Convenors
Tommaso Frangioni, Politecnico di Milano
tommaso.frangioni@polimi.it
Daniela Leonardi, University of Torino
daniela.leonardi@unito.it
Providing adequate housing to everyone is increasingly recognised as an urgent challenge by major international agencies (e.g., UN 2030 Agenda, EU Affordable Housing Plan, OECD report and the ‘affordable housing database’), across different geographies also emphasizing the needs of many social groups. The 2025 Eurobarometer on cities confirms this: lack of affordable housing is the most pressing concern for city dwellers, with 51% of respondents describing it as an immediate and urgent problem.
Yet the housing question cannot be reduced to affordability alone (Anacker 2019; Hancock and Milligan 2007). Access to safe and dignified housing is unevenly distributed across social groups, and affordability indicators fail to capture security of tenure, domestic power relations, overcrowding, energy poverty, and spatial isolation. The current academic debate, in its most groundbreaking contributions, is currently trying to go beyond an affordability-centred paradigm, favouring instead a broader, more experiential understanding of housing precarity. Ethnographic works have been crucial for these attempts, fostering greater attention to everyday dimensions of housing exclusion, social vulnerability of marginalised social groups, overarching processes of dispossession and violence. This round-table discussion aims to consolidate and build upon this approach.
Housing is a privileged site for observing both institutional violence and creative forms of agency. Ethnography helps reconstruct the ambivalences of this field: how trauma, dispossession, and geographies of exclusion produce unlivability (Pain 2019; Brickell et al. 2017), while also revealing the importance of mutualism, solidarity and collective design in producing forms of shared livability, utopian spaces even when transitory (Chevée 2022; England 2025; Bosi and Zamponi 2020; Caciagli 2020).
This session aims to bring embodied and embedded housing experiences into dialogue with the imaginative and temporal dimensions of dwelling through the distinctive lens of ethnography. Ethnography is an essential method to investigate housing as a terrain of symbolic and material struggle— where the ‘impossibility of home’ (Morpurgo 2025) coexists with everyday (Cooper 2014) or real utopias (Wright 2010), and what we call necessary utopias.
We welcome contributions addressing the dystopian, utopian, and possible dimensions of dwelling. Both utopia and dystopia entangle space and time: space as a desired, imagined horizon in one case, as a desperate and violent object in the other. We are especially interested in papers that bring ethnography into conversation with geography, urban studies, gender studies, with the aim of broadening the scope of discourse and analysis beyond assumptions taken for granted in contemporary society – which threaten the possibilities of livability – thereby seeking to highlight the emancipatory potential of social research (Massari and Pellegrino 2020).
Open questions
We welcome proposals based on ethnographic and qualitative fieldwork that address some of the following questions:
- When does housing become a source of fear? How do these conditions vary analysing different social groups?
- What factors threaten livability, according to those who feel endangered?
- How can alternative practices of inhabiting challenge conventional ideas about housing and their standards? How do different forms of cohabitation challenge social norms about families, relations, ‘house-rules’ about e.g. private and collective spaces, power a/symmetries?
- How do different social groups imagine and narrate possible, dystopian, or desired housing futures? What does ethnographic fieldwork reveal about the everyday experience of housing precarity beyond affordability markers?
- How does institutional and market violence materialise in domestic space, and how is it resisted or negotiated, what alternative practices of welfare are already in place?
- How do gender, sexuality, disability, race, and migration status shape unequal access to secure and dignified housing?
Keywords
utopia, distopia, housing, imaginaries, livability, institutional violence
Sub-disciplines / cross-disciplinary areas
Housing studies, Welfare and social policy studies, Urban and rural sociology , Social movements, Gender and queer studies
References
Antinori, S. (2025). (Contro) Tempi nel margine.«Dimenticare sé stessi» e tattiche” trap” a Roma Termini. Etnografia e ricerca qualitativa, 18(1), 123-145.
Brickell, K., Arrigoitia, M. F., & Vasudevan, A. (2017). Geographies of forced eviction: Dispossession, violence, resistance. In Geographies of forced eviction: Dispossession, violence, resistance (pp. 1-23). Palgrave Macmillan UK, London.
Cooper, D. (2014). Everyday utopias: The conceptual life of promising spaces. Duke University Press, Durham.
Desmond, M. (2016). Evicted. Poverty and profit in the American city. Crown Publishers, New York.
Herzfeld, M. (2009). Evicted from eternity: the restructuring of modern Rome. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Grazioli, M., & Caciagli, C. (2018). Resisting to the neoliberal urban fabric: Housing rights movements and the re-appropriation of the ‘right to the city’in Rome, Italy. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 29(4), 697-711.
Lancione, M. (2023). For a liberatory politics of home. In For a Liberatory Politics of Home. Duke University Press, Durham.
Massari, M. & Pellegrino, V. (eds) (2020). Emancipatory Social Science. Le questioni, il dibattito, le pratiche. Napoli-Salerno: Ortothes Editrice.
Morpurgo, D. (2025). The impossibility of home: Conceptualizing home a-making through the Lens of sex work in Italy. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
Wright, E. O. (2010). Envisioning real utopias. Verso, London.
Convenors’ bio
Tommaso Frangioni is postdoctoral researcher at Politecnico di Milano. His current research deals with housing inequalities seen through individuals’ pathways and experiences. He has also been working on poverty, street-level bureaucracies, with a specific focus on welfare instruments and on the different temporalities at play in organisational settings.
Daniela Leonardi, PhD in Applied Sociology and Methodology of Social Research, is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turin. Her research focuses on Housing Precarity, Welfare, Policy Analysis, Poverty and Inequality. She was awarded the Seal of Excellence for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship on gendered housing precarity. Among her publications: Leonardi D., (2023) Housing and the welfare system in Italy, in ‹‹The Routledge Handbook of Housing and Welfare››, Grander M. & Stephens M. (eds.).