The Housing and Urban Justice Project

The Housing & Urban Justice Project is a research group established at IBF with the aim of promoting critical research and contributions to urban, housing and environmental justice.

The research group conducts research on social inequalities, marginalisation and oppressions that are especially manifested across urban settings, although not limited to them. In particular The Housing & Urban Justice Project aim at addressing class, gender, ethnic, citizenship, ability and other dimensions of social cleavages that are expressed in residential conditions, urban planning and the appropriation of spaces in towns, cities and large metropolitan areas. The scope and scale of land dispossession, displacement and exclusion from adequate housing and essential urban goods and services are multifarious nowadays.

The roots of these phenomena are mostly located in power relations which, in turn, shape specific policies, political camps and grassroots social movements. They affect very different territories in the Global North and the Global South, although there are also flows of people, commodities, information and capital that cross national boundaries under very unequal conditions.

This research group frames its approach in the understanding of global processes of accumulation by dispossession which also are locally manifested, for example, in the renovictions that have been largely observed in Sweden, particularly by IBF-researchers, and the increasing dominance of large-scale corporate landlords, investment funds and asset managers. The financialisation of capitalism adds gendered and racialised dimensions to an acute affordability housing crisis signed by privatisations, state disinvestment, skyrocketing energy costs, home evictions, homelessness and the formation of a new housing precariat.

The current and accelerated environmental catastrophes, pandemics such as the Covid-19 and others, the rise of far-right political parties and governments, and ongoing devastating wars are not less important constraints of urban life and home-making across the world. In our view, these drivers and developments need to be rigorously investigated but also interpreted by considering the claims for rights, needs and justice mobilised by progressive grassroots struggles. Urban, housing and environmental issues are the key motivation for some social movements, but also become integrated in other activisms focused on gender and racial justice, for example.

A critical approach to these issues not only gives priority to identify and provide consistent knowledge about them, but also engages in normative debates about the claims at stake. Urban justice is thus a general horizon of well-being, human rights, democracy, economic equality and ecological transitions of urban living that informs both the social struggles on the urban, hosing and environmental realms, and our scientific analyses about them.

The Housing & Urban Justice Project hosts and welcomes different research programmes and specific projects that align with the above perspective. On the one hand, we continue focusing on research topics that have already occupied IBF-researchers, such as social movements and resistance against renovictions, spatial racialisation, stigmatisation, gentrification, housing precariousness, gender discrimination, privatisations, as well as struggles for environmental justice, squatting, inclusive planning, and the accommodation of refugees, to mention but a few. On the other hand, we foster a forum for the discussion of research results, theoretical, methodological, political, ontological and ethical issues related to the production of knowledge on urban, housing and environmental justice. Regarding methods, we are particularly open to mixed- methods approaches combining qualitative and quantitative insights to social phenomena, but also respect coherent methodological choices according to the social problems under examination and the research questions asked. Furthermore, we welcome participatory and activist methods involving the co-production of knowledge with research participants.