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LSO Ep.6: In Conversation with Dr Margherita Grazioli | Julia Lurfová and Dr Nerina Boursinou

In this month’s episode, we share a stimulating conversation with Margherita Grazioli, a fixed-term assistant professor (RTDa) in Economic Geography in the Social Sciences Area of the Gran Sasso Science Institute (L’Aquila, Italy). Margherita is also a steering committee member of the ⁠Beyond Habitation Lab⁠, a Turin-based collective study lab.

In her work, Margherita explores the right to the city through themes of housing, squatting, and urban commons. As a long-standing member of Rome’s Movimenti per il Diritto all’Abitare (Movement for the Right to Habitation), her academic engagements are firmly rooted in her activist background. Having lived in a housing squat in Rome for six years, Margherita brings a critical perspective to our conversation around housing struggles, which we are thrilled to share with our listeners.

Listen now on Spotify.

Guest: Dr Margherita Grazioli ([email protected])
⁠https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Margherita-Grazioli
https://beyondinhabitation.org/team/margherita-grazioli/⁠

This episode was recorded in February 2024.

Logo credits: Alma Hummelsberger
Editor: Eden Igwe
Music: Matthew Lewis (@matthewlewy on Spotify)

Let’s Step Outside (LSO) is a podcast series bringing urban-related activism and exciting research outside the walls of Academia and one step closer to people who don’t fancy talking with jargon. LSO’s episodes feature mainly women researchers/speakers at all stages of their career, as well as a range of activists engaged with all things urban. Delicious food for thought delivered to your ears.

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Blog Featured Latest from the Lab Reports

RUL Report #2.1. Taking Control of the Energy Crisis: Proposing a community-owned solar panel system in Beirut, Lebanon

Beirut, the capital of Lebanon is home to diverse communities and has a rich and lively culture. Spending the majority of my summers in Beirut since I was a child, has given me insights into the love people have for the city, but also the daily struggles of Beirut citizens since the 15-year civil war started in 1975. More recently, Lebanon has simultaneously been dealing with five crises which are
heavily centred around governmental mismanagement (Moore, 2023). These include the Syrian refugee, economic meltdown, and post-covid crises; as well as dealing with the aftermath of the August 2020 Beirut port explosion and the
continual effects of climate change. In fact, the World Bank (2021) listed Lebanon as one of the top 3 countries experiencing the most severe crises since the mid 1900s. These crises combined, specifically, the lack of effective governance and severe economic crisis have resulted in an almost complete loss of electricity in the city. I do not pretend to understand the full extent to which the communities
in Beirut have been affected by my short yearly stays in Lebanon, however, I will attempt to provide community-led alternative solutions to the energy crisis that move away from government involvement, the root cause of the current
conditions in Lebanon.

RUL_Report-3.1-Seema-Machaca-2Download
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LSO Ep.5: In Conversation with Dr Vanessa Schofield | Julia Lurfová and Dr Nerina Boursinou

In this first episode of LSO’s spring season, we welcome the Lab’s very own Dr Vanessa Schofield, who is presently a lecturer in Geography at the University of St Andrews. Throughout her academic career, Ness has looked at different aspects of risk governance and policing. Her participation in protests and her archival work around riots have been motivated by the overarching question of ‘What counts as a riot?’ in different legal contexts. In this episode, we discuss the policing of the 2001 ‘race riots’, challenge violent riot iconography, and address the theme of (in)visibility around riot politics.

Listen now on Spotify.

Guest: Dr Vanessa Schofield
https://research-portal.st-andrews.ac.uk/en/persons/vanessa-schofield⁠
Email: ⁠[email protected]

This episode was recorded in February 2024.

⁠⁠⁠Logo credits: Alma Hummelsberger
Editor: Eden Igwe
Music: Matthew Lewis (@matthewlewy on Spotify)

Let’s Step Outside (LSO) is a podcast series bringing urban-related activism and exciting research outside the walls of Academia and one step closer to people who don’t fancy talking with jargon. LSO’s episodes feature mainly women researchers/speakers at all stages of their career, as well as a range of activists engaged with all things urban. Delicious food for thought delivered to your ears.

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Blog Featured Latest from the Lab Podcasts

Let’s Step Outside: Spring and Summer Season

With the start of the new year, 2024, we are excited to welcome a new season of Radical Urban Lab’s very own podcast series, Let’s Step Outside.

In the upcoming spring sessions, Nerina and Julia will be joined by three activists-researchers discussing a broad range of social and political issues, while the podcast’s summer sessions will focus in on migration research.

The flyers below introduce our wonderful guests for the upcoming season:

Listen to our previous episodes on Spotify.

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Blog Featured Latest from the Lab RUL talks RUL week of events

Municipalism and the Commons (RUL week of events)

Ana Méndez de Andés (University of Sheffield)

Teams meeting link for livestream

Four years after the square occupations under the banner ‘Real Democracy Now’, citizen-based platforms presented to the Spanish local elections, and consolidated an institutional assault that won some of the most important cities – Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza or A Coruña – and dozens of smaller towns and villages. In their practice, Spanish municipalism appealed to the idea of thecommons to advance an institutional change towards radical democratic governance of collective resources. Thecommons were included in the name of some of the newly created local parties – such as Barcelona en Comú, meaning Barcelona in Common – and in public events, regulations and strategic plans, as well as in the rationale of the internal municipalist debates. This session presents a research on the effort to develop urban commoning processes in the so-called ‘cities of change’ and how the articulation of thecommons’ democratic ethos has shaped an alternative planning strategy situated in the middle of things: between social demands and state-driven programmes, political narrative and administrative normative, inside and outside public institutions. 

Ana Méndez de Andés is an architect and activist from Madrid (Spain). She was advisor to Madrid City Council as part of the municipalist platform Ahora Madrid and has coordinated the European Municipalist Network. Her research ‘Becoming-common of the public’ – documented in the Open Science Platform, under a Creative Commons license – holds an ESRC White Rose DTP award and has been supervised by Dr. Doina Petrescu (Sheffield School of Architecture) and Dr. Beth Perry (Urban Institute). She has co-authored the Urban Commons Handbook, the Municipalist Ecosystem and Urban Commoning in Europe maps, and co-edited the compilations Códigos Comunes Urbanos and Atlas del Cambio (in Spanish).

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Featured Latest from the Lab RUL talks RUL week of events

Housing as Commons (RUL week of events)

Experiences of the struggle for housing, ignited by the lack of social and affordable housing, have led to the establishing of shared and self-managed housing areas. In such a context, it becomes crucially important to re-think the need to define common urban worlds “from below”. Here, Penny Travlou and Stavros Stavridis trace contemporary practices of urban commoning through which people re-define housing economies. Connecting to a rich literature on the importance of commons and of practices of commoning for the creation of emancipated societies, the authors discuss whether housing struggles and co-habitation experiences may contribute in crucial ways to the development of a commoning culture. The authors explore a variety of urban contexts through global case studies from across the Global North and South, in search of concrete examples that illustrate the potentialities of urban commoning.

Dr Penny Travlou is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Geography and Theory at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of Edinburgh. Her research is interdisciplinary focusing on social justice, the commons, collaborative practices, emerging networks, feminist methodologies, critical landscape theory, epistemologies of the South and ethnography. 

She is also the Co-Director of the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research in Athens, a non-profit independent research organisation that focuses on feminist and queer studies, participatory education and activism.

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Blog Featured Latest from the Lab RUL talks RUL week of events

For a liberatory politics of home (RUL week of events)

Professor Michele Lancione (University of Torino)

Teams meeting link for livestream

In For a Liberatory Politics of Home, Michele Lancione questions accepted understandings of home and homelessness to offer a radical proposition: homelessness cannot be solved without dismantling current understandings of home. Conventionally, home is framed as a place of security and belonging, while its loss defines what it means to be homeless. On the basis of this binary, a whole industry of policy interventions, knowledge production, and organizing fails to provide solutions to homelessness but perpetuates violent and precarious forms of inhabitation. Drawing on his research and activism around housing in Europe, Lancione attends to the interlocking crises of home and homelessness by recentering the political charge of precarious dwelling. It is there, if often in unannounced ways, that a profound struggle for a differential kind of homing signals multiple possibilities to transcend the violences of home/homelessness. In advancing a new approach to work with the politics of inhabitation, Lancione provides a critique of current practices and offers a transformative vision for a renewed, liberatory politics of home.

Michele Lancione is Professor of Economic and Political Geography at the Polytechnic University of Turin and coeditor of Grammars of the Urban Ground, also published by Duke University Press, and Global Urbanism: Knowledge, Power and the City.

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Featured Latest from the Lab

RUL week of events

Join us in a week-long series of events, book presentations and discussions organised by the Radical Urban Lab (RUL) at the School of Geography and Sustainable Development, University of St Andrews.

Our speakers present urgent, radical and cutting-edge research on questions of housing, commoning, everyday life, migration and public space – always through a social justice lens. The events are open to all – just show up, or follow a live stream of the events via the links below:

Monday Feb 5, 1-2pm, Arts Seminar Room 6

Professor Michele Lancione (University of Torino)

For a liberatory politics of home

Monday Feb 5, 2-3pm, Arts Seminar Room 6

Dr Anna Pearce (University of St Andrews)

The Home Office’s ‘hotel maximisation’ policy

Tuesday Feb 6, 1-3pm, School V, United College

Dr Penny Travlou (University of Edinburgh)

Housing as commons

Thursday Feb 8, 1-3pm, Lapworth Lab, Irvine Building

Ana Mendez de Andes (University of Sheffield)

Municipalism and the Commons

Friday Feb 9, 1-3pm, Lapworth Lab, Irvine Building

SD4116 Volume Editors (University of St Andrews)

Community-led solutions to urban sustainability challenges

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Featured Latest from the Lab RUL talks

Nick Gill in conversation @GOSSIP &RUL

November 24, 13:30-14:30, Hebdomadars room, St Andrews. Click here to join the meeting.

Professor Nick Gill, Exeter // Chair: Professor Nissa Finney, St Andrews // Discussant: Dr Vanessa Schofield, St Andrews

Inside Asylum Appeals: Access, Participation and Procedure
Appeals are a crucial part of Europe’s asylum system, but remain poorly understood. Building on insights and perspectives from legal geography and socio-legal studies, and drawing on hundreds of ethnographic observations of appeal hearings as well as research interviews, this presentation paints a detailed picture of the limitations of refugee protection available through asylum appeals. Although refugee law can appear dependable and reliable in policy documents and legal texts the discussion offers a unique insight into the reality that myriad social, political, psychological, linguistic, contextual and economic factors interfere with, and frequently confound, the protection that it promises during its concrete enactment. Combining evidence from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy and the United Kingdom, the presentation therefore evokes a clear sense of the fragility of legal protection for people forced to migrate to Europe.

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Blog Featured Latest from the Lab Podcasts

LSO Ep.4: In Conversation with Nik Gorecki (Housmans) | Julia Lurfová and Dr Nerina Boursinou

LSO’s fourth episode introduces Housma⁠ns, ‘the longest continuous-running radical bookshop in Britain, established in 1945 and based in London’s Kings Cross since 1959’. Having become a local favourite, Housmans is known for selling ‘books, magazines, and periodicals of radical interest and progressive politics, such as feminism, pacifism, Black politics, LGBTQIA+ politics, environmental justice and anarchism’.

As Housmans’ co-manager, this episode’s guest Nik Gorecki brings a unique insight into what running a radical bookshop entails in this day and age. We talk about the term ‘radical’, Housmans’ unique history within the city of London, as well as about creating a safe space for political conversations and a sense of community through a politically framed bookstore.

Listen now on Spotify.

This episode was recorded in May 2023.⁠⁠⁠

Logo credits: Alma Hummelsberger
Editor: Eden Igwe
Music: Matthew Lewis (@matthewlewy on Spotify)

Let’s Step Outside (LSO) is a podcast series bringing urban-related activism and exciting research outside the walls of Academia and one step closer to people who don’t fancy talking with jargon. LSO’s episodes feature women researchers/speakers at all stages of their career, as well as a range of activists engaged with all things urban. Delicious food for thought delivered to your ears.

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