interests and needs, while also recognising multiple forms of expertise and responsibility. This can move processes beyond mere confrontation toward facilitation and hybrid solutions. Public–civic partnerships and “triple-helix” settings—combining civil society organisations, academics, and administrative actors—provide examples of this dynamic. Furthermore, the mixed nature of these collaborations often enables creative, multilayered solutions to otherwise paradoxical conditions. Finally, by fostering convergence between human and non-human agents, they generate new assemblages, capacities, and forms of collaboration, and enable the reconciliation of seemingly opposing priorities in the name of stewardship of shared “resources”. The hypothesis at the origin of this panel is that wicked problems have a chance to be reframed and dissolve when viewed through the ecosystemic lens and experimental frameworks that commoning offers. While this represents significant potential, obstacles and challenges remain that can hinder effective outcomes.

Within this conceptual framework, the panel aims to engage with a variety of empirical case studies that both support the hypothesis and highlight the limitations and challenges of commons-based approaches in addressing the wicked issues of contemporary cities. Cases of commoning addressing urban sites where issues of social and ecological justice are notoriously considered irreconcilable are particularly welcome, to focus the reflection on forms of adaptive plural governance enabling the tackling of irreconcilable positions: reclaimed empty buildings, renaturalized sites, agricultural domains, forests, water bodies,
and other natural commons in urban, peri-urban, and rural settings. Contributions from researchers, activists, and/or policymakers are encouraged in order to explore the potential of commoning in reframing wicked issues while generating transdisciplinary knowledge and perspectives. Theoretical contributions are also welcome to enrich the debate and generate hybrid perspectives on ill-defined issues.

Panel organizers:
Katalin Ámon, ELTE Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Minority
Studies
Fanni Dés, ELTE Centre for Social Science, Institute for Minority Studies
Angelina Kussy, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Submit paper/contribution proposal to:
amon.katalin@tk.hu

Session type:
Regular panel

In the past 10 years, many activists and grassroots civil groups in European countries have channelled their power into the feminist movement, for example, to frame the structural gender inequalities in reproductive labor, to act against violence against women, and to
promote new municipalism. New municipalism, in itself, is rooted in the feminization of politics, enacting a politics of care and a vision of establishing caring commons in urban contexts. Scholarship on new municipalism, radical municipalism, and care municipalism, as
well as social infrastructures, urban and caring commons offer rich conceptual frameworks to understand how feminist social provisioning and the feminization of politics are essential in creating new urban imaginaries: visions and practices as social, political, and economic
alternatives that transgress the boundaries and limitations of the market and the state.

Housing has a central role in these imaginaries and the theories that reflect on them. Housing as a financial asset is a key driver of financial capitalism, while the right to housing is essential to social citizenship and the right to the city. It is a central claim of social movements that emerged after the Great Recession that a physical and abstract site exists in which new imaginaries of a liveable society can be constructed. The lack of affordable housing pushes women towards relationships based on violence and exploitation. In right-wing authoritarian contexts, such as Hungary, pronatalist-familist housing policies further deepen these inequalities, which focus on middle-class family home ownership, and even those are often conditional on joint credit and marriage. At the same time, new municipalist and grassroots NGOs and social groups engage in policy and political practices, aiming to establish housing commons that not only offer a vision of the decommodification of
housing but also of caring communities. These attempts to create alternatives to the capitalist mode of housing production and social reproduction face many obstacles: housing speculation and state-subsidized housing developments, exacerbating the rise of real estate
and land prices, the ideology of home ownership and family values, authoritarianism, and the lack of interconnectedness between the housing and feminist movements, to mention a few.

This panel offers an opportunity to explore the potential and obstacles of the commoning of housing and care, both theoretically and empirically. This includes feminist theories on housing and social reproduction, including housing commons and feminist critiques of home
ownership; empirical studies and theoretical reflections on new municipalism and other practices of feminization of politics, policy, and political practices creating housing and caring commons, pronatalist-familist housing policies, and their alternatives; the theoretical and
empirical intersections between feminist and housing movements.

Panel organizers:
Francesca Ru, IBF Uppsala University

Submit paper/contribution proposal to:
francesca.ru@ibf.uu.se

Session type:
Regular panel

This session aims to explore the dynamics and implications of commercial gentrification (Hubbard, 2017) and the transformation of urban landscapes driven by touristification and foodification. The upgrading, commodification, and aestheticization of commercial areas
(Zukin, 1998) profoundly reshape the social composition, economic fabric, and everyday temporalities of neighbourhoods, redefining who belongs, who circulates, and who consumes in the contemporary city.

Commercial gentrification does not merely entail the replacement of one set of shops with another; it alters the rhythms(Kern, 2016) and mobilities of urban life. As local markets and long-standing shops close—often under the combined pressures of neoliberal urban policies
(Gonzalez, 2018), rising rents, and changing consumption patterns—neighbourhoods lose their dense networks of social interaction and informal care, that such spaces sustain (Watson, 2009). In their place emerge tourist-oriented, upscale venues or gentrified markets
(Guimarães, 2018) catering to transient and wealthier populations. These processes, on the other hand, also generate commercial desertification, as visible in cities such as Venice (Salerno, 2022), where everyday provisioning spaces are replaced by souvenir stores and short-term food outlets, leading to forms of food privileges (Anguelovski, 2015), in which only certain groups enjoy exclusive access to better quality food.

This session invites contributions that examine how such transformations reshape the temporal and spatial infrastructures of neighbourhood life: the rhythms of opening and closing, the patterns of mobility, and the affective attachments to local places. We are
particularly interested in analyses of the displacement of long-standing businessesand the exclusion of working-class populations – both residents and workers – who are increasingly pushed out of areas where upscale commercial activities and tourist consumption dominate.
In addition, the session seeks to interrogate how urban policies contribute to these processes. Policies targeting businesses associated with “undesirable” or “deviant” populations—such as the stigmatization of bangladini shops in Italy—often serve to reinforce exclusionary dynamics, moralize consumption, and sanitize urban space in line with
middle-class and tourist expectations, following policies promoting decorum (Pitch). These practices reveal the intersection between economic restructuring, symbolic control, and racialized forms of urban inequality.

At the same time, we welcome papers that examine resistance and counter-gentrification practices. Local markets, small retailers, and informal economies can act as brakes to gentrification processes, struggling against displacement sustaining alternative temporalities and relational networks that resist the homogenizing pressures of neoliberal urbanism. Through these spaces of (sometime involuntary) resistance, everyday life may offer a vantage point for rethinking urban justice, social sustainability, and the right to remain. By bringing together comparative and case-based studies, this session aims to deepen our understanding of how commercial gentrification reconfigures the social, spatial, and temporal dynamics of contemporary cities, and to reflect on the policies and practices that might
counter its exclusionary effects.

Panel organizers:
Nikos Vrantsis, IBF Uppsala University

Submit paper/contribution proposal to:
nikos.vrantsis@ibf.uu.se

Session type:
Regular panel

Shielded by the institutional insulation of academia and NGOs, critical intellectual life has often turned inward, developing a self-referential language increasingly detached from social struggle (Riley, 2025). Yet the current wave of authoritarian attacks on liberal institutions may
paradoxically force a rupture with this enclosure. As the protections of academic autonomy erode, critical intellectuals may be pushed into more direct and organic relations with the political and social forces from which they have long been severed.

This long-standing severance has had clear effects. Repeated proclamations of the “end of the working class” (Nisbet 1959; Wrong 1964; Gorz 1982; Beck 1992; 2007) hastily declared a farewell to labour as a central political subject. At the same time, urban research has extensively documented processes of financialisation, housing commodification, dispossession, and the militarisation of space, while often treating labour as a residual category. These approaches rarely explain how dispersed experiences of exploitation and domination might be recomposed into collective power. Discussions of agency persist, but frequently as weak, catch-all descriptors of individual coping strategies or minor adaptations to over-exploitation, rather than as concepts capable of accounting for class formation and political recomposition.

Against this backdrop, this session asks how workers’ inquiry must be updated under conditions of authoritarian urbanism, rentier capitalism, and overlapping ecological and social crises, while insisting on the continued centrality of labour as the focal point of organising and struggle. It proposes a collective re-engagement with workers’ inquiry as a methodology, a politics of knowledge, and a practice of intervention, refocusing analysis on labour under capitalism, around which relations of domination, exploitation, and resistance are articulated.

While workers’ inquiry emerged in relation to the factory and the wage relation, its central wager remains urgently relevant today: that labour is ontologically primary (Tronti, 1966); that class is formed through antagonistic processes rather than sociological classifications
(Roggero, 2023); and that knowledge production is itself a weapon of organising (Alquati 1993; Hoffman, 2019), capable of engaging with collective actors and helping to turn lukewarm struggles into open antagonism.

The session advances three interconnected points. First, workers’ inquiry requires a rigorous interrogation of critical researchers’ own subjectivity, recognising capitalist social relations as both the object of study and the object of hata (Roggero, 2023), and orienting knowledge production toward collective actors capable of acting upon it. Second, it confronts the unresolved problem of the relation between labour and class, insisting on class as a social relation (Durou, 2019) forged through struggle rather than occupational positioning or stratification categories. Third, it seeks to identify concrete sites of inquiry and struggle within
contemporary rentier capitalism in authoritarian urban contexts.

Rather than allowing inquiry to collapse into a research technique or funding rhetoric, this session invites theoretical reflections, empirical cases, and activist experiences that reclaim workers’ inquiry as a living practice. At stake is the possibility of producing knowledge with
struggles, not merely about them, and of turning urban research into a weapon for housing justice, urban commons, and collective resistance in a burning world.

The session welcomes contributions addressing questions such as:

• How can workers’ inquiry be adapted to the conditions of urban rentier capitalism and authoritarian governance?
• How does inquiry operate under regimes of surveillance, repression, and permanent crisis?
• What forms of labour recomposition are emerging across urban production and social reproduction?
• How can inquiry contribute to struggles for urban commons, housing justice, and collective resistance?

Panel organizers:
Beatriz Palmeira, State Secretariat for Transport and Urban Development
(SETRAND) of Alagoas, Brazil
Professor Juciela Cristina dos Santos, Federal University of
Alagoas
Professor Rafaela Faciola Coelho de Sousa Ferreira, Federal University of
Alagoas
Andreia Nunes Estevam, SETRAND/AL

Submit paper/contribution proposal to:
beatrizpalmeira.urb@gmail.com

Session type:
Thematic session

Across the Global South, millions of urban residents live in territories rendered institutionally invisible due to the absence of basic urban infrastructures, among which postal addressing remains critically underestimated. The lack of official street names, house numbers, and
formal addresses is not merely a technical gap, but a structural mechanism that restricts access to rights, public services, and political recognition. In times of authoritarian governance, fiscal austerity, and deepening urban inequalities, addressing emerges as a strategic (yet contested) terrain of urban justice.

This thematic session builds on the experience of the State of Alagoas, Brazil, where a partnership between the State Secretariat for Transport and Urban Development (SETRAND) and the Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL) has implemented a large-scale addressing initiative in peripheral and informal settlements. Developed in articulation with social interest land regularization (REURB-S), the program Um Endereço para Chamar de Seu (An address to call yours) positions postal addressing as a key preparatory and enabling step for the implementation of REURB-S, creating the institutional, legal, and territorial conditions required for land regularization to advance. Operating at the intersection of cartography, public policy, and community engagement, the program frames postal addressing as a foundational infrastructure of citizenship and territorial recognition.

Beyond its local impacts, the Alagoas experience has functioned as one of several policy laboratories with national implications. The methodologies, institutional arrangements, and territorial diagnostics developed through the program have contributed to and helped inform
the federal initiative CEP para Todos (ZIPCODE for everyone), currently promoted by the Brazilian Ministry of Cities to expand postal recognition in favelas and urban communities nationwide. This trajectory highlights how state and local level experiments can influence federal agendas, while also exposing the limitations of national programs that rely
exclusively on census-based territorial classifications and partial addressing solutions.

The session deliberately approaches addressing not as a neutral technical procedure, but as a political and institutional process shaped by power relations, legal frameworks, and struggles over urban visibility. It examines the conditions required to scale addressing policies beyond isolated projects, including intergovernmental coordination, judicial
engagement, community validation, and the production of reliable territorial data in contexts marked by informality and institutional fragility.

Structured as a thematic session, the panel will feature short initial reflections (5–10 minutes) from invited speakers, followed by an open debate between the session chairs and the audience. Bringing together situated experiences from different institutional and research positions, the session aims to foster critical reflection on postal addressing as a
political–institutional action within broader struggles for urban justice.

Speakers include: (1) specialists in REURB-S and land regularization, addressing legal and institutional dimensions; (2) researchers from the Laboratory of Urban Research (LA.R/UFAL), presenting methodological innovations in participatory mapping and cartographic production;
and (3) a representative from SETRAND, reflecting on the challenges of implementing and scaling addressing as a public policy.

By connecting a situated Brazilian experience to national and global debates on urban commons, right to the city, and governance from below, the session offers transferable insights for cities and countries facing similar challenges of territorial invisibility. Beyond material and administrative benefits, the discussion highlights how access to an official address fosters a sense of possession, belonging, and symbolic recognition, reshaping residents’ relationship with their territory and with the state. It argues that addressing, often treated as mundane bureaucracy, can become a powerful tool for advancing urban justice
across diverse geopolitical contexts.

Organizers:
Dominika V Polanska, Södertörn University/Stockholm University
Hannes Rolf, Stockholm University
Lisa Kings, Södertörn University
Lucas Poy, IISG
Nikos Vrantsis, IBF Uppsala University (Chair)

Event type:
Book talk

This session explores collective urban struggles for housing justice in times of deepening inequalities and authoritarian tendencies, while also examining the history of historical struggles to draw lessons for the future. It brings together insights from two complementary works:

Rent Strikes: A History of Collective Tenant Actions Across the World (Poy & Rolf, 2025, UCL Press). This anthology traces the global history of tenant organizing and rent strikes as a powerful repertoire of contention, highlighting how tenants have organized across diverse contexts to resist displacement, rent hikes, and housing precarity.

Urban Struggles in Sweden: In Need of a New Approach? (Kings & Polanska, 2026, Palgrave Macmillan). This book offers a comprehensive, longitudinal analysis of urban movements in Sweden from the 1940s to the present. It proposes a new conceptual and methodological lens to understand both visible and hidden practices of resistance, focusing
on tenants’ movements and urban justice mobilizations.

Together, these works invite reflection on the intersections between housing struggles, urban justice, and the right to the city. How do performances like rent strikes travel across contexts? What can Swedish urban movements teach us about organizing in the everyday and resisting structural inequalities? And crucially, what lessons can we learn from the past to inform future struggles for urban justice?

Organizers:
Federico Smania, University of Milano-Bicocca
Lab "The Big Game" - OffTopic - (CIO) Unsustainable Olympics Committee

Event type:
Movie screening and discussion

This creative session centres on a collective screening of The Great Game: The Flip Side of Olympic Medals (2025, 69 minutes), a political and militant documentary produced from within the anti-Olympic network C.I.O. – Comitato Insostenibili Olimpiadi (Unsustainable
Olympics Committee). The film takes Milano–Cortina 2026 as a privileged vantage point to question the Olympic promise of sustainability, inclusion and cooperation, and to unpack how the mega-event operates as a “grandiose show” that attracts capital and legitimises predatory uses of social and environmental resources. By following activists and affected communities across different territories, the documentary foregrounds how the benefits of the Games tend to concentrate among a few actors, while costs diffuse through housing pressures, socio-spatial exclusion, and the reshaping of everyday life under event-led urbanism. Narratively conceived as three “rounds” of a match, the film moves from the city to sport and then to the mountains. The first act focuses on Milan—specifically the stretch from Scalo Romana (site of the Olympic Village) to the Corvetto district—where luxury redevelopment, speculative dynamics and securitising impulses clash with the right to
remain and to inhabit the city. The second act interrogates sport itself, contrasting the privatising model promoted by mega-events with the possibility of popular, inclusive, grassroots practices as a way of reclaiming urban space. The third act turns to mountain territories, where the “development model” tied to alpine skiing is portrayed as increasingly unsustainable under climate change, while past Olympic ruins (such as the abandoned Turin 2006 facilities) appear as warnings about future “legacies.”

After the screening, an hour-long facilitated discussion will open a methodological roundtable on audiovisual products as research tools. The film itself began as a collective workshop inside C.I.O., lasted roughly two years, was self-financed, and involved filmmakers, workers,
researchers and students; it is explicitly an “insider’s account,” filmed live within an unfolding political process. Building on this experience, we will reflect on what it means to “do research with images” in movement contexts: how filming and montage can function as inquiry and counter-expertise; how evidence, affect and narration interact in producing public truth-claims; and what ethical and epistemic tensions emerge when those behind the camera are also participants in the struggle—negotiating consent, representation, risk, and the uneven visibility that comes with political conflict.

For more details:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GAeUJnBRoq2efNuW4KAKMwjIfncoQGeQ/view?usp=drive_link
https://www.offtopiclab.org/ilgrandegioco/
https://cio2026.org/

Organizers:
Nadia Bertolino, University of Pavia & Architecture of Care Collective

Event type:
Walking tour

This creative session takes scholarship to the streets, building on Uppsala's Housing and Urban Justice Project's commitment to engaged research. We propose a critical walking methodology through an Uppsala neighborhood—sites like Gränby or Kvarngärdet, where renoviction processes, place destruction, and tenant resistance have transformed everyday life. Crucially, this walk is facilitated and attended by international participants largely unfamiliar with Uppsala's context. This productive unfamiliarity becomes methodological strength: participants bring fresh eyes to landscapes that local actors may have naturalised,
ask naïve questions that denaturalise what seems inevitable and draw unexpected connections between Uppsala's struggles and housing struggles in their home contexts.

WALKING AS RESEARCH, WALKING AS CARING PRACTICE

This is a situated inquiry—collective bearing witness to what is present and what has been erased. Drawing from participatory action research and engaged scholarship traditions, we understand walking as methodology and political practice. Our bodies moving through
contested space become instruments for reading how "creative destruction" operates—how landlords remove trees and playgrounds, how rent increases follow renovations, how residents' "right to stay put" becomes daily struggle.

The international composition of participants generates productive tensions: What strikes international participants as shocking may have been normalised locally; what seems uniquely Swedish to outsiders may reveal patterns recognizable from other contexts. Participants from Southern Europe might recognize Uppsala's financialisation despite
Sweden's different housing regime; those from Latin America might identify forms of spatial violence operating beneath welfare state rhetoric; researchers from contexts with weaker tenant protections might perceive what's at stake as Swedish organizing tools erode. This
collision of perspectives—between familiarity and unfamiliarity, local knowledge and outsider perception—becomes the walk's generative core.

MAPPING THE UNMAPPABLE

Participants will collaboratively produce a map capturing what eludes conventional cartography: affective geographies of renoviction-induced displacement, invisible emotional harm inflicted on residents who "stay put" yet lose their neighborhood, networks of mutual aid. Crucially, the map expresses our collective inability to comprehend—acknowledging
limits of observation, partiality of our vision, knowledge remaining inaccessible to those experiencing these processes daily. This epistemic humility is especially vital when participants lack local context: the map documents both what we learn and what remains opaque, both moments of recognition and moments of incomprehension.

We employ multiple mapping techniques: hand-drawn annotations, collective narrative-building, photographic documentation, audio recording when residents consent. The unfamiliarity of participants shapes what gets mapped—outsiders may notice spatial details locals overlook, may stumble over what requires explanation, may connect Uppsala's struggles to seemingly distant contexts, revealing translocal patterns of housing financialization.

CHALLENGING MAINSTREAM HOUSING NARRATIVES

This session confronts sanitised language: "renovation" (renoviction), "upgrading" (displacement), "neighborhood renewal" (place destruction). We identify where these euphemisms operate in Uppsala's landscape, where Million Programme housing representing Sweden's welfare state success becomes terrain for profit extraction. International participants' unfamiliarity helps denaturalize these euphemisms—what Swedish
participants might decode automatically becomes subject to collective scrutiny and naming.

We center both visible and invisible struggles. Visible: Gränby tenants' confrontational resistance, tenant union organizing, 2021 mobilizations bringing down government over market rent reforms. Invisible: daily navigation of "domicide," emotional harm of watching familiar places destroyed, exhaustion of fighting through collective bargaining systems
increasingly unable to protect tenants.

This walking methodology builds on engaged research understanding knowledge as collaborative. Knowledge produced belongs to participants and affected communities—a tool for organising, distributed freely, revised continuously. The unfamiliar eyes of international participants offer fresh perspectives while remaining accountable to local struggles, creating possibilities for translocal solidarity where housing justice movements learn from each other's contexts, tactics, and vocabularies of resistance.