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Displaceability in the Age of Climate Crises: Housing, Injustice, and the Uneven Geographies of Place-Keeping
24th IRS Lecture on Society and Space by Isabelle Anguelovski, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
This talk explores the entanglements between housing and climate injustice as dual and mutually reinforcing crises of our time. Drawing on global urban research, it examines how climate change and the policies designed to address it—such as green redevelopment, energy retrofits, and resilience planning—can deepen housing precarity and intensify processes of displacement. Beyond cases of visible eviction or migration, the talk introduces the concept of climate mobility (in)justice to capture the ongoing vulnerabilities, anticipations, and threats of loss that shape everyday urban life for marginalized communities. Through comparative examples, it highlights how climate adaptation and mitigation often reproduce social hierarchies of race, class, and place, and calls for a reparative approach to climate and housing justice that centers security, care, and the right to remain.
Isabelle Anguelovski
Isabelle is the director of the Barcelona Laboratory for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ), a Research Professor and a Principle Investigator at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA). As part of collaborative and individual international research projects, she studies how urban environmental injustice is materialized and contested. Currently, her focus is on four main research areas: 1) The politics of the green city as a growing global planning orthodoxy; 2) The social and racial manifestations and impacts of green gentrification for historically marginalized residents; 3) Urban planning for health and wellbeing, with a focus on health equity and justice; and 4) Justice and inclusivity in climate adaptation planning, including distributional and procedural insecurities produced by adaptation plans, interventions, and land use configurations and regulations. Her most current work examines the compounding environmental racisms and injustices faced by marginalized groups when exposed to climate impacts (e.g. heat, flooding), resilient infrastructures, and displacement pressures.