Workshops 2025
Space | Economy PhD Workshop (3rd edition) | 6-7 March 2025 | University of Rome La Sapienza, Faculty of Economics, Sala Lauree | 3rd annual workshop dedicated to doctoral candidates researching in the broad fields of Economic Geography and Regional Science at Sapienza University of Rome and the Gran Sasso Science Institute (L'Aquila) | Coordinated by F. Celata, G. Bei, C. Giannantoni, A. Ascani, A. Faggian, F. Zampollo.
GSSI Cities' research track Workshop | 27 March 2025 | Gran Sasso Science Institute, L'Aquila | Informal workshop for the discussion of ongoing research on urban Issues by PhDs and reserchers. Organized by the Cities' research track of the GSSI in collaboration with the geographers of the Department Memotef Sapienza.
Community and diverse economies research and practice | 27-29 May 2025 | Short course by Katherine Gibson for PhD candidates and early career researchers on the theoretical and methodological foundations of post-capitalist and diverse economies research and practice.
ToRoBo' Critical Geography Workshop | 4-5 June | University of Bologna | 1st edition of an yearly research workshop organized by the University of Bologna (Claudio Minca), the Polytechnic/University of Turin (Francesca Governa), and Sapienza (Filippo Celata), for the presentation and discussion of ongoing research by PhD candidates and early career researchers.
Abstracts and readings
Cristina Temenos | Filling gaps and papering cracks: Innovation and state failures in the polycrisis
Polycrisis is the new buzzword of our time. In 2022, ‘Permacrisis’ was the Collins Dictionary word of the year. While very different, these two relatively new entrants into the governance lexicon indicate that multiple and intersecting crises are the current zeitgeist. In times of increasing uncertainty and intersecting crises - health, economic, social, and environmental – cities search for ways to mediate competing pressures on already strained systems. It’s no wonder then, that urban innovation has become an imperative for municipal governments which, as countless research has shown, have long acted as entrepreneurial actors (Harvey, 1989, Leitner 1990, Phelps & Miao 2020). What urban innovation means in practice however is often more iterative than truly paradigm shifting, despite what the notion of innovation may evoke in popular and political discourse. While couched in a neoliberal, technocratic or corporate grammar, there are emerging progressive and radical models of urban governance that have been given the space to form under the shelter of intersecting crises. Perhaps most notably, new municipalism, a form of radical democratic decision-making focused on issues of social reproduction such as housing, sustainability, and health (Russell 2019). Simultaneously, ‘innovative’ change is often pushed forward through a framing not only of crisis but that of state failure. What success and failure mean in practice for urban governance is as much a question of political infrastructure as political will (Temenos 2024). Drawing on preliminary findings from current research in Santiago, Athens and Manchester, this paper explores the co-existence of formalized routes of urban health innovations and grass-roots experimentation in order to increase access to health services for marginalized communities. I analyse the ways in which crisis policy-making has given rise to new and experimental forms of radical and progressive care work in cities, alongside ongoing projects of revanchist and reactionary public health politics (MacLeod 1999, Temenos 2022). This paper asks how the concept of innovation works through competing needs of having to demonstrate urban entrepreneurialism while providing public health provision amidst ongoing austerity?
Readings:
1) Temenos, C. (2022). Troubling austerity: Crisis policy-making and revanchist public health politics. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 21(6), 728-749.
2) Temenos, C. (2024). FROM BUDAPEST TO BRUSSELS: Discursive and Material Failure in Mobile Policy. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 48(3), 523-538.
Link for attending on line: HERE
Paolo Boccagni | Still life: Stories of migrants biding their time
Readings:
1) Boccagni P. (2022) At home in the centre? Spatial appropriation and horizons of homemaking in reception facilities for asylum seekers. In Making home(s) in displacement. Leuven University Press (link)
2) Boccagni P. (2023) Rooms with little view: Reluctant homemaking and the negotiation of space in an asylum centre. In Migration and Domestic Space: Ethnographies of Home in the Making (pp. 117-135). Springer (link).
Link for attendind online: HERE
Martina Tazzioli | The making of migrants' wageless life. Exploitation and life beyond profit making in refugee camps
This presentation engages with current debates on value production in migration confinement and claims that it is necessary to complicate analyses that show either profit-making activities of the border regime or that conceive migration in terms of surplus population turned into wasted life. Drawing on feminist literature on social reproduction in refugee humanitarian contexts (Rigo, 2022) and on anthropology of labour (Norotzky, 2016), the talk investigates modes of valuing grounded not only on turning migrants into cheap labour force nor (exclusively) in capitalizing on their forced immobility but, rather, on the de-accumulation of life.
In the first part, it discusses the growing literature on extractivism in migration governance and suggests that the concept of “wageless life” (Denning, 2010) enables articulating works on value extracted from migrants’ captivity and reflections on governing migrants by depleting and choking their lives. In the second part, the presentation deals with the Greek refugee context, analysing modes of value-making that are not narrowed to profit-making activities - migrants’ cheap labour force and to the business of private actors - and that, instead, are predicated on wageless life and on the active obstruction to autonomous social reproduction activities.
Readings:
Tazzioli, M. (2024). Refugees’(in)dependency conundrum: Obstructed social reproduction activities and unpaid labour in refugee camps. Antipode, 56(4), 1483-1503.
Link for attending online: HERE
Georgia Alexandri | The role of the state in the financialization of housing: insights from the cases of Athens and Barcelona
Academic debates on housing financialization often conceptualize the state as key facilitator, establishing institutional frameworks that enable global financial actors to embed themselves and extract values from local housing markets. In this presentation, I draw on a Poulantzian-inspired understanding of capital and the state as a social relation to argue for a more complex and dialectical account of the state-investor nexus. Through a comparative analysis of Athens and Barcelona—two cities profoundly reshaped by the Global Financial Crisis—I examine how state interventions have both enabled and constrained housing financialization at different moments in time and across spatial scales. My analysis highlights how these processes are shaped by contingent and path-dependent dynamics, rather than following a singular or linear trajectory. In Athens, the central state initially protected domestic financial interests and shielded indebted households from repossession. However, it also laid the groundwork for future financialization, which has recently intensified amidst economic recovery and the rapid expansion of tourism. In contrast, the Spanish central state facilitated large-scale mortgage repossessions and banking sector restructuring, allowing international investors to enter Barcelona’s housing market. These developments provoked strong urban social movements, which in turn influenced local policies aimed at affordable housing. Across both cases, I show how financial actors recalibrated their strategies in response to shifting institutional and market conditions. I conclude that the trajectory of housing financialization is highly variegated and contested, and that a more nuanced, relational understanding of state-capital dynamics is essential for capturing its complexity and potential for alternative pathways.
Readings:
Alexandri, G. (2022). Housing financialisation a la Griega. Geoforum, 136, 68-79.
Alexandri, G., & Hodkinson, S. (2025). Unpacking the complex role of the state in housing financialization, comparing Athens and Barcelona. European Urban and Regional Studies, online first doi: 09697764251324893.
Alexandri, G., & Janoschka, M. (2025). Local housing policies and corporate social financial logics: Insights from the financialization of housing in Barcelona. Housing, Theory and Society, 42(1), 41-59.