Call for Papers: 24th IMISCOE Annual Conference (6-9 July 2027, Brussels)

Panel: Who Has the Right to Stay? Migration, Urban Development, and Contemporary Contestations around the Right to Adequate Housing

This panel examines how contemporary urban transformations produce spatial exclusions that disproportionately affect migrants and racialised, low-income and precariously housed populations. Who has the right to stay in the city, and under what conditions? Situated at the intersection of migration and urban studies, the panel invites contributions that explore how processes of gentrification, rising property values, and tourism-driven markets such as short-term rental platforms affect the right to adequate housing, in particular for migrant populations. Although the right to adequate housing is considered a fundamental human right (OHCHR 2009), processes of urban development that apparently operate through neutral mechanisms such as zoning regulations or municipal policies tend to produce racialised and classed geographies of belonging, displacement and expulsion. The proliferation of hostile architecture and the threat of eviction for people living in informal settlements further demonstrate how the regulation of space can restrict not only access to housing, but also the right to rest, gather and remain visible in public space. Migrants and allied movements have challenged such exclusions through informal housing, asylum accommodation struggles, self-organised settlements, squatting and other practices of collective inhabitation. These practices constitute forms of rights-making from below, through which migrants claim the right to stay and participate in the production of urban space. At the same time, the populist right in various places has instrumentalized housing shortages and declining affordability in cities to mobilize around narratives of competition between “deserving” citizens and racialised outsiders.

For this panel, we invite papers grounded in ethnographic research that address the entanglements between migration and housing in rapidly changing urban contexts.

Please send your abstracts (250 words), your academic affiliation and contact details to michelle.vondach@uzh.ch and olivia.killias@uzh.ch by 3 September 2026. We will inform selected participants by mid-September.