Athens | Glasgow | Barcelona
📅 22 January 2025 | 🌐 Online Event
In January 2025, the HousInC research team held a closed, online interim workshop with activists and members of housing movements from Athens, Glasgow, and Barcelona. The aim of this workshop was to share our initial findings, gather valuable feedback, and foster connections among housing struggles across these diverse urban contexts.
This gathering brought together research participants and collaborators to reflect on the shifting meanings and practices of the right to housing amidst ongoing, overlapping crises: the cost-of-living crisis, housing unaffordability, displacement linked to the so-called “refugee crisis,” and the broader climate emergency.
Structured in two parts, the workshop opened with a short presentation of preliminary findings from the HousInC project. This was followed by a roundtable-style discussion, which gave space to activists and representatives of housing initiatives to respond, reflect, and engage in a comparative dialogue across the three cities.
While the workshop was held behind closed doors to allow for open discussion among participants, we plan to publish a short report summarising key insights and takeaways. This will be made available on the HousInC website soon.
We would like to warmly thank everyone who took part and shared their experiences, analysis, and questions. These conversations are vital to shaping the project’s conclusions and its contribution to housing justice research and activism.
For more information about the HousInC project, our reports, or the research team, visit our main project page, or contact us at housingincrises@gmail.com.
Workshop Participants (other than the research team)
Melissa Garcia – Lamarca
Melissa García-Lamarca is an Associate Senior Lecturer at the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies in Sweden. She researches housing injustices and urban green inequalities, where she considers both political economic/financial processes and situated, everyday lived experience as ways to help imagine and enact more emancipatory, just urban futures. Melissa is also co-founder and editor of the Radical Housing Journal.
Marta Ill-Raga
Marta Ill-Raga holds a PhD in Political Science from Ghent University. Her academic and activist trajectory is marked by a sustained interest in the policies and consequences of accumulation by dispossession in urban environments and in the social relations of property. Her doctoral research ethnographically examines the conflicting dynamics between landlords and tenants in Barcelona through her involvement with the Barcelona Tenants’ Union, of which she has been a member since its founding. She is currently participating at the Communication and Content Comission of the Barcelona Tenant’s Unions as well as an adjunct professor at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and an affiliated researcher at the Institute for Urban Research in Barcelona (IDRA).
Marianella Kloka
Marianella Kloka was born in Athens in 1972. At a very early stage she joined the Humanist Movement and dedicated herself to health, education and advocacy missions in Greece, the Balkans, Africa and Asia. She was part of the first editorial team of the Greek LGBT magazine “antivirus” and publisher of the Greek LGBT newspaper “city uncovered”. She also was part of the organizational team of the first Athens Pride. She worked as general manager for the Hellenic association of PLHIV, “positive voice” and supported the first steps of the Hellenic Liver association and the drug users’ union [PENUPS]. Since 2013 she has been working as the advocacy officer of PRAKSIS, greek ngo. She is co-director of the international news agency for peace and non violence, “pressenza”. Marianella has been tutoring on Advocacy and Meaningful engagement in the postgraduate course in EKPA University “Addictions – Addictology” since 2017. She has also been giving courses on Advocacy and Networking for the Social Dynamo HUB. Currently she is one of the consultants of the Greek Drug Policies’ Coordinator.
Neil Gray
Neil Gray is a researcher and writer in urban geography whose work currently focuses on four main strands: (1) The structural role of devaluation in contemporary urban regeneration strategies; (2) Rent, the rent gap and its discontents (3) Housing and tenants’ movements; (4) The spatialities of Italian autonomous Marxism. His edited book, ‘Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle’, was published in 2018.
