News & Events: Conference: Emerging Urban Inequalities Conference (26-27 June 2025)

By Nouri Abdelgadir on Fri, Jul 4, 2025

The conference was organized and hosted by the Urban Institute of the University of Sheffield. The aim was to bring together early career researchers from various disciplines to discuss social, environmental, and economic injustices in urban contexts. As such, it provided an opportunity to discuss ongoing work-in-progress with peers, and to initiate and deepen relationships with researchers elsewhere.

Nouri’s presentation Housing 10 Million: Framing Displacement and Arrival in a Housing ‘Shortage’ was an empirically driven reflection on the limits of dominant housing crisis narratives in Zurich. This intervention was motivated by an urban geographer’s surprise about our use of the term housing crisis in Zurich, and by the adamant public rejection of the same term by representatives of local government and planning agencies.

This work is based on interviews conducted with real estate advisors and investors by Frances Brill, and on an ongoing media analysis of prominent housing narratives in Zurich by Nouri Abdelgadir & Michelle Schaffer. The presentation examined how controversies around low vacancy rates and displacement are framed by elite actors and in the public sphere. Contested housing crisis narratives are understood here in terms of framing and discursive practice, which allows us to interrogate how problems are defined, what responses are formulated, and who is seen as deserving of the benefits from these responses.

The presentation traced how vacancy is framed as a numbers issue, how displacement is commonly individualized and moralized, and how widespread but unequal conditions of displaceability are co-constituted by structural injustices and hegemonic discourses of deservingness and localism. Nouri highlighted how housing shortage and displacement frames circulate across elite, policy, and media spheres, how they are politicized and depoliticized in various manners, and how they increasingly align with various anti-migration narratives. These dynamics highlight how responsibility is unevenly assigned. Competing crisis frames not only define problems, but responsibilize different actors, in this case often by shifting blame onto newcomers and responsibility onto tenants and market forces while obscuring structural causes. This work on housing crisis narratives will inform Nouri’s future work on experiences of and challenges to displaceability by incumbent tenants and newcomers in Zurich and Geneva, which is an integral part of SP4.

On the second day, Frances Brill presented preliminary results from interviews with real estate consultants in her presentation Conflict (Resolution) And Making Sense of Responsibility-Making in Swiss Urban Real Estate. She explored how private sector actors make sense of and act on responsibility for socio-ecologically sustainable investment. The core tension at play here concerns individuals’ personal sense of responsibility and the constraints imposed by their institutional position. The presentation raised important questions about what responsibility means in a sector where individual intentions are often in conflict organizational and institutional goals. It also pointed to pressing methodological, ethical, and political challenges in conducting critical social research in the real estate sector.

The panels Nouri and Frances participated in also initiated insightful conversation with fellow researchers. Particularly notable here are Judith Schnelzer, whose work on displaceability strongly informed some of Nouri’s conceptual framework, and Hannah Sender, whose research about the role of property in shaping urbanization trajectories speaks to many of the concerns at the heart of the responsible city project.

The conference featured other activities and contributions that pushed us to reflect on the broader stakes of our urban research. Saffron Woodcraft’s keynote New Frontiers of Urban Inequality: Power, Technology and the Politics of Everyday Life highlighted new forms of inequality rooted in digital infrastructures and data citizenship. Her talk drew attention to the limitations of traditional inequality indices and rigid understandings of participatory, and called for transdisciplinary, empowering interventions to increase equity in knowledge production, policy design, and urban planning. Helen Sims, CEO of Voluntary Action Sheffield, reflected on the challenges of charity work in highly unequal urban contexts such as the Sheffield region. Finally, world café discussions invited participants to explore conceptual approaches to urban inequalities, innovative methods, and, crucially, the importance of (re)discovering hope in urban research in the face of growing political pressures from the right.