The Beyond Inhabitation Lab provides an infrastructure to facilitate a process of collective study around the shifting terrain and politics of inhabitation globally. The goal is to investigate how inhabitation is re-worked from the ground across urban geographies in everyday life endurances that can morph, often silently, into struggles against contemporary and historical forms of dispossession. We read these processes in a situated, decolonial and intersectional way, beyond the conventions of humanitarian and technocratic approaches.
During its first five years (2020-2025), the Lab organised around Professor Lancione’s ERC Starting Grant on ‘Inhabiting Radical Housing‘, hosting a number of international researchers and a global steering committee. You can read about what we did at that time here.
In its second phase (2026-ongoing), the Lab is refocusing its geographic focus on the Mediterranean region. We are driven by curiosity and political urgency at a time when the Mediterranean and its broader regions are structuring racial death, genocide, neo-colonial enterprise, and capitalist war-logistics. At the same time, extended Mediterranean urbanities speak of proletarian struggles, undercurrents and connections among people, and speculative habitational futures that mix multiple languages, cultural traditions, and organizational forms that seem irreconcilable. The Lab will continue to provide an infrastructure for collective study around these themes. You can read more about our renewed agenda here.
Directors
Michele Lancione (he/they), Professor of Economic and Political Geography, Polytechnic of TurinVisiting Professor of Urban Studies, University of Sheffield
AbdouMaliq Simone, Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, Honorary Professor of Urban Studies at the ACC, University of Cape Town
Turin-based associates
The Turin-based associates are a key part of the Lab. They engage in local collective study and help to steer and manage the Lab’s work.
Current Turin-based associates (aa 2025/2026):
- Ms Caterina Ciarleglio
- Ms Giulia Corgnier
- Dr Daniela Giudici
- Dr Francesca Guarino
- Dr Chiara Iacovone
- Dr Alessandra Mossa
- Dr Saanchi Saxena
Former Lab’s steering committee members (2020-2025):
- Dr Asha Best
- Dr Cristina Cielo
- Ms Aïcha Diallo
- Dr Margherita Grazioli
- Dr Rupali Gupte
- Dr Wangui Kimari
- Dr Erin McElroy
- Dr Alana Osbourne
- Dr Irene Peano
- Dr Emma Shaw Crane
Former Lab’s Core Team members (2020-2025):
- Dr Chiara Cacciotti
- Dr Rodrigo Castriota
- Dr Mara Ferreri
- Dr Daniela Giudici
- Dr Chiara Iacovone
- Dr Daniela Morpurgo
- Dr Melissa García-Lamarca
- Dr Oluwafemi Olajide
- Dr Rayna Rusenko
- Dr Veda Popovici
- Dr Ana Vilenica
- Dr Devra Waldman
- Dr Syeda Jenifa Zahan
Visiting scholars
Current visiting scholars (aa 2025/2026):
- Dr Irene Peano
- Dr Julia Dzun
Scholars visiting must have an independent work program aligned with the Lab’s priorities. If you are interested in visiting us or collaborating in other ways, do get in touch.
In light of extended capacities to enclose, surveille, pre-empt, and capitalise upon the improbable. In light of the relegation of the marginalised, impoverished, and racialised to both objects of extraction and purveyors of liminality, what constitute viable performances of generativity beyond production? How is inhabitation re-imagined from those spaces where only the uninhabitable seems to be?
Lancione and Simone, 2022