Former scientific staff:
PhD researcher in Social Geography and Urban Studies from 2020 to 2025

PhD project:
Housing Dispossession as a Political Problem – Exploring Political Alienation in Displacement Processes in Basel and Athens

Project summary:
Displacement often engenders profound feelings of loss, helplessness, and insecurity 
as tenants are forced to leave familiar surroundings. Capital accumulation in this context relies on the existential need of an urban population for housing, as well as for spaces within the city to rest, educate themselves, and work. However, the surplus value generated from these needs is absorbed in place-specific forms by those who hold property titles. This is why this study places the concept of housing dispossession – particularly through gentrification-induced displacement – at its center. Displacements are here understood as part of a process that drives the accumulation of capital and housing stocks in the hands of institutional investors, while deepening the precariousness of tenants due to rising rents. However, the growing concentration of real estate ownership among institutional actors enables them to accumulate not only economic but also political power. Despite this, these actors are frequently overlooked as active political agents, whereas displaced tenants are often inadequately recognized or framed as materially and politically dispossessed.

The empirical foundation of this dissertation draws from two case studies of displacement processes: one involving tenancy cancellations in Basel and another driven by rising rents in Kypseli, Athens. The Basel case serves as the central focus, offering a detailed examination of the micro-level dynamics of how tenants experience and respond to displacement caused by tenancy cancellations. Findings from Basel are placed in dialogue with insights from the Athens case study to deepen our understanding of housing dispossession as a wider political issue that exacerbates economic, legal, and discursive power asymmetries for our Western democracies. By exploring the interplay between powerful institutional structures and everyday lived experiences, I analyse tenants’ practices and experiences and the ways these are shaped by broader structural forces and power relations, employing an institutional ethnography framework. Data collection for both cases followed a multi-method qualitative approach, incorporating expert interviews, media analysis, a document analysis, semi-structured interviews with displaced tenants, and participant observation, resulting in five distinct datasets.

This dissertation makes seven key contributions: First, it shows how individually negotiating with landlords or competing for scarce affordable housing may seem practical for tenants in Basel, this experience of an inhibition of collective action is paradoxically however often pivotal in motivating tenants to collectively resist cancellations. Second, my work underscores the importance of political alienation (Schwartz, 2017) in shaping tenants’ reactions to displacement. It contributes to research on how alienated political institutions and structures that inhibit political appropriation reinforce tenants’ experiences of abandonment and competition. Third, it delves into the role of intersectional understandings of class in shaping tenant responses and resistance to housing precarity and displacement. By foregrounding class positionality – structured through tenants’ trajectories as workers, citizens, and tenants – it highlights how interconnected work, borders, and property regimes influence tenants’ economic, political, and social capacities to resist displacement. Fourth, this study emphasizes the significance of tenants’ trajectories as tenants in understanding varying responses to displacement. Long-term, diverse, and stable tenancies are highlighted as socio-spatial structures that protect tenants from the pressures of the competitive housing market, thereby producing economic, social, and ideological effects nurturing critique. Fifth, my research examines the economic, legal, and discursive structures that shape tenants' practices and vice versa, while a sixth contribution identifies structural factors that enable and sustain resistance. Finally, my work shows how housing dispossession reinforces power asymmetries in ways that fundamentally challenge democratic principles, also recentering questions of power and dispossession to debates on alienation.