In this episode, we speak to Mara Ferreri, Assistant Professor and Senior Researcher in the Inhabiting Radical Housing ERC-founded project at Polytechnic of Turin, Core Team Member of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab and co-founder and editor of the Radical Housing Journal. She has held research and teaching positions at the London School of Economics, Durham University and Northumbria University, in the UK, and at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, in Spain.

Her research focuses on housing precarity, temporary and platform urbanism, and struggles for housing commoning. In her recently published book, The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism: Normalizing Precarity in Austerity London, she draws on seven years of semi-ethnographic research to highlight the material and cultural dynamics of temporary urbanism in the context of capitalism, particularly the gentrification processes that are currently occurring in the city.

This podcast explores these precarious geographies with Mara by examining the concept and practice of property guardianship in the UK, which offers low-cost living solutions for those willing to secure and safeguard unoccupied buildings. Mara provides an in-depth account of this complex phenomenon and helps draw out potential learnings for the way forward for progressing planning in this context