Lab Director Michele Lancione has just received news that his project, Housing precarity in Eastern Europe: histories, geographies and urban political economies, will be funded by a FARE grant from The Italian Ministry of University and Research. This project will run for the next four years and will complement the ERC project Inhabiting Radical Housing, by expanding its remit towards Eastern European geographies.
In particular, the project will focus on three main concerns: i) the financialisation of housing in Central Eastern Europe, and the role of Western capital in shaping contemporary urban housing questions there; ii) the modalities and politics of grassroots housing organising; and iii) changes in everyday housing and urban affective regimes in three selected cities, investigated through audio-visual methods. A new postdoctoral member will be joining the Lab to navigate the intricacies of the first concern, while the other two will be managed directly by Professor Lancione and members of the current ERC team.
Finally, project resources will be used to support and expand the work of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab with the aim of providing further means of exchange and collective study with scholars and activists based in CEE.