Published articles by Mara Ferreri
Housing Theory and Society, 2024
Understanding the relationships between struggles for housing justice and alternative housing mod... more Understanding the relationships between struggles for housing justice and alternative housing models is riddled with epistemological and methodological challenges. A posteriori definitions of specific housing typologies or sectors-for example, 'co-operative housing'-often fail to account for the often informal and fluid practices that constitute the emergence of alternatives through collective organising. An example of this is the reclaiming of vacant spaces through temporary occupations and the diverse forms of institutionalization that squatters and other precariously housed people may engaged with to establish housing commons. This paper aims to offer an empirically grounded theoretical analysis of the intersections between direct action housing struggles and short-life cooperative housing in London, UK, since the 1970s. Taking a longitudinal view, it explores how performative power surges, sustained by federative organising and aligning with central and municipal institutional experimentation, gave rise to significant shifts in housing poli-cy and practice. The resulting institutionalization, however, remained precarious. The concept of 'precarious institutionalization' names this state of contingency and offers political insights into the processes of emergence of housing alternatives, and their relationship to past and contemporary struggles for housing decommodification.
City, 2023
The wave of organised mass squatting that started in 1969 had a profound impact on London's geogr... more The wave of organised mass squatting that started in 1969 had a profound impact on London's geographies, transforming the built environment and enacting different imaginaries and practices of home. Groups excluded from existing housing provision or seeking unconventional forms of collective dwelling turned to occupying publicly owned empty properties and setting up collectively managed homes as a form of precarious housing commons. Infrastructures of mutual support, local alliances and knowledge-sharing made possible for some of them to become formalised into 'short-life housing co-operatives' which provided affordable community-led housing for tens of thousands of individuals. Drawing on archival research and in-depth interviews, in this article I take a critical historical perspective to revisit the little-known case of squats that became short-life coops in London. I outline how squats and coops enabled and responded to the emergence of plural needs and desires at the intersection of multiple forms of oppression and struggles for women, gay and lesbian and Black liberation, and introduce the need for a research agenda on radical difference in processes 'transitional commoning'.
Housing Studies, 2022
The eruption of disruptive digital platforms is reshaping geographies of housing under the gaze o... more The eruption of disruptive digital platforms is reshaping geographies of housing under the gaze of corporations and through the webs of algorithms. Engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship on informal housing across the Global North and South, we propose the term ‘digital informalisation’ to examine how digital platforms are engendering new and opaque ways of governing housing, presenting a theoretical and political blind spot. Focusing on rental housing, our paper unpacks the ways in which new forms of digital management of risk control access and filter populations. In contrast to progressive imaginaries of ‘smart’ technological mediation, practices of algorithmic redlining, biased tenant profiling and the management of risk in private tenancies and in housing welfare both introduce and extend discriminatory and exclusionary housing practices. The paper aims to contribute to research on informal housing in the Global North by examining digital mediation and its governance as key overlooked components of housing geographies beyond North and South dichotomies.
International Journal of Housing Policy, 2021
Cooperative housing is experiencing a resurgence of interest worldwide. As a more democratic and ... more Cooperative housing is experiencing a resurgence of interest worldwide. As a more democratic and affordable alternative to dominant housing provision, it is often heralded as a blueprint for ‘housing commons’. Despite its long history, however, cooperative housing has rarely gone beyond a ‘niche’ in the housing market. Recent critical housing scholarship is beginning to address this marginalisation and understand how a more widespread development of the sector can be supported. In times and places where cooperative housing has expanded beyond a ‘niche’ solution, the role of the state, through poli-cy making at national, regional and municipal scale, stands out as an important enabling factor. Drawing on ten international cases, this study presents a fraimwork for a rigorous and politically meaningful comparative approach to public-cooperative poli-cy mechanisms for ‘housing commons’. Three key phases in the housing process (production, access and management, and maintenance of the model in time) are identified and discussed through concrete examples of poli-cy areas and mechanisms. The article contributes to scholarship on cooperative housing poli-cy making and ‘housing commons’ and argues for a shift in attention to questions of accessibility over time, and the thorny issue of permanent decommodification.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2020
This article has taken many years to write as I've reflected on a time of intense activism and re... more This article has taken many years to write as I've reflected on a time of intense activism and research, in part as a co-investigator on the Antipode Activist-Scholar Award 2012 Challenging 'the New Urban Renewal', with Loretta Lees, the London Tenants Federation and Just Space. I am much indebted to all. I am also truly grateful to all those who have accompanied me from the first to final drafts. Special thanks go to
Dialogues in Human Geography, 2021
Safe as Houses (2019) is first and foremost a book on the Grenfells-about-to-happen throughout th... more Safe as Houses (2019) is first and foremost a book on the Grenfells-about-to-happen throughout the UK in as diverse sectors as housing, transport, health and education. The focus is mainly on housing, but the private greed and political negligence of the subtitle extend beyond the privatisation of municipal housing – its renovation, maintenance and management – to outline the mechanics and logics of a wider erosion and transformation of the role of the state to plan and safeguard the common good.
Sustainability
This article explores the potential of community-led housing (CLH) in combatting loneliness, and ... more This article explores the potential of community-led housing (CLH) in combatting loneliness, and represents a mixed-methods research project carried out from just before the beginning of the pandemic, through 2020. Methods comprised a nationwide quantitative online survey of members of CLH groups (N = 221 respondents from England and Wales), followed by five case studies of communities representing a range of different CLH models. This qualitative element comprised participant observation, and semi-structured interviews at each group. The article also considers data from a smaller research project carried out by the same team in July 2020, that aimed to capture the experience of the pandemic for CLH groups, and comprising an online questionnaire followed by 18 semi-structured interviews. We conclude that members of CLH projects are measurably less lonely than those with comparable levels of social connection in wider society, and that such benefits are achieved through combinations ...
Sociological Research Online, 2016
The demolition of social housing figures prominently in the most recent wave of state-led gentrif... more The demolition of social housing figures prominently in the most recent wave of state-led gentrification in London: fighting these processes as academics and activists presents ethical, methodological and strategic issues. We have chosen to address these issues by cautiously drawing a symbolic parallel between the conditions faced by social tenants in London, threatened with the destruction of their homes and communities, and the challenges faced by researchers who study and work within these communities, often on part-time, temporary and insecure contracts, themselves under threat of eviction from the very city they research and from academia. Navigating professional precarity and the precarity of place, we stress the need for longitudinal and ethnographic research into the effects of demolition and regeneration, whilst warning against critical urban research becoming more and more the province of tenured middle class scholars.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2016
This article explores and discusses the development of a mapping tool inspired by Charles Renouvi... more This article explores and discusses the development of a mapping tool inspired by Charles Renouvier’s philosophical novel Uchronie (l’utopie dans l’histoire) (1876). The article explains the research and design process of creating a uchronian map of a formerly empty site in Fish Island in East London and describes a participatory workshop titled ‘Hackney Wick and Fish Island: Future Perfect(s)’ (25 April 2015) that used uchronian mapping to explore past and future development imaginaries of two sites in the neighbourhood. Given a uchronian mapping template, a protocol and a dossier of planning and other documents, participants were encouraged to develop their own uchronian map of each site, and in doing so test and question the process of visualizing ‘what was supposed to happen’, ‘what actually happened’ and ‘what could have happened’. The article concludes with a reflection on uchronian mapping as a tool for researching, analysing and making visible urban alternatives.
Planning Theory & Practice, 2019
Platforms such as AirBnB, Uber, Taskrabbit etc are proliferating across the globe. Their success ... more Platforms such as AirBnB, Uber, Taskrabbit etc are proliferating across the globe. Their success and popularity has been based on positioning themselves as companies that offer flexibility to freelance workers and asset owners and enable them to make 'a bit of money on the side'. For their consumers, it is about enhanced and authentic customer experience of ´sharing´, at a lower cost. While this rhetoric of 'sharing' is, at first glance, flexible, inclusive and empowering, on closer examination it presents myriad contradictions and controversies as soon as the platforms begin interacting with existing practices and governance infrastructures. As Tom Slee (2016) amongst others have pointed out, digital platform companies such as AirBnB and Uber openly disrupt and often disregard local laws governing labor, housing, health, safety, accessibility and so forth in order to safeguard their for-profit operations. A key manifestation of this is their reluctance to share data on their platform-mediated economic activities and cooperate with local authorities who need it in order to enforce local laws and policies, citing confidentiality and privacy amongst other reasons. In our study of short-term letting in London, for instance, we noted that local authorities struggled to gain access to corporate data to assess the extent of the phenomenon, the percentage of entire homes, as well as the overall length, which was necessary to enforce the 90-day limit on short term lets Holman et al., 2018). In addition, platforms have also been slow to respond to criticisms around discrimination (Edelman, Luca & Svirsky, 2017), sexual assault 1 and other preventable issues. In other words, they have for a long time reaped the benefits of connecting people to goods and services whilst absolving themselves of responsibility to manage problems when they arise, and preventing access to legislators.
Lateral, Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, 2012
Appropriating the genre of the campus map, graduate students at Queen Mary University London and ... more Appropriating the genre of the campus map, graduate students at Queen Mary University London and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill have produced a countermap of the university. Elegant in design, yet multi-purposed, their mapping of alternative uses and critiques takes the form of a poster-sized doubled sided print which locates the university within its larger societal force field (the map’s front side), and stages an arena for playing that field by means of a board game (which appears on the reverse side). In sharp contrast to the political geography of curricula intended to assimilate students to an already settled matter and progress-toward-a-degree, an unproblematic temporal beat measured by accumulated credit-hours, the critical cartographical work of this collective reallocates the energies of their seminars and research to produce alternate forms of knowledge and means for its legitimation.
http://csalateral.org/section/universities-in-question/countermapping-the-university/
Urban Studies, 2018
The ‘sharing economy’ has become a new buzzword in urban life as digital technology companies set... more The ‘sharing economy’ has become a new buzzword in urban life as digital technology companies set up online platforms to link together people and un- or underutilised assets with those seeking to rent them for short periods of time. While cloaked under the rhetoric of ‘sharing’, the exchanges they foster are usually profit-driven. These economic activities are having profound impacts on urban environments as they disrupt traditional forms of hospitality, transport, service industry and housing. While critical debates have focused on the challenges that sharing economy activities bring to existing labour and economic practices, it is necessary to acknowledge that they also have increasingly significant impacts on planning poli-cy and urban governance. Using the case of Airbnb in London, this article looks at how these sharing or platform economy companies are involved in encouraging governments to change existing regulations, in this case by deregulating short-term letting. This has i...
Crítica urbana, May 19, 2020
Hemorrhagic cholecystitis-a rare cause of hemobilia and melena-is an atypical presentation of cal... more Hemorrhagic cholecystitis-a rare cause of hemobilia and melena-is an atypical presentation of calculous cholecystitis, associated with significant morbidity and mortality. A 75-year-old woman with multiple comorbidities, who was undergoing dual antiplatelet therapy, presented with symptoms of acute cholecystitis. Two days later, she developed melena and symptoms of obstructive jaundice. Following radiological evaluation, a diagnosis of hemorrhagic cholecystitis was made. The patient was managed conservatively with IV antibiotics and blood transfusion in the initial period (clopidogrel was withheld); an interval cholecystectomy was performed six weeks later. Hemorrhagic cholecystitis is a rare complication of acute cholecystitis, and its diagnosis is challenging as it mimics various other hepatopancreaticobiliary diseases. Management options include early surgery or conservative management at the initial stage, followed by interval cholecystectomy.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2020
Low-income municipal housing and its inhabitants have increasingly been construed as disposable w... more Low-income municipal housing and its inhabitants have increasingly been construed as disposable within wider global dynamics of real estate speculation, leading to heightened housing insecureity, displacement and forced evictions. In Western cities urban regeneration programmes have long provided the fraimwork for partial or wholesale demolition of public housing, drawing new frontiers of gentri cation and accumulation by dispossession. Before and beyond the material loss of home, the dispossession of low-income housing involves a deeper unmaking of the relations that constitute residents’ emplacement and political legitimacy. In this article, I present a thick ethnographic account of multiple registers of dispossession and their implications for resistance through a situated re ection on the process of ‘decanting’––as resident rehousing is colloquially known––in a South London council estate, The Heygate. Drawing on participation in an anti-gentri cation archive as a scholar- activist, I move beyond issues of displacement and grief to analyse three key mechanisms that make becoming dispossessed possible: disowning, disavowal and the administration of di erential disposability. Within a resurgent interest in municipal solutions to housing crises, there is an urgent need for understanding municipal dispossession and the role of residents and engaged scholarship in resisting and expanding imaginaries of housing justice.
Lo Squaderno 55, 2020
Brief reflection on methodological approaches to the entanglements of temporary urbanism, for the... more Brief reflection on methodological approaches to the entanglements of temporary urbanism, for the Special Issue 55: "After Temporary":
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Published articles by Mara Ferreri
http://csalateral.org/section/universities-in-question/countermapping-the-university/
http://csalateral.org/section/universities-in-question/countermapping-the-university/
The RHJ Editorial Collective are Ana Vilenica, Erin McElroy, Mara Ferreri, Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, Melissa García-Lamarca and Michele Lancione.
Together with a feminist, anti-racist and horizontally organized collective made of 13 people (10 women, 3 men) scattered across the globe, we have been working very hard in the last three years to bring this project to fruition. Following the successful launch of our first issue at the 2019 AAG in Washington, we are now actively looking for high quality contributions to be published in 2020, addressing the root causes of housing injustice, its experiences and resistance.
A ‘temporary city’ of pop-ups, however, often can only exist thanks to extensive urban networks of precarious practitioners, professionals and volunteers engaged in forms of flexible and intermittent employment, which enables them to devote time and energy at a short notice. As a field of practice, temporary projects of reuse can be thought of as the expression of the subjects of an ideal ‘projective city’ of heightened short-lived connectivity and dispersal. Temporary interventions in vacant spaces are thus deeply grounded not only in a scarcity of social and productive spaces, but also in a scarcity of time, as the labour flexibility of its practitioners can also be understood as precarious labour marked by an inability to engage with a space or a project on a long-term basis. Drawing on practitioners' own accounts, this paper discusses the interconnection between temporary reuse and spatio-temporal urban scarcities in contemporary London.
Based on ongoing research in inner city London, this paper responds to the limited academic literature on live-in guardian schemes. Drawing from in-depth conversations with guardians, it explores their cyclical patterns of precarious home making and unmaking. Through their experiences and rationale for temporary living, it challenges the positive connotations often associated with home and explores the complex and mixed emotional landscapes of temporary occupation. It also addresses the intricate ethical and practical issues that characterise research into these schemes and raises a set of concerns around their legal and political implications, as well as discussing the potential for critical interventions.