Project description
Greater insight into the global fight against precarious housing
Millions of people are forcibly evicted from their homes every year. What is more, 1.6 billion have inadequate housing. In response to the increasing housing precarity worldwide, grassroots housing movements are becoming more and more common. However, little is understood about the significance of their organising globally and in a comparative fashion. How are housing struggles reshaping our cities across geographies? The EU-funded RadicalHOUSING project aims to fill these critical gaps in knowledge. It will achieve this through an innovative radical housing approach and pioneering research on translocal networks and housing struggles in the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia. The project will lead to a better understanding of the global fight against housing precarity and its urban politics.
Objective
According to UN-Habitat, each year millions of people face forced eviction from their homes, while a staggering 1.6 billion are inadequately housed. Forecasts suggest housing precarity will continue to grow in future, worldwide. In response, grassroots housing movements are becoming increasingly common. Crucially, these groups fight for more than just housing, often advancing critiques of wider societal inequalities. Yet little is known of the broader significance of these struggles, and research has failed to offer an understanding of geographically dispersed movements. The ways in which the fight for the right to housing operates is essential to understand contemporary urban life. RadicalHOUSING will fill these critical gaps through an innovative Radical Housing Approach and pioneering empirical research at a global scale.
First, the project identifies the importance of a historical understanding of dwelling precarity, to appreciate the relevance of housing struggles worldwide (Objective I). Second, it investigates and profiles prominent grassroots networks in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia to analyse their goals and organisational culture (Objective II). To appreciate the wider significance of radical housing resistance, the project deploys an ambitious ethnographic encounter with grassroots struggles in eight emblematic cities (Objective III). It then brings selected participants and experts together in a Global Forum of Radical Housing, fostering the exchange of peer-to-peer knowledge to generate further findings (Objective IV). Finally, the project will gather these insights into an innovative critical comparative framework, which will lead to agenda-setting publications, interventions, and academic scholarship (Objective V).
RadicalHOUSING is a ground-breaking project that will contribute to housing, urban and geographical studies, as well as to grassroots knowledge, opening a new phase in understanding the global fight against housing precarity.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
Keywords
Programme(s)
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Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
10129 Torino
Italy