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Adverse Acquisition and European Basic Rights Frameworks: Legal-Philosophical-Computational Inquiry

Objective

"SQUAT is an innovative 24-month research project examining squatting, informal settlements, and home invasion through European human rights frameworks. The project challenges traditional property law paradigms by developing a comprehensive legal-philosophical-computational analysis of housing rights from society's margins.
The research addresses Europe's housing crisis by examining tensions between human rights to housing and property rights. While affordable housing is a core European value, commodification of residential units restricts access. Traditional scholarship remains trapped in a ""legal-title-trap,"" focusing on formal ownership while ignoring housing practices of marginalized communities including homeless people, political squatters, Roma, Travellers, and migrants for whom squatting may be the only available tenure. Recent criminalization of squatting across Europe makes this research urgent.
The project pursues three objectives: reconstructing concepts of squatting, homelessness, tenure, and adverse possession using philosophical and data-driven methods; developing comparative analysis of squatting laws across UK, Italy, and Poland to test compatibility with European human rights standards; and constructing an ambitious normative theory providing moral and legal appraisal of squatting.
SQUAT pioneers integration of computational linguistics with normative legal theory through Natural Language Processing using Word2Vec to analyze how legal concepts evolve across frameworks, combining computational analysis of legal corpora with traditional scholarship, and employing Queloz's needs-based concept appraisal evaluating concepts by practical needs rather than abstract definitions. This represents the first application of word-embedding techniques to property-related concepts in European human rights contexts. The project transcends existing scholarship by reframing squatting as potential rights-claiming rather than law-breaking."

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships

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Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF

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Coordinator

UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI GENOVA
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 193 643,28
Address
VIA BALBI 5
16126 GENOVA
Italy

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Region
Nord-Ovest Liguria Genova
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

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