This month we continue our series of posts aimed at presenting the most recent research developments of the Lab’s Core Team. We are going to feature all of our researchers who are working as part of the ERC Inhabiting Radical Housing (IRH) project, the FARE Precarious Housing in Eastern Europe project, or who are pursuing their own individual Marie-Curie or USF fellowships.
We continue with Daniela Giudici, Marie-Curie Global Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Lab.
Daniela Giudici is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at DIST, Polytechnic of Turin and Milieux Institute, Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is an anthropologist whose research centers on the intersections of the urban and the political, with a specific focus on grassroots activism and material ecologies of urban life. Daniela has been also engaged in ethnographic work on asylum politics, welfare restructuring, housing and social precarity. Her current Marie Curie project (TAKEBACK) investigates the intersections of urban transformations, urban activism and sustainability agendas, in Canada and Europe. Particularly, the project explores different urban mobilizations focused on the collective reappropriation and/or use of vacant ex-industrial areas. By tracing evolving understandings of collective care within activism, this research seeks to cast new light on how changing human-environment relationships shape political struggles in contemporary cities.

At the moment Daniela lives in Montreal, where she is completing a one-year fieldwork on urban “vacant” areas as sites where different visions of the urban future are enacted and contested. As a city longtime struggling with postindustrial decline, Montreal is nowadays in the middle of a burst of revitalization projects and, as professed by the current administration, a “green revival”. Until recently known as Canada’s “rental paradise”, it is also a city marked by an increasingly uneven urban development and a generalized crisis of affordability. Daniela’s research has been particularly focused on struggles against revitalization projects and new infrastructural developments in the east of Montreal Island. In this part of the city, once one of Canada’s largest industrial suburbs, spontaneous “urban nature” has increasingly taken over vacant areas and wastelands. Yet, those terrains vagues are supposed to leave space for major infrastructural developments, which will mainly serve the expansion of the adjacent industrial port of Montreal. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth qualitative interviews, as well as discursive analysis of planning documents, media, and social media, Daniela’s ongoing research traces the mismatch between institutional promises of “sustainable” urban futures, and grassroots struggles for the right to inhabit healthy and just urban environments. At the same time, by exploring how residents and activists forge new alliances with living plants and animals, she aims at shedding light on how non-human life increasingly participates in political struggles and competing imaginaries of the urban future.
Recent publications
- Giudici, D. (2024). (Un)sustainable futures and the “vulnerable other”: Rethinking conditional inclusion in times of climate change. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544241287632
- Giudici D. (2024) Who feels safe? Uncertain futures and enduring aspirations in Italy. Geopolitics. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2024.2349633
- Giudici D. (2023) “(In)Visibility. On the doorstep of a mediatized refugees’ squat” In Boccagni P. & Bonfanti S. (eds). Entering Migrant Homes. New York: Springer OA, pp. 137-52.
Picture: Activists take over billboards in Montreal. September 2023. Photo by: Daniela Giudici.