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Housing struggles, regeneration and large-scale demolition

The political and moral economy of construction booms

Project Lead: Marco Di Nunzio

Since October 2023, Marco has a conducted a research project that provides a comparative and ethnographic exploration of the resurgence of large-scale demolition as a technology of urban development and the search for urban alternatives that communities have mounted in response. So far, research activities have focused on Addis Ababa and Birmingham, where large-scale demolitions of thousands of homes have been planned or initiated with little to no involvement of urban communities.

My work examines the multiple forms of community resistance to demolition - not only as acts of defiance but also as sites of knowledge production. Residents’ struggles expose contradictions in demolition-driven development while proposing alternative visions of community, collaboration, and participation - foundational for imagining just urban futures locally and globally.

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