Juggling with urbanization and housing insecurity
Lived experiences from four citiesThis essay addresses the contemporary experience of the intensifying insecurity of housing arrangements in urban contexts. Its fictional characters are based on the authors’ individual ethnographic research. Two distinct stories trace efforts of making a home in an age of neoliberalization and financialization marked by transience and uncertainty. Two families, stretched across four cities, Manchester, Istanbul, Tbilisi, and Vienna, find themselves juggling various concerns as they face the prospect of physical and social dislocation. While one of them navigates housing challenges as they transition to a single-parent household, the other family is confronted with the unexpected fate of having their home demolished, while juggling moving in and out of apartments and cities.
Catherine Raya Polishchuk is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna and a fellow at the ifk. Her research examines urban renewal with a focus on policy-making, citizen participation, city branding, and values.
Nana Iashvili is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. She investigates household credit-debt arrangements that use long-owned homes to access loans.
Christopher Morris is Lecturer in Law at the Manchester Law School at Manchester Metropolitan University. His current research examines legal geographies of contracts, focusing on the role of power in the production and regulation of society and space.
Kubilay Aşar is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University in Vienna. His research focuses on futurity, sovereignty, and property in urban life.