Since its founding, the Beyond Inhabitation Lab has provided an infrastructure for collective study of the changing terrains and politics of inhabitation around the world. Our work has been organized around one guiding question: How are urbanites re-doing inhabitation through mundane struggles against historic and contemporary forms of dispossession?
We pursued this question across a set of intersecting initiatives:
1. Collective work with our steering committee
We sustained extended online conversations, seminars, and events with the steady intellectual engagement of our steering committee. Committee members have driven much of the Lab’s activity through situated inquiries and collaborative work. The committee included Asha Best, Cristina Cielo, Aïcha Diallo, Margherita Grazioli, Rupali Gupte, Wangui Kimari, Erin McElRoy, Alana Osbourne, Irene Peano, and Emma Shaw Crane.
2. International events, summer schools, and seminar series
Over the past five years the Lab organized numerous international events, including two intensive summer programs (Turin and Lisbon, in partnership with the Urban Transitions Hub) that brought together 15 international fellows and featured keynotes by Gilmore, Thieme, Osbourne, de Boeck, Alves, and Simone. A Manifesto emerging from the Schools will appear in the journal City in early 2026. We also convened an extended collaborative workshop with ULIP in Paris, a two-day academic workshop with the Urban Institute in Sheffield, and delivered 25 public lectures by distinguished international scholars both in Turin and online.
Many seminars have been recorded and are freely available on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@beyondinhabitationlab762/videos. All public-facing events are listed on the Lab’s website.
3. ERC “Inhabiting Radical Housing” project
The Lab’s work in its first five years was funded by the ERC project Inhabiting Radical Housing, led by Michele Lancione. The project explored how housing and inhabitation struggles intersect with—and co-constitute—broader fights against class, racial, and gender injustice globally. It advanced a housing-justice research approach grounded in three tenets: a decolonial and intersectional theorization, ethnography oriented to situated engagement, and a committed approach to knowledge exchange. Project team members were also the Lab’s core researchers and central to its development: Chiara Cacciotti, Rodrigo Castriota, Mara Ferreri, Daniela Morpurgo, Oluwafemi Olajide, Veda Popovici, Rayna Rusenko, Ana Vilenica, and Devra Waldman. The Lab also hosted fellows through international fellowships, including Melissa García-Lamarca, Daniela Giudici, Chiara Iacovone, and Syeda Jenifa Zahan.
The published works emerging from the ERC programme of work are available here: https://beyondinhabitation.org/publications
Moving on
This five-year cycle initiated in 2019-2020 at the University of Sheffield with a series of workshops on the theme of “Dwelling in Liminalities” (see our positioning paper in EPD) and virtually closes with the forthcoming publication of our joint monograph “Beyond Inhabitation: Housing and Ordinary Desire at the Edge” (forthcoming fall 2026, Duke University Press).
We extend our thanks to the ERC postdoctoral fellows, steering committee members, and Turin-based scholars who have invested time and energy to populate the Lab with ideas, debates, and projects. A special thanks to everyone who participated in our events and seminars.
In January 2026 we will launch a thematic program for the next five years focused on Mediterranean geographies, where we will further unpack habitability, urbanity, racial politics, and speculative imaginaries. At this crucial juncture—marked by colonial and genocidal wars, the establishment of fascist biopolitics, and increasing attacks on critical academic inquiry—we renew our commitment to making the Lab an infrastructure for unapologetically political and conceptual work.
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Michele Lancione and AbdouMaliq Simone