Collaborators

This project was conducted through the collaboration with (in alphabetical order):

Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia

Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia is an urban sociologist and researcher at the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability, and senior Associate Researcher at  the University of Bristol Barcelona. Her work focuses on housing and critical geographies of home, particularly collaborative housing from an interdisciplinary and intersectional perspective. This includes long-term ethnographic research on the production of alternative home futures and community-led practices, notably senior co-housing, as well as case studies in the UK, the Netherlands, and more recently, Spain and Catalonia. She has published articles and edited volumes on social housing in Europe (Wiley, 2014), on the “unmaking” of homes through displacement and evictions globally (Palgrave, 2016) and on collaborative housing, ageing and social care in Europe (Policy Press 2025). She is a co-founder and editor of The Radical Housing Journal.

Austin Gage Matheney

Austin Gage Matheney is a postdoctoral researcher at BCNUEJ ICTA-UAB. Before obtaining his PhD from ICTA-UAB in 2024, Austin studied at Western Michigan University, the University of Cape Town, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, FLACSO Argentina, and Jawaharlal Nehru University Delhi. Influenced by each institution, his research explores the impacts of urban greening projects on the (re)construction of identities, place, and community. Through his dissertation, Austin explored methodological approaches to community-based environmental justice research, aiming to foster more just research approaches through which green and just cities can be imagined and performed. Austin now works as a postdoctoral researcher at BCNUEJ, examining the impacts of the 'green transition' on housing inequality throughout Catalunya.

Sarah Marie Hall 

Sarah Marie Hall is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Manchester. With her research she develops understandings of how economic changes are shaped by relationships, lived experience and social difference. Much of this work is alongside and in solidarity with community researchers and activists to tackle social and economic inequality in creative ways. Since 2021 she has been leading a large UKRI project on Austerity and Altered Life-Courses, exploring how austerity across Europe shapes young people’s lives and futures. This project brings together her long-standing interests in everyday life and the economy; social reproduction, care and ethics; and feminist methods and praxis.

Dora Kanellopoulou

Maria Karagianni

Maria Karagianni is an urban planner and housing researcher active in cooperative housing movements. She is a Cohousing and Affordable Housing Expert at the Major Development Agency of Thessaloniki (MDAT S.A.) and a member of the CoHab collective, where she works on community-led housing, vacancy reuse and the “CoHabiting Vacancies” project. Her work connects municipal policy, grassroots initiatives and European networks to experiment with social, cooperative and affordable housing. Maria holds a PhD in Urban Planning and Geography from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and an MSc in Global Urban Development and Planning from the University of Manchester.

Aliki Koutlou

Dr Aliki Koutlou is a postdoctoral researcher soon to commence a Simon Fellowship in Geography at the University of Manchester. Her research sits at the intersection between feminist political economy and human geography. Her doctoral and postdoctoral work so far has contributed to understandings of the crisis in social reproduction through an original conceptualisation of utility arrears as utility-based indebtedness in the context of the Greek debt crisis. During her Simon Fellowship, she is pursuing an original and timely project investigating how households in the UK and Greece navigate the strain of overlapping energy, climate, and cost-of-living crises through their reproductive labour. The project aims to develop an empirically grounded, theoretically ambitious understanding of how reproductive labour is reconfigured under conditions of systemic strain — and how these adaptations may prefigure more sustainable and equitable futures.

Alexandra Linardou

Alexandra Linardou is an urban planner and a PhD candidate at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). Her doctoral research, titled ‘The transformative role of participation: Searching for the qualities and characteristics of citizen participation across different decision-making scales,’ examines participation through discourse, definition, and practice. Her research centres on power, hegemony, and critical urban politics, with a focus on the interplay of rhetoric and practice via political discourse analysis. With professional experience in spatial planning and European-funded initiatives, she has collaborated with academic and public institutions on participatory urban planning projects.  Alexandra’s work engages with the dialectical tensions between top-down policy frameworks and grassroots agency. Her doctoral research has been funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI).

Vasiliki Makrygianni

Vasiliki (Vaso) Makrygianni holds a diploma in Architecture Engineering and a PhD in Urban Planning and Urban Development from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Currently she works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Unit of Geography, University of Bologna, at the ERC funded project "The Game: Counter-mapping Informal Refugee Mobilities along the Balkan Route" [site.unibo.it] where she investigates  refugee mobilities in relation to spaces, infrastructure and digital technologies in the Greek island entry-zones. She has participated in various research projects in Greece and Denmark and has published on topics including  spaces of care, urban conflicts, Τhe Right to the City, migrants’ urban practices and digital spaces. Her primary research areas include critical urban theory, feminist methodologies, migration studies and science and technology studies (STS). Her current research interests revolve around infrastructure, digital geographies and technologies and feminist technoscience perspectives.

Blanche De Moidrey

Ioanna Papakonstantinou Brati

Ioanna Papakonstantinou Brati is an architect and housing researcher. She is a PhD candidate at the Department of Architectural Language, Communication and Design at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). Her dissertation, broadly entitled "Homing the Neighborhood in the Pandemic Context: From Athens to Barcelona", focuses on how individuals navigate housing challenges in two Southern European neighborhoods experiencing rising rents and urban transformation in recent years. Particularly, her work seeks to understand how everyday practices construct social relations and antagonisms around housing policy and home-city geographies, and how all these are interpreted into both public and private spaces.

Linda Peake

Linda Peake, FRSC, professor emerita at York University, is an urban feminist geographer whose research interests encompass: urban feminist theory; gendered urban insecurities in the global south and specifically in Guyana; and, more recently, mental health. She is PI on the SSHRC Partnership Grant,Urbanization, gender and the global south: a transformative knowledge network (GenUrb), a Trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation, a member of the editorial board of Urban Geography, and co-founder of the AAG Affinity Group on Mental Health in the Academy.  She was also previously the Director of the City Institute at York University, Toronto, Canada.

Sergio Ruiz Cayuela

Sergio is a postdoctoral researcher at the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice, ICTA-UAB. His main research interests include processes of urban commoning and self-organisation, militant and engaged approaches to research, and urban environmental justice. He works for the IMBRACE project, which looks at migrants’ climate health vulnerability and how situated knowledges inform both their own response capacities and urban climate adaptation. Sergio completed his PhD at CAWR, Coventry University in 2023, which focused on investigating the urban commons’ potential of expansion from a militant ethnographic perspective. Sergio’s academic praxis is informed by his involvement in several grassroots organisations struggling for socioenvironmental justice. 

Katerina Stavridi

Katerina Stavridi is a PhD candidate at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens. Her research, The Subject of Rescue: Producing the Nation through Transnational Dog Rescue Mobilities, is an analysis of the (geo)political dimensions of animal rescue practices in Europe, grounded in feminist and postcolonial theories. She examines the role of non-human actors in transnational networks of care, border regimes, and the production of difference. Her work engages with feminist and more-than-human epistemologies of spatial knowledge, as well as sensory and affective geographies. Katerina has conducted research in both Greece and the Netherlands, and has presented her work at international conferences and workshops, including the 8th International Conference of Critical Geography and the Posthuman Symbioses Masterclass at TU Delft.

Dimitra Tassou

Constantina Theodorou

Miriam Williams

Dr Miriam Williams is a Senior Lecturer in Geography and Planning in the School of Communication, Society and Culture at Macquarie University, Australia. Miriam is an urban geographer whose work focuses on how urban life could be made more just and caring for people and planet. Her work makes a contribution to urban studies with a focus on everyday practices of care and justice across a range of empirical foci including planning, community food provisioning initiatives, public spaces, housing and commons in cities.

CoHab Athens

CoHab is an open collective and exchange platform for urban researchers, activists and residents interested in claiming housing as a right and exploring alternative housing models based on self-management and collective ownership. Formed in 2016 as a research group, CoHab emerged from the need not only to analyse the housing crisis and recent transformations in Greece, but also to experiment with concrete alternatives. Since November 2017, CoHab Athens has been running an ongoing participatory design process to map local housing needs and investigate the feasibility of the first cooperative housing / collective ownership project in Athens. Drawing inspiration from international examples of cooperative housing, the group works towards the decommodification of urban land and the active realisation of the right to the city, building synergies with existing initiatives and similarly oriented projects in Greece and abroad. In 2023, CoHab created the first-ever toolkit for cooperative housing in Greece and, in 2024, organised the national competition “CoHabiting Vacancies” for the transformation of vacant public buildings into cooperative housing. For more information: https://cohabathens.org/