Paper short abstract:

How to engage with a vulnerable community rehoused in a dispersed way by local authorities? Following the residents and adopting a methodology of housing biographies we can make sense of the home as a mobile asset shaped by precariousness, (im)mobility, family structures and neighbourhood relations.

Paper long abstract:

In the paper I aim to discuss the possibilities and potentialities of acknowledging emergent spatialities through a methodology of housing biographies. Localized in the outskirts of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (Portugal), residents of a depleted neighbourhood consisting of self-build homes are relocated to existing, refurbished houses in relatively close, surrounding urban areas. This rehousing programme is executed by the municipality with the objective to end precarious housing conditions of the afro-descendent, Roma, racialized and migrant residents, that had taken advantage of an abandoned and unfinished concrete structure to build their homes, persisting there for decades. Opposed to former programmes (1990s), where large and centralized compounds were built outside of urban areas, lacking services, transport and quality public space, this one aims to integrate the community into the surrounding urban and social fabric by dispersing them. Following those families on their trajectory from precarious to social housing, one can make sense of the spatialization of this community and percieve which vulnerabilities or inequalities persist, are overcome or are reproduced. Following the residents by getting to know families through other families, ie. snowballing, works here, but was boosted by a great amount of initial trust and intimacy granted by interlocutors to whom the ethnographer was no stranger thanks to former collaborations, mainly social work and political solidarity in the struggle for the relocation. Through the collection of biographies centred on housing trajectories, questions on how home is produced, reproduced, transformed, and located in processes of spatialization, can be posed.