Governing the Margins: Housing Precarity, Urban Informality, and Homelessness In Turbulent Times

In an era of economic turbulence, extreme wealth concentration, and eroding safety nets, the global crisis of shelter has intensified. This session examines the continuum of housing precarity, urban informality, and homelessness. We explore and critique how contemporary governance strategies attempt to supervise, regulate, discipline, or integrate precariously housed and unhoused populations into civil and market society.

We invite international papers investigating how state, non-profit, private, and grassroots actors manage housing insecurity across diverse spatial landscapes, from informal settlements, squats, and encampments to precarious rentals and emergency shelters. In keeping with the Congress theme, we seek to analyze how macro political-economic shifts, authoritarian trends, and neoliberal dynamics shape conflicting governance logics. These include punitive state strategies that criminalize poverty, ambivalent deferrals to precarious non-profit networks, and extractivist real estate pressures driving displacement. We welcome research centering the lived experiences, daily survival, and spatial resistance of individuals navigating these insecure spaces.

To advance global urban sociology, we encourage diverse methodological approaches (including ethnography, comparative analysis, and critical policy studies) from both the Global North and Global South. By bridging these contexts, this session aims to challenge urban theories and foster cross-disciplinary dialogue on housing justice, the policing of informal spaces, and the role of grassroots solidarity in carving out emancipatory alternatives for living on a fracturing planet.