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Amid isolation and precarious work, this paper explores how Madrid’s domestic and care workers have created collective spaces that foster connection, belonging, and new ways of inhabiting the city, revealing life-sustaining labor often relegated to the margins.

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Many domestic and care workers, especially those employed as internas (live-in), are no strangers to isolation. Precarious labor arrangements, restrictive housing conditions, and migration-related constraints often limit autonomy, mobility, and social connection. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Madrid, this paper examines an empowerment center created by and for these workers as a collective response to these challenges, exploring how shared spatial practices reshape everyday experiences of marginality, belonging, and presence in the city.

The center functions as a flexible and evolving environment: a place to rest, cook, learn, move, gather, and spend time outside employers’ homes and surveilled public spaces. Through these everyday practices, the center enables forms of shared presence that counter the fragmentation produced by precarious labor, housing, and migration regimes. Thinking with bell hooks’ (1990) notion of homeplace and Soja’s (1996) Thirdspace, I approach the center as a relational space where marginality is not only endured but actively reworked through mutual support, affective ties, and collective making.

I argue that the center allows workers to inhabit the city otherwise, allowing for practices of what Porto-Gonçalves (2006) refers to as re-existence. Where modes of emplacement are grounded in lived experience and sustained through everyday collaboration. In doing so, it makes visible forms of labor and life that are often rendered invisible, while also creating conditions for longer-term organizing and feminist claims-making. Attending ethnographically to these spatial practices offers insight into how urban spaces are continuously produced through care, presence, and collective effort.

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I examine how Arabic- and Persian-speaking migrants and refugees in Istanbul circulate “disaster knowledge” and influence each other on housing and mobility choices vis-a-vis earthquake risk, advancing a crowd psychology of preparedness to inform more inclusive, group-informed urban governance.

Paper long abstract

This research examines the multidirectional circulation of "disaster knowledge" among migrant and refugee groups from an Arabic and a Persian-speaking background in Istanbul: a context shaped by the intersecting forces of conflict induced migration and earthquake risk. This 4-year long study explores the extent to which past disasters and anticipation of future ones influence housing decisions, everyday mobility, and strategies of preparedness. Drawing on one-to-one interviews, conversations with local policymakers and focus groups, the project strives for making today's uneven urban governance politically inclusive, culturally responsive, and social group-informed. The study builds on crowd psychology theories to examine the inter- and intra-group dynamics through which migrants and refugees influence one another’s housing and mobility choices. By combining nationality-based and nationally mixed focus groups, it traces the circulation of knowledge, rumours, trust, and collective assessments of risk across and within communities. In addition, a large-scale survey maps broader patterns of mobility from overseas to Türkiye and onward to specific Istanbul districts, identifying the degree to which such movements occur on a group basis rather than as isolated individual trajectories.

Hence, this research advances the concept of a collective social psychology of disaster preparedness shaped through shared histories of displacement and negotiations of urban life. Practically, the research aims to inform municipal advocacy by highlighting the limitations of current disaster awareness programmes, arguing for approaches that integrate group-specific histories, social relations, and material hindrances rather than relying solely on technical information and linguistic translation.

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Ethnography between the Slovak Roma settlement and Page Hall/Eastwood (Sheffield–Rotherham, UK) shows how institutional risk epistemologies meet migrants’ situated city knowledges. Recognition events and community infrastructures enact care-and-repair, re-stitching polarized dwelling and belonging.

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This paper examines how polarized urban territories are not only navigated but actively recomposed through transnational connections between the segregated Roma settlement of Letanovce and reputationally marked neighborhoods in Northern England. Based on multi-sited ethnography, I analyze how Romani households mobilize and convert economic, social, cultural, and symbolic resources across sites and how urban reputations and classification regimes in housing, schooling and work condition what becomes legible as “respectable,” credible, and thus actionable.

Rather than treating Letanovce as a rural origin external to “the city,” I approach it as a transnational counter-site that generates urban imaginaries, moral evaluations, and status benchmarks that travel with migrants and feed back into settlement hierarchies. I contrast institutional epistemologies of risk and respectability with migrants’ situated knowledges of safe routes, reliable intermediaries, and reputational cartographies of the city. Mobility recalibrates ethnic visibility: some households cultivate institutional legibility, while others sustain enclave-oriented repertoires within contested urban boundaries.

Empirically, I trace differentiated dwelling regimes ranging from institutionally stabilized pathways to precarious circuits shaped by informalized labor and housing insecurity. Key turning points appear as recognition events—encounters where attendance records, tenancy histories, references, and reputational cues translate everyday competencies into institutional trust. Finally, I show community infrastructures enact grassroots care-and-repair—administrative translation, service navigation, and the practical repair of broken institutional encounters—creating alternative spaces that re-stitch fractured urban socialities while also producing new boundaries of respectability. I argue these practices open contingent possibilities for belonging in a polarized city, even as they reshape the settlement–city divide.

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Based on ethnography with 706 Youth Space in Shanghai, this paper examines how youth writing practices, care, and co-living recompose polarized urban space after COVID-19, challenging binaries of public/private, cure/care, and individual/collective life.

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Cities are increasingly governed by polarized logics that separate center and periphery, public and private, and cure and care. These fractures became acutely visible during Shanghai’s COVID-19 lockdowns, when young people positioned within precarious housing, labor, and social networks were placed in states of social and spatial suspension. Drawing on ethnographic research with 706 Youth Space, an independent youth cultural organization in Shanghai, this paper examines how youth-led practices of writing and co-living recompose urban life beyond such polarized imaginaries.

This paper argues that 706 operates as an alternative space—an in-between social field that enables relatively autonomous forms of action within dominant urban and governmental structures. Rather than mobilizing overt resistance, 706 works through ambiguity and temporality to reconfigure youth subjectivity and everyday sociality. During the lockdown, its online writing workshops provided a relational space in which participants narrated everyday suffering, countering the abstraction of state-led biomedical “cure” with practices of care grounded in lived experience. Writing functioned not only as expression but also as an ethnographic and ethical practice that sustained social connection amid isolation.

In the post-pandemic city, 706 further transformed its role through small-scale co-living experiments. Characterized by lightly structured sociality, these spaces enable shared dwelling without demanding constant intimacy, resisting both atomized housing markets and collectivizing forms of governance. Engaging theories of alternative space and relational urbanism, the paper conceptualizes these initiatives as practices of urban repair: modest, experimental ways through which fractured cities are concretely inhabited and reassembled.

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The article analyses how grassroots practices of care and alliance-making rework Sarajevo’s urban space, enabling migrants to rest and (re)organise their mobility. The notion of a "rest hub" captures the relational and urban dimensions of waiting along migration routes.

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Drawing on an ethnography grounded in direct participation in solidarity work, this paper analyses the relationship between solidarity practices directed at migrants in transit or (temporarily) present in the city and the urban space of Sarajevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina), understood as a site of everyday life, encounter, and contestation along the Balkan route.

Situating the production of solidarity initiatives at the urban scale, the paper engages with the question of how grassroots practices of care and alliance-making can render urban space liveable along migration routes. The analysis unfolds along three interconnected dimensions. First, it addresses centre-periphery relations, highlighting solidarity actors’ commitment to keeping their activities within central areas, in contrast to the spatial segregation produced by institutional models of reception. Second, it examines the multiscalar character of solidarity practices, through which Sarajevo functions as a site of experimentation that challenges national regulations while articulating a critique of EU migration governance. Third, it explores the relationship between the capital and the country’s geographical border, which since January 2023 has bordered the Schengen Area.

Through this analysis, Sarajevo emerges as a space at the margins of the spectacle of the “migration crisis”: a city where grassroots practices of care and alliance-making rework urban space, enabling migrants to rest, return, and (re)organise their mobility. Thinking in terms of a rest hub allows us to grasp the relational and urban dimensions of waiting along migration routes, as the city becomes more than a mere “through” space within a “transit country” along the route.

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I will explore how opposite categories are expressed or overcome in a capital “cosmopolitan” city through musical and dance events shaped by DJs from different countries. To what extent polarisation is a question of the level of analysis, imaginary, or experience?

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The capital city of Accra in Ghana is often presented as a cosmopolitical or afropolitan, and is well known for its musical and dance events. In the one hand, these spaces of coexistence reinforce opposite categories (African/Occidental, Ghanian/diaspora, French/English…), as it targets a specific audience and imaginary. In the other hand, they do overcome them, as events are open to anyone, and have to meet both expectation (and the sensation of feeling at home) and surprise (the discovering of other imaginaries), experiences and aspirations.

This ethnographical approach of DJs shaping music and dance events in the city will show at which point differences become a polarisation i.e. revealed or lead to tensions or inequalities, and where an accurate description will nuance polarised representations.

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How do promises co-produce cities and often undermine sustainable futures? Exploring the promissory dimensions of two cultural institutions in Paris (Institut du monde arabe & des cultures d’islam) sheds light on the attachments formed within and beyond the polarized spatial experience of the city.

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For several years, I have been concerned—epistemologically and empirically—with the relationship between the city and promise: How do promises enter urban worlds, and how do they co-produce cities? Most importantly, how can we free ourselves from promises that we know undermine the sustainable futures of the urban worlds we inhabit?

To explore these questions, I propose to examine the promissory dimensions of two cultural institutions in Paris: the international foundation Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA), conceived in the 1970s and inaugurated in the 1980s, and the Institut des Cultures d’Islam (ICI), created in the 1990s and opened in 2006 by the City of Paris. From the outset, both institutions were situated within polarized political contexts, and their articulations of the “Arab world” and “Islamic cultures,” respectively, were framed as cultural promises meant to counter these contexts.

To grasp the everyday inconsistencies of the urban landscape co-created by these institutions, I will present an analysis of two ethnographic itinéraires—guided walks between the IMA and the ICI. What potential connections do my research partners draw between the two? How do they experience and inhabit polarized social atmospheres? Do they care, and if so, how do they counter them? What else nourishes their attachment to—or fuels their disenchantment with—the city? Researching the city as a “promissory assemblage” helps illuminate the often paradoxical attachments formed within and beyond the profoundly contradictory spatial experience of the city as lived space.

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The memory of past urban spaces offers insight into how polarisation is spatially assembled and de-assembled. This paper considers how queer desire enabled transgressions of polarised urban space during the Northern Ireland Conflict amid ethnonational and state violence.

Paper long abstract

Urban space during the Northern Ireland Conflict, otherwise known as the Troubles, was characterised by (para)militant and ethnonational segregation, and state securitisation, hindering mobility and reproducing violence. Urban segregation in the Northern Irish context was premised on inherited psychic geographies of safety and danger, constituting a cityscape polarised through territoriality, danger, and risk. This paper explores how queer desire facilitated the subversion of ethnonational boundaries through the mobilisation of material and discursive spatial practices. How this spatial polarisation was traversed through queer desire is traced, drawing on ethnographic data composed of 45 life story interviews with individuals who experienced same-sex desire during the period of the Northern Ireland Conflict, from the late 1960s to the early 2000s. Participants describe creative strategies of seeking out queer desire in cities, Belfast and Derry, that traverse segregation, yet also mobilise infrastructures of violence to facilitate queer experience. These mobilities both challenge and repurpose systems of polarisation in an otherwise fractured urban contexts. How participants recall these spatial practices indicates queer desire is temporally and spatially positioned through its relationship to the assembling and de-assembling of conflict and resolution in urban contexts. Consequently, the relationship between transgression, spatial practice, and polarisation produces assemblages of queer being and becoming, and illustrates that the malleability of polarisation is contingent on the capacity to subvert it.

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This ethnographic account engages with Berlin's queer Arab collectives through their right to opacity. It explores how urban artistic forms and practices challenge the polarising binaries and imaginaries of Islam and queerness, messing with the face of a city so long accustomed to frowning.

Paper long abstract

Overly grim victors often write history. This ethnographic contribution, however, narrates a queer history of Berlin-based initiatives penned by a commitment to their right to opacity (Glissant 1997). It is a refusal to be restrained by the presumed impossibilities of queer Arab life, particularly against the polarising binaries—and imaginaries—of Islam and queerness as reinforced by racializing state discourses of homonationalism (Puar 2007; 2013), femonationalism (Farris 2017), and securitization (Amar 2011; Dietze 2018).

Grounded in my participation in collectives like Queer Arab Barty and ADIRA, this paper explores their creation of an “otherwise” of cultural production that challenges delusions of a “safe space." Their urban artistic engagements function as grassroots modes of care, forging spaces for collective desire and solidarity under public scrutiny. By embracing opacity, queer Arab artists protect themselves from reductive categories by reworking their practices within coalitional networks of racialized Others, a mode of relating enabled by urban migrancy. This practice remains entangled in the frictions of the neoliberal city, facing political silencing, budget cuts, and right-wing populism.

Centering collectives that rework a fragmented city through opacity, I ask: How can migrant negotiations of queer encounters leverage unruly, imaginative performance like drag to challenge the racialized binaries of gender, religion, and belonging? And how does the collective desire for doing otherwise (Binder 2022; Weiss 2016) mess with the face of a city so long accustomed to frowning?

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Drawing on fieldwork in Kyōjima, a former light-industrial neighbourhood in eastern Tokyo, this paper examines art projects as relational arenas in which polarised and competing imaginaries come into contact, enabling the negotiation of change as well as the reimagining and reshaping of the city.

Paper long abstract

Starting in the 1990s, art projects have become a prominent feature of urban (re)development and community-building initiatives in Japan. Framed as participatory, socially engaged, and co-creative artistic practices, these projects are often site-specific and provide a platform for polarised discourses surrounding local issues – such as economic restructuring, demographic change, rising vacancy rates, eroding social ties, and disaster preparedness – as well as questions of local identity to come into contact.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Kyōjima, a former light-industrial neighbourhood in eastern Tokyo, this paper examines art projects as relational arenas in which divergent interpretations of urban identities, pasts and futures are negotiated among heterogeneous groups, including local residents, creative practitioners, municipal actors, and corporate stakeholders. I conceptualise art projects as relational “spaces of possibility” where polarised opinions and lived realities can meet and, in turn, initiate alternative reimaginations of the neighbourhood, its spaces, and meanings. Dependent on external financial and spatial resources, as well as (supra)local cultural and social capital, art projects are compelled to cooperate across the above-mentioned groups, making visible competing expectations and urban imaginaries – from wishes to preserve the neighbourhood’s historic architectural heritage and shitamachi identity to attempts to increase local real estate value through market-driven urban renewal. By focusing on how art projects shape and are shaped by Kyōjima’s social and spatial fabric, this paper explores how sharing creativity can be a first step toward reimagining and reshaping the city.

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How the globalisation in late capitalism reconfigures informal market, language and lifestyle in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire ? This paper examines the arrival of an international corporation of private hire taxi (equivalent to Uber) in the market of taxi meter and its effects on informal workers.

Paper long abstract

What happens when foreign capital and new technologies enter local markets in postcolonial Africa? How do they reorganize markets, linguistic practices, and the values associated with language? This paper examines a case of the commodification of language in Abidjan, where local French language practices acquire new values within a newly configured market of late capitalism.

In 2018, Yango—an international private hire taxi company operating through a mobile application and emblematic of this form of capitalism—entered the Abidjan market. It rapidly disrupted the traditional taxi sector, converted many taxi drivers into Yango drivers, and contributed to shifts in the use of Nouchi (Ivorian French argot) and what is locally referred to as 'bon français' (good French) during rides.

In this context, how has the arrival of Yango transformed the market and French language practices? What values are these linguistic registers associated with? I ground my analysis in the concept of the commodification of linguistic practices, which conceptualizes language as a form of economic exchange value within the globalized market of late capitalism (Heller, 2010; Duchêne & Heller, 2012; Heller & McElhinny, 2017).

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Cities act on individuals through a dual mechanism of alienation and hegemonic culturalisation, as well as encounter and emancipation. This paper explores how, when diverse epistemologies and ontologies mix, cities can cultivate counter-hegemonic ways of life within the framework of globalisation.

Paper long abstract

The city is often seen as a place of partial alienation for individuals: migrating from rural areas or simply moving to a new location for structural reasons leads individuals to detach from their communities and solidarity networks. At the same time, large cities, as globalisation’s capitals, are centres of innovation that spread and absorb new universalising traits of humanity. For these reasons, the city has always symbolised both a break from ancestral traditions or community bonds and, through the same mechanism, a path to emancipation and liberation from them.

During my ethnographic work on the Okupa and anti-touristification movements in Barcelona (Spain), it emerged that forms of anti-system organisations were configured as forms of decolonisation from the global capitalist system and of urban resistance.

In La Paz and El Alto (Bolivia), the city, historically a site of denial of indigenous identity due to racial discrimination in the South American context and to modern-Western cultural hegemony, is becoming a space for epistemic decolonisation for new generations. This is achieved through new forms of alternative gathering that liberate them from traditional communitarian diktats and, simultaneously, from Western colonisation. The result is counterhegemonic political movements that rebelliously renegotiate the ontologies of globalisation and indigenous ones.

In both ethnographic cases, the development of new community forms repairs the fractures between modernity and political/ethnic identity. These experiences suggest how cities can be reconceptualised as spaces of political resistance to certain globalisation, and, in the case of indigenous peoples, as hubs of transmodernity.

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Through ethnographic reflections on walking Cairo after the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and later Berlin, this paper shows how streets are inhabited as living archives where memory, loss and political possibility are negotiated, tracing how fractured urban spaces are inhabited, erased, and reimagined.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how walking operates as both method and practice in fractured cities. Through personal trajectories, interlocutors’ narratives, and sensory encounters with streets, walls, and buildings, I explore how urban space is lived, remembered, and contested across political rupture.

I approach the city through a dwelling perspective, treating streets, walls, and buildings not as static backdrops but as relational terrains shaped through movement, care, and contestation. Focusing on practices such as marching, lingering, photographing, and remembering, I trace how urban space is continuously made and unmade through acts of togetherness, rejection, and remembrance. While revolutionary streets once functioned as sites of collective intimacy and political imagination, they later became spaces of erasure, securitization, and decay. Yet even under conditions of defeat and fragmentation, walking persists as a modest but generative mode of dwelling. It transformed into quieter practices of remembrance—searching for leftover graffiti, retracing routes of protest, and engaging bodily with spaces marked by loss. These acts function as grassroots modes of care that resist state-imposed forgetting.

By walking across different moments and cities, the paper highlights how memories of protest travel translocally, reactivating past affects in new urban contexts. Rather than presenting walking as resistance in a heroic sense, the paper foregrounds its fragility and ambiguity as a practice of dwelling within fractured urban landscapes. In doing so, it shows how creative and imaginative practices of inhabiting the city can challenge polarized conceptions of public space, not by overcoming fracture, but by learning to dwell within it.

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This paper explores how people rendered “out of place” in Cape Town’s world-class city project are governed through regimes of visibility, and how its unhoused population mobilises practices of “making the town dirty” to transform marginality into a political resource in staking claims to the city.

Paper long abstract

In its aspirations to a "world-class city" aesthetic, Cape Town’s growing unhoused population is rendered “out of place”, borrowing from the lexicon of Douglas (1966). Racialised and classed conditions are routinely framed in policy, discourse, and practice as obstacles to development, rather than as consequences of infrastructurally reinforced underdevelopment produced under Apartheid. Central Improvement Districts (CIDs), quality-of-life bylaws, digital incident-management platforms, and privatised security infrastructures operate as interlocking technologies of urban governance, managing urban order while containing the visibility of poverty at the city’s margins.

Drawing on ethnographic research with people on the streets and members of housing activist coalitions, this paper examines how historically structured conditions shaping Black lives are deliberately pushed into view through practices interlocutors describe as “making the town dirty.” I argue that being rendered “out of place” in an aspiring world-class city is strategically instrumentalised as both a critique of racialised spatial arrangements and unjust social orders, and as a site of political imagination.

Through occupations, encampments, slogans, and spatial transgressions, unhoused activists transform marginality into a material and rhetorical force that reconstitutes the street as a space of claim-making. The ethnography reveals the city as a field of relational tensions through which competing visions of order, care, and belonging are negotiated. By foregrounding a politics of visibility, the paper contributes to broader anthropological conversations on how polarised urban spaces are not only governed and divided, but actively reworked through everyday struggles over recognition, place, and the right to inhabit the city otherwise.

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This paper explores the disappearance of Palestinian neighbourhoods as shared urban spaces, showing how the erosion of everyday public life produces polarised childhoods and reorganises fear, care, and belonging under conditions of violence and state abandonment.

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This paper examines the disappearance of the neighbourhood as a shared social space among Palestinian citizens of Israel and its implications for childhood, parenting, and everyday life under Neolibera conditions. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the Triangle region between 2019 and 2020, the study traces how neighbourhoods once central to socialisation, informal care, and collective responsibility have become sites of fear, withdrawal, and exposure to arbitrary violence.

I argue that the erosion of the neighbourhood is key spatial process through which polarisation is produced and lived. As public space collapses, families retreat into domestic interiors, children’s lives become increasingly privatised and mediated, and responsibility for safety is displaced from collective infrastructures onto individual households. Drawing on structural violence (Galtung) and necropolitics (Mbembe), I develop the notion of mediated necropolitics to describe a mode of governance in which state abandonment, neoliberal restructuring, and selective policing render community violence statistically predictable while appearing internally generated. Within this configuration, Palestinian neighbourhoods increasingly function as “death reserves”: urban spaces of permanent exposure where life is organised around the anticipation of possible death rather than direct sovereign killing.

By foregrounding the neighbourhood as a vanishing “third place” between home and state, the paper contributes to debates on polarised urban spaces by showing how epistemologies, imaginaries, and everyday practices are reshaped through the fragmentation of public space. It reframes polarisation as a spatial and moral process, highlighting how urban collapse reorganises belonging, care, and survival in ways that demand renewed anthropological attention.

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My research ethnographically investigates life in collateralized homes in Tbilisi. Using long-owned homes as collateral often leads to their loss. Amidst intensified dispossessions, alternative ways of lending/borrowing exist. In this panel, I explore Giravnoba as such and show its limitations.

Paper long abstract

My PhD project ethnographically investigates life in collateralized homes in Tbilisi, Georgia. Inherited or acquired at a symbolic price from socialism, apartments are increasingly used as a security for consumer loans in the context of low wages and employment uncertainty, parallelled with the booming real estate sector in the capital city. Collateralization often leads to loss of homes, at times through violent evictions. Amidst intensified inequalities and dispossessions, alternative ways of lending/borrowing and renting/owning exist. Giravnoba is one such example. A colloquial name for a practice between two individuals, Giravnoba involves an owner of an apartment in need of a large sum of money and an individual looking for a place to live and has that sum. If agreed, the two sides sign an agreement and secure the loan with the apartment. In exchange for lending money, the ‘creditor’ is granted the use right of the apartment for the duration of the contract. There are no monthly payments, and the money is only repaid in one sum at the end, when the creditor moves out. Giravnoba is sought by those who are excluded or avoid financial institutions, as well as by those who oppose speculative rental market and see rent as a ‘waste’ of money. In this panel, I suggest to think through Giravnoba as a creative housing arrangement, and while exploring the actors, institutions, and networks involved in the practice, I show its interconnections with formal circuits of finance and its limitations.

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Ethnography at Milan's BiG intergenerational housing project reveals residents practicing critical care: simultaneously supporting and contesting urban regeneration. Their engagement challenges binary framings of projects as either neoliberal or resistant, revealing civic capacity in action.

Paper long abstract

Urban anthropology has productively documented how regeneration projects become sites of contestation between different visions of the city. Yet analytical frameworks often position such projects along a spectrum: captured by neoliberal governance logics on one end, or expressing authentic grassroots resistance on the other.

Ethnographic attention to residents' actually-existing practices reveals more complex forms of urban inhabitation that trouble this framing.

This paper draws on twelve months of fieldwork at BiG (Borgo Intergenerazionale Greco), an intergenerational housing cooperative in Milan's Greco neighborhood, examining how two key actors practice what might be called critical care: forms of engagement that simultaneously critique structural limitations while actively laboring to make the project succeed.

Clara, a lifelong social housing advocate, performed harsh critiques of BiG's governance before revealing this was pedagogical—meant to foster change, not offer sterile critique. Gianni, universally recognized as the neighborhood's memory-keeper, constitutes the groundstone of BiG's historical archive while maintaining what he describes as a "down and dirty" stance toward the project.

Drawing on Puig de la Bellacasa's (2017) matters of care and Blanco and León's (2017) concept of platforms for reciprocity and political contestation, I argue these practices reveal critical engagement as dual function rather than contradiction.

Clara and Gianni enact what Blanco and Nel·lo (2017) identify as civic capacity—the ability to organize around community matters while remaining critically engaged. Their positioned labor demonstrates how residents stitch together urban fractures (Ingold 2010; Lefebvre 1974) by working with rather than against them, revealing generative modes of inhabiting transformation.

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Based on long-term ethnographic research, this paper discusses the concept of the “meantime” as a temporal horizon of urban precarity. The “meantime” is a common denominator for grassroots initiatives that work on imagining and realising housing alternatives in post-apartheid Cape Town.

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Three decades into South Africa’s new democracy, colonial and apartheid infrastructures continue to make Cape Town one of the most polarised and unequal cities in the world. The city’s most disadvantaged, predominantly black, working-class communities remain suspended on obscure housing waiting lists, in precarious occupations, and in flood- and fire-prone informal settlements. Against this backdrop of ingrained spatial inequality and continuous displacement, this paper proposes the notion of the “meantime” as both a spatio-temporal horizon of urban precarity and a site of grassroots experimentations. While liberatory promises of the post-apartheid era have been repeatedly deferred, this paper identifies the “meantime” as a key temporal heuristic defined by deferral and delay, but also by alternative designs and creative experimentation. Based on long-term ethnographic and collaborative research with community architects, residential communities, and housing activists, I examine how these groups mobilized and drew upon various alternative designs, pedagogies, and visions, such as public housing upgrades, adaptive reuse models, and incremental building typologies, to reimagine Cape Town’s most rigid and segregated housing environment. Working and designing with and in the “meantime” was a common denominator or shared condition for many of these housing and activist initiatives. In conclusion, the paper offers a discussion about whether these “meantime” initiatives can be read as tactical alternatives and stopgap interventions to address South Africa’s long-failed, exclusionary public housing standards, or whether they perpetuate a postcolonial political ecology in which the status quo of precarious infrastructures, spatial inequality, and infrastructural insufficiency is only indefinitely managed and maintained.

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Creativity, adaptability, and tradition-driven innovation under international sanctions in Baghdad. During periods of material scarcity, a prototype affordable housing emerged as a crisis response, yet became obsolete once economic conditions shifted.

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The research examines the foundations, processes, and limitations of crisis-driven architectural innovation in Baghdad during the international sanctions (1990-2003). It focuses on a prototype housing project constructed without steel reinforcement, developed in response to restricted access to imported construction materials. Faced with severe material scarcity, architects and engineers organized seminars and professional discussions to develop housing solutions based on locally available materials and traditional construction techniques. One such prototype house remains standing in Baghdad today. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and archival research, the study investigates whether this project can be understood as exhibiting antifragile characteristics—benefiting from crisis conditions rather than merely surviving them. While the prototype demonstrates durability, adaptability, and continued performance at the local scale, it was neither replicated nor institutionalized. Moreover, the professional knowledge that informed its development was never formally documented or integrated into broader housing practice. This case reveals a form of localized architectural antifragility that emerges under crisis conditions but fails to translate into systemic or disciplinary change. By foregrounding this disconnect, the study contributes to broader discussions on crisis-driven innovation, architectural knowledge loss, and the limits of antifragility in the built environment.