Today we launch the renewed focus of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab, which will frame our work for the next five years (2026–2030). Our inquiry will unfold under the umbrella of The Political Re-creations of the Mediterranean and Their Urbanicities.
Under this theme we will extend our shared interests—dwellings, liminalities, urban habitability, racial biopolitics, and affirmatory politics—across the geographical signifier of the Mediterranean. Of what it lands on the sea and what is land of the sea; of what it crosses and what is made cross; of those imaginaries and subjectivities that might be only tangentially related to the perimeters of such sea, and might well extend beyond lands crossed by it, but do come back to its logistics, affects, aesthetics and (com)promises.
Our aim is to provide infrastructure for critical inquiry and generative political thinking rather than to codify a neat research program. 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. Providing infrastructure to explore these junctures requires an indication of intent and a willingness to connect across domains.
Initially, we will focus on three lines of inquiry:
1. Economic and infrastructural reversals
Across the Mediterranean basin, vast new residential and administrative zones are being built, major infrastructural projects are being conceived, and systematic destruction and reconstruction of urban fabrics are underway. The region is being reimagined as a strategic military arena where public, private, and international investments flow into infrastructures that instantiate multiple versions of “defense,” each tied to distinct military‑industrial complexes and their specific territorializations in cities and bodies. We will initiate conversation across the political, financial, and affective economies of these “plans.” What new infrastructural configurations are emerging in the urban Mediterranean? Why are they pursued, and do they generate multiplier effects—of any sort? The future disposition of militarized Gaza as a real‑estate fantasy falls into this inquiry as do visions such as Leonardo’s Med’Or, massive projects like Egypt’s Ras el‑Hekma, and Tirana’s continual reinventions under estate capitalism. A key element of inquiry will be the political ecology and material lives of the extractions that underpin these plans. What lies beneath mud and concrete, barbed wire and drones once these “plans” take effect—if they are ever completed, and if an “end” is even part of the plan to begin with?
2. The ambiguation of borders
Multiple border regimes and negotiations crisscross the region. Power is constantly reconfigured between the militarized extension of the EU’s migration‑death machine (including Frontex and national systems of migrant carcerality), the humanitarian border complex, and the steady encroachment of investments tied to cooperative arrangements among criminal syndicates in North Africa and Southern Europe. What trajectories of habitability remain possible, and which are yet to come, under such biopolitics of white European life? What languages are required to narrate the subjectifying power of these intersections—who gets to imagine living, and who is recognized as life worthy of protection? We will stretch the geographical signification of the Mediterranean to consider what lies beyond its southern shores: the terrains of European romanticism toward the deserts below, and local “insurgencies” that may not aim to seize conventional power but instead sustain perpetual volatility, filling vacuums with shifting tactics and economic games. We want to interrogate these turbulent rearrangements of power and population—often narrated as driving northward movement—and ask what it means when the Mediterranean region is instead being drawn southward, through apparently unregulated economic transformations, logistical chains, and new forms of bordering.
3. Habitational queering
From Naples to Tirana, and through Cairo, Beirut, and Marseille, popular neighbourhoods across the Mediterranean have long defied imposed conditions of habitability to forge new localities of radical community care. These includes the degree to which urban populations of North Africa maintain a proximate relation to the possibilities of explosive rupture — something barely successfully suppressed, but over long periods of time that also induce a kind of stupor in the population — but also something awaiting perhaps an unfamiliar trigger, not in the modality of a “Spring” but a detonation that comes suddenly with unpredictable results. We are also interested in struggles around homing and gender, as well as homing and mental health: the terrains and subjectivities they (re)activate and how these emerge from proletarian and popular grounds. What speculative and immediate reconfigurations stretch Mediterranean cities beyond the violences of imposed habitability? Which affirmatory gestures, practices, songs, and dreams point toward a radically different cartography of Mediterranean habitation—at the level of urban practice and at the level of subjectification—with particular attention to their conflicting propositions?
Organization and activities
The Lab henceforth will not be organized around a permanent steering committee but through curated connections and working groups across the region. We will continue to host visiting scholars in Turin and involve a selected cohort of Turin‑based geography researchers and research students in designing and running our activities. In 2026, our program will include a year‑long Seminar Series and a conference/colloquium at the end of the year.
Information about the series and our activities will be announced on our website very soon. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed.
We look forward to welcoming you into our collective study and inquiry at the Beyond Inhabitation Lab.
Michele Lancione and AbdouMaliq Simone