A research lab at ICTA-UAB
Research Line Co-leader
Melissa García-Lamarca is an Associate Senior Lecturer at the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies in Sweden, and a BCNUEJ affiliated member. With a PhD in Geography from the University of Manchester (2016), she held Spanish- and ERC-funded postdoctoral positions from 2016-2022 at ICTA-UAB with BCNUEJ, and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow working on the CLIMATEJUSTHOME project at DIST, Polytechnic of Turin during 2023. Melissa’s research unpacks housing injustices and urban green inequalities by looking at both political economic processes and situated, everyday lived experience. She is a co-founder and handling editor at the Radical Housing Journal, and has over twenty years of experience working as a consultant in a sustainability workers cooperative, a researcher, teacher and project coordinator in Spain, Canada and internationally. (Languages: Cat, Spa, Eng)
Research lines (of the lab): Housing inequalities, social struggles, environmental gentrification
Selected Publications
- Ferreri, M., García-Lamarca, M., Obra Social Barcelona, (2024). Radical Methodological Openness and Method as Politics: Reflections on Militant Research with Squatters in Catalonia. Antipode 56(2): 469-461. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12993
- Ruiz Cayuela, S. and García-Lamarca, M., (2023). From the squat to the neighbourhood: Popular infrastructures as reproductive urban commons. Geoforum. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103807
- García Lamarca, M. Non-Performing Loans, Non-Performing People: Life and Struggle with Mortgage Debt in Spain. 2022. Athens, University of Georgia Press. Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series. (Translated and published in Spanish with Bellaterra in 2023: Préstamos fallidos, personas fallidas: Vida y lucha contra la deuda hipotecaria).
- Kotsila, P., Anguelovsi, I., García Lamarca, M. and F. Sekulova. 2022. Injustice in Urban Sustainability: Ten Core Drivers. London: Routledge.
- García-Lamarca, M., Anguelovski, I., Cole, H.V.S., Connolly, J.J.T., Pérez-del-Pulgar, C., Shokry, G., Triguero-Mas, M. (2022). Urban green grabbing: Residential real estate developers discourse and practice in gentrifying Global North neighborhoods, Geoforum, 128: 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.11.016.
- García-Lamarca, M. & Ullström, S. (2022) “Everyone wants this market to grow”: The affective post-politics of municipal green bonds. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Society, 5 (1): 207-224. DOI: 10.1177/2514848620973708.
- Garcia-Lamarca, M., Anguelovski, I., Venner, K. 2022. Challenging the financial capture of urban greening. Nature Communications.
- García-Lamarca, M., Anguelovski, I., Cole, H., Connolly, J., Argüelles, L., Baró, F., Loveless, S., Pérez del Pulgar, C., & Shokry, G. (2021). Urban green boosterism and city affordability: For whom is the ‘branded’ green city?
Urban Studies, 58(1): 90-112. DOI: 10.1177/0042098019885330.
Editorial
- Melissa García-Lamarca: “Se ha sacralizado la vivienda privada, con el mensaje ‘yo hago lo que quiero con ella” (elDiario.es, 2023)
- Lived realities versus state rationalities: Mobilizing within and against housing injustices (Radical Housing Journal, 2022)
- Valuing housing in the normalised crises: Resistance, fatigue and lexicons of struggle (Radical Housing Journal, 2021)Radical housing (dis)encounters: Reframing housing research and praxis (Radical Housing Journal 2020)
- Covid-19 and housing struggles: The (re)makings of austerity, disaster capitalism, and the no return to normal (Radical Housing Journal, 2020)
- Interrogating Rent: Structures, Struggles and Subjectivities (Radical Housing Journal, 2019)
- Introducing the Radical Housing Journal (Radical Housing Journal, 2019)