News & Events: Blog: A Crisis of Displaceability: Vacancy, Eviction, and the Uneven Geographies of Housing (Thu, Sep 10, 2026)

By Nouri Abdelgadir on Thu, Sep 10, 2026

Housing has emerged as the most pressing concern for Zurich’s residents in recent years, and there is a shared recognition that something ought to be done to address pressing housing questions. Yet, there is disagreement about causes, symptoms, and potential responses to ‘crisis’, which is why in this article, we analyzed competing crisis framings by combining interviews with real estate actors, media analysis, and insights from ongoing interactions with housing researchers and activists in Zurich. We identified prominent controversies, showed how they are negotiated, and how they reinforce each other.  

We highlighted the two most prominent narrative strands. The first revolves around the record-low vacancy rate as a symptom of a market in crisis. The second concerns the growing trend of (mass) evictions in Zurich, which our colleagues at ETHZ have analyzed in a federal report and academic publications. These evictions are commonly posited as an unfortunate but necessary cost to address the low vacancy rate.  

We propose understanding these crisis framings around vacancy and eviction as mutually reinforcing, amounting to what we call a crisis of displaceability. Displaceability helps us link the material dimensions of crisis to discursive practices through which crisis is narrated and contested. This interplay of ‘heavy measures’ of evicting and ‘subtle tools’ of narrating crisis reinforces existing hierarchies of deservingness; and efforts to resolve one dimension of crisis often exacerbate another. 

With this article, we contribute a meso-level analysis to ongoing debates about the geographies of (housing) crises. Taking the case of Zurich, we trace the specific patterns through which crisis as a discursive practice describes, legitimizes, and reinforces conditions of displaceability. We argue that crisis narratives are pivotal for understanding what becomes recognizable as crisis and what responses are rendered possible. Understanding this dynamic helps us trace how crises are named, represented, and negotiated.  

This work supports the broader interests of the Responsible City project. It speaks to its premise of interrogating Swiss responses to socio-ecological housing controversies, of which concerns over limited housing supply and unequally distributed displaceability are prime examples. The article integrates early data and higher-level analyses from SPs 4 and 5, and its findings now inform ongoing, more grounded work with tenants and private sector actors. It is also closely related to a recent article published about the role of migration in the real estate sector, which shows how a housing shortage is often attributed to ‘demand from elsewhere’ by private sector actors and how that narrative is mobilized.  

Future publications based on this article will also be presented on this blog. Interested readers may find the open access publication here.