Spatializing Urban Vulnerability in Times of Crisis: Energy Poverty, Housing Deprivation, Homelessness, and Displacement

In the current era of intersecting housing, energy, climate, and socio-economic crises, urban vulnerability is increasingly understood as spatially concentrated and structurally produced. Rising housing costs, energy poverty, inadequate housing conditions, and uneven access to infrastructure are not isolated phenomena but interconnected expressions of a broader condition of urban polycrisis. These overlapping pressures challenge conventional understandings of resilience, which often conceptualise it as adaptive capacity or system stability in the face of external shocks. This paper offers a conceptual contribution by rethinking resilience through the lens of urban polycrisis and bottom-linked governance. It argues that dominant resilience frameworks tend to depoliticise vulnerability by focusing on recovery and adaptation, while underemphasising the structural and institutional arrangements that generate uneven exposure to risk. In contrast, this paper conceptualises resilience as a politically embedded and socially mediated process shaped by governance configurations operating across multiple scales. Central to this argument is the role of non-state and multi-sectoral alliances as meso-level governance infrastructures. Rather than acting solely as service providers or emergency responders, such alliances can be understood as institutional mediators that connect fragmented actors, mobilise resources, and produce alternative forms of coordination in contexts of crisis. In doing so, they may contribute to reconfiguring governance logics toward more egalitarian and inclusive urban futures, although their transformative capacity remains uneven and contested. By linking resilience theory with scholarship on urban governance and polycrisis, the paper reframes urban vulnerability not as a discrete policy problem but as a relational condition produced through the interaction of housing systems, energy regimes, and socio-spatial inequalities. It ultimately argues that understanding resilience in the era of polycrisis requires shifting attention from systems of recovery to the governance infrastructures that structure exposure, mediation, and collective action in the urban realm.

Urban resilience strategies have become a dominant paradigm for urban development in cities navigating protracted crises. Nevertheless, they often fail to critically engage with the social vulnerabilities that precondition a city’s capacity to cope, adapt, or transform in the face of shocks or stressors. This research argues that a resilience pathway is shaped by a prior diagnostic act: how a city identifies and prioritises its social vulnerabilities. It applies the VISIBLE framework – disaggregating vulnerability into seven core groups (Voice and Power, Information and Awareness, Socioeconomic Disparities, Infrastructure and Services, Belonging and Social Conditions, Land and Housing, and Exposure) – to conduct a comparative analysis of Athens' and Thessaloniki's resilience strategies, Greece. Despite sharing a context of austerity, migration challenges, and climate risks at the time of strategy-making, the analysis reveals their divergent pathways. Athens’ strategy, forged in overlapping emergencies, perceived vulnerability as requiring immediate triage, resulting in a pathway of pragmatic improvisation that prioritises acute deficits in infrastructure, shelter, and critical services. In contrast, Thessaloniki’s strategy, shaped by institutional constraints and economic stagnation, views vulnerability as a structural deficiency, producing a pathway of strategic projection that foregrounds issues of voice, information asymmetries, and long-term socioeconomic disparities. Through structured comparison, the research empirically demonstrates that the scope of vulnerability diagnosis preconfigures the substance of resilience planning. Furthermore, it advances the argument for “planning from vulnerability” methodologically by showcasing VISIBLE as a plausible critical tool for making diagnostic choices explicit, comparable, and open to scrutiny. The findings underscore that just resilience planning cannot begin with technical solutions, but must start with a structured diagnosis of a city’s vulnerability profile – including how access to infrastructure, land and housing, exposure to hazards, and differential positionality intersect on the ground.

This paper critically re-examines the relationship between data and urban resilience by shifting attention from data as a neutral technical artefact to data practices as socio-spatial processes that shape how vulnerability, risk, and futures are imagined and governed. Drawing on social constructivist perspectives and critical scholarship on urban imaginaries, the paper conceptualises “resilience imaginaries” as socially produced visions of urban futures that influence policy priorities, resource allocation, and whose vulnerabilities are rendered visible or invisible across urban space. Empirically, the paper synthesises findings from multiple research projects conducted over the past five years in contexts characterised by housing precarity, personal vulnerability, and climate risk in both the Global South and the Global North In and attempts to examines three interrelated domains of data practice: data consumption, where data supports risk management, housing and energy planning and ultimately the process of urban resilience; data circulation, where information flows shape governance coordination and public participation across institutional and territorial scales; and data generation, focusing on participatory and dialogical mapping with marginalised communities experiencing compounding forms of vulnerability ad through the process of mapping nurture a resilience spirit. Our analysis demonstrates how data practices can simultaneously reproduce spatialised injustices and open up possibilities for more inclusive, situated, and equitable urban futures. The paper proposes a holistic framework that positions data as product, flow, and process, highlighting the importance of connecting quantitative spatial analysis with participatory and qualitative approaches. It concludes by arguing that socially embedded, process-oriented data practices are essential for addressing cumulative urban vulnerabilities and advancing more just resilience imaginaries in places dealing with multiple and overlapping crises.

This study examines material deprivation in the Municipality of Athens through a spatial lens of urban vulnerability, focusing on the intersections between housing deprivation, energy poverty, and homelessness. The research is theoretically grounded in multidimensional approaches to poverty and social exclusion, conceptualizing deprivation as a dynamic and spatially uneven process shaped by unequal access to housing, infrastructure, and essential services. Drawing on geographical perspectives, the study situates material deprivation within broader processes of urban inequality and spatialized injustice. In alignment with European homelessness research, it adopts the ETHOS framework to capture a continuum of housing exclusion, including hidden forms of homelessness. Methodologically, the research employs a mixed-methods design combining quantitative spatial analysis and qualitative inquiry. Census and socio-economic data are analyzed using GIS and cluster analysis to map the spatial distribution and co-location of deprivation indicators at a fine urban scale. Qualitative data are collected through interviews and focus groups with residents, service users, and social actors in high-deprivation areas, exploring lived experiences of housing precarity, energy insecurity, and social exclusion. The findings reveal pronounced spatial concentrations of vulnerability in central-western Athens, where housing deprivation, energy poverty, and precarious employment overlap. These areas are characterized by poor housing conditions, overcrowding, limited energy access, and forms of hidden homelessness, reflecting cumulative and mutually reinforcing disadvantages. The analysis demonstrates that these dimensions are deeply interconnected, forming a complex geography of urban vulnerability. The study emphasizes the need for place-based interventions, including strengthened street outreach to detect hidden homelessness, improved accessibility of social and housing services, and the development of integrated local housing strategies. It further supports coordinated action among municipalities, civil society, and local actors, alongside targeted measures in affordable housing provision and energy upgrading to tackle housing exclusion.

This paper explores the phenomenon of touristification in Athens through the lens of spatial analysis and the Rent Gap theory. The main research hypothesis focuses on the comparison between “potential rent,” captured through an attractiveness index based on proximity to cultural points of interest following the logic of the 15-minute city, and “current rent,” expressed by the existing Quality of Life (QoL) index. By utilizing GIS tools and data from short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb, the analysis seeks to identify areas where low quality of life and correspondingly low rents coexist with high tourist attractiveness, creating strong investment incentives and increased displacement pressures on permanent residents. In the methodological section, a cartographic subtraction of the two indices is applied to produce a composite spatial index. The resulting map highlights zones with different levels of gentrification risk. Areas with high positive values, such as Metaxourgeio, are identified as "gentrification frontiers", where the dynamic of converting housing into tourist accommodation is more intense due to the large profit margin. Conversely, areas with negative values function as "residential refuges", where a high quality of life prevails over tourist pressure, contributing to the maintenance of social cohesion. Overall, the paper offers a quantitative and cartographic documentation of the spatial manifestations of residential pressure in Athens, contributing to the understanding of the mechanisms that lead to the transformation of urban space.

‘Gendered energy precarity’ sits at the intersection of SDG 5 (gender equality) and SDG7 (affordable and clean energy), yet it remains rarely examined through integrated quantitative analysis, limiting understanding of how gendered inequalities in energy precarity are patterned across households and regions. Grounded in feminist political ecology, critical energy geographies, and energy precarity debates, this paper develops a framework to challenge the traditional gender-energy nexus by showing how socio-political, economic, and environmental factors intersectionally shape politically-induced energy vulnerability. Gender inequality and energy precarity, often treated separately, are deeply intertwined: unequal access to resources, decision-making power, and social protection reinforces women’s vulnerability to energy deprivation. Robust quantitative analyses remain scarce, particularly in post-socialist Southeast Europe, where gender and energy vulnerabilities are pronounced. To address this gap, we developed the ‘gendered energy precarity’ framework (GEPF), building on ‘energy precarity’ theorisation to link material energy conditions with structural gender and other social dimensions of marginalisation. Applying GEPF to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), a post-socialist country with political fragmentation, socio-economic disparities, uneven energy infrastructure, and entrenched gender inequalities, this study provides the first systematic quantitative analysis of ‘gendered energy precarity’ in the region. We analysed longitudinal data (2004-2021) from the Agency for Statistics of BiH, the United Nations Development Programme, and the International Renewable Energy Agency using Principal Component Analysis and clustering. GEPF integrates three domains: socio-economic background, gender inequality, and energy precarity, covering housing, expenditure, education, employment, political representation, and energy access. Results show reliance on traditional fuels, insecure housing, and energy-inefficient assets drive energy precarity, while persistent gender inequalities in education, labour-force participation, political representation, and unpaid care work exacerbate vulnerability. Temporal analysis reveals improvements in energy provision and housing post-2015, yet enduring gendered disadvantages persist. GEPF is transferable, supporting gender-responsive energy policy and comparative research on energy precarity in underrepresented regions.

This contribution emerges from our lived experience of the last two Greek summers, among the hottest and most unbearable on record. Writing as scholar-activists and critical housing and climate researchers based in urban Greece, we combine a vignette-based methodology grounded in participant-personal reflection with a critical mapping approach to examine how housing precarity, energy poverty, and intensifying climate risk converge in the embodied geographies of the Greek city. We approach urban heatwaves not as neutral natural hazards but as socially produced disasters rooted in speculative urbanisation, fragmented horizontal property ownership, deteriorating concrete building stock, and the systematic neglect of environmental justice and housing rights. We construct a comparative heat vulnerability index for Athens and Thessaloniki at the scale of municipal units, integrating population data, socio-economic indicators, green space distribution, and building stock characteristics. Initial mapping for Athens identifies the Municipality of Athens as the most acutely vulnerable area within the wider metropolitan region, confirming the spatial concentration of compounded risk in the dense urban core. Both cities rank among the least green in Europe, far below WHO thresholds; combined with the urban heat island effect and unequal access to cooling, this produces an uneven geography of exposure in which the elderly, women performing invisible care labour, and precarious residents in poorly insulated dwellings absorb a disproportionate share of climate harm. We argue that quantitative spatial analysis and embodied, situated narratives are mutually constitutive ways of knowing climate injustice: the map locates vulnerability; the vignettes inhabit it. Drawing on political ecology and radical housing studies, we close by calling for a transformative approach that re-frames housing policy as a field of collective struggle over the right to a liveable city.

Housing adequacy and the proliferation of informal settlements are some of the major urban struggles in Nairobi. For this reason, the Kenyan State has engaged in multiple types of housing interventions, such as slum upgrading programmes. However, there is evidence that beneficiaries of such housing programs are vacating their assigned housing units, due to affordability constraints. To interrogate this phenomenon, the research selected the case study of Soweto East A public housing in Kibera, Nairobi, which is an example of on-site resettlement, implemented through slum upgrading. For this purpose, two theoretical models were selected, namely Impoverishment Risks (Cernea, 1997; Patel et al, 2014) and Sustainable Housing Affordability (Mulliner & Maliene, 2011; Ezennia et al, 2021). Impoverishment Risks can be described as the impact of resettlement on capital assets that enable people to pursue their livelihood (natural, physical, financial, human and social capital) (Cernea, 1997; Patel et al, 2014). Sustainable Housing Affordability pursues a comprehensive assessment of affordability that integrates social, environmental, and economic criteria (Ezennia et al, 2019; Elghandour, 2024). The aim of the research was to determine how Impoverishment Risks affect Sustainable Housing Affordability in the case study. For this purpose, it employed a combination of qualitative and spatial methods, assessing primary and secondary data. The main findings were that Impoverishment Risks and Sustainable Housing Affordability are theoretically compatible and have valid application potential on precarious realities. Through this research, it was also concluded that Impoverishment Risks were directly affected by resettlement distance. In the case study, residents were not notably impoverished by resettlement and their access to housing and infrastructure was generally enhanced. However, Sustainable Housing Affordability struggles related to the inability of slum upgrading to holistically upgrade the slum-dwellers’ lives and directly address the proliferation of poverty in the informal settlements.

This paper reconceptualizes energy as a social relation of (re)production, focusing on the overlooked intersection of refugees, housing precarity, and energy practices. Despite the importance placed by both policy and academia on energy poverty and energy transitions, both academic research and policy practice have systematically overlooked issues related to energy provision and consumption in refugees’ housing. Our research addresses this significant gap in research and analysis. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research conducted with refugees squatting in abandoned buildings in Thessaloniki, Greece, we provide new empirical and theoretical insights into the nexus of housing and energy access among refugees. By examining the improvised energy landscapes that refugees are compelled to construct, we advance a critical understanding of energy as a social relation, namely, the ability to access social relations of production and reproduction which eventually can give access to energy. We introduce the concept of refugees’ energy commons, to explain how refugees’ communities self-organize to meet their energy needs -repairing, maintaining, and improvising energy infrastructures to provide heating, cooling, insulation, cooking, and communication. We also examine the different meanings that energy provision can have, how refugees perceive energy, what practices and activities they engage in and how energy constitutes not only a means for meeting basic needs, but also a means of building practices of solidarity and mutual support. These collective energy infrastructuring practices which act as means to reclaim disrupted life trajectories, question the dominant discourses around energy poverty revealing that access to energy is not simply a matter of technical adaptation or ability to pay bills; rather, it is a matter of being embedded into a set of social relations of (re)production, within which communities, institutions, and technologies, enable or disable access to the housing-energy nexus.

In the decade following the “long summer of migration,” scholarship documented how citizens, policy makers, and migrant communities built solidarity infrastructures (Schilliger 2020, 2025) to support illegalized people on the move. Today, however, these infrastructures are increasingly destabilized across European cities by political hostility, the criminalisation of aid, and shrinking budgets (Rygiel & Baban, 2019). Greece exemplifies this, with NGOs and grassroots groups facing mounting constraints that undermine their ability to share essential resources. Drawing on an in-depth ethnography of The Harbour House, a Thessaloniki-based community centre cooking meals for people on the move, this paper examines how solidarity is negotiated and sustained within an eroding infrastructural field (Vasileiadi and Swerts 2024). We situate The Harbour House within this field, showing how people on the move are illegalized and rendered invisible in urban space. Moving beyond binary debates on the (a)political nature of humanitarian aid, we argue that The Harbor House responds to pressures on its solidarity infrastructure through infrapolitical spatial, symbolic, and relational strategies (see Scott 1985). Its ability to uphold solidarity despite surveillance, resource scarcity, and policy hostility depends on “unseen, unasked, and unsaid” everyday strategies of resistance that remain intentionally low in visibility yet are deeply political (see Swerts 2017, 2026). Our findings show that such spatially concentrated infrastructures of solidarity function as vital “living rooms” for displaced people with diverse trajectories and personal histories- spaces where they can access material support, momentarily exhale, and recharge. At the same time, we highlight the tensions inherent in offering unconditional welcome under the radar within a hostile migration regime, where providing temporary relief may inadvertently entrench forms of stuckedness (Drangsland 2020; Felder et al. 2023). The paper contributes to debates on urban inequalities by demonstrating how displacement is produced, navigated, and - quietly - resisted through infrastructures under pressure.

This paper examines the socio-spatial effects of policies aimed at eradicating informal housing in Mayotte, considering them not only as tools of urban regulation but as mechanisms that may produce, displace, and intensify vulnerability. In a context marked by rapid demographic growth, severe land scarcity, and a structural shortage of affordable housing, informal settlements constitute a central component of the housing system rather than a marginal one. Official data indicate that nearly 40% of dwellings were still made of sheet metal in 2017, highlighting the scale of housing deprivation and inequality. Focusing on Mamoudzou and its peripheries, the paper analyzes the 2023 “Wuambushu” operation, which represents a significant intensification of demolition and eviction practices. Framed as a response to insalubrity, insecurity, and irregular land occupation, this intervention provides a critical lens for examining the effects of state action on residential trajectories, social networks, and exposure to risk. Its legal foundation, particularly Article 197 of the French ELAN law, enables accelerated clearance procedures, often without sustainable or secure rehousing solutions for affected populations. The central question is whether such policies genuinely reduce vulnerability or instead contribute to its institutional production. Three hypotheses structure the analysis. First, evictions do not eliminate vulnerability but displace it, forcing households to resettle under more precarious conditions. Second, these displacements tend to redirect populations toward areas more exposed to environmental hazards, thereby intensifying inequalities. Third, these policies reinforce urban fragmentation by deepening divides between formal and informal spaces. The impact of Cyclone Chido (2024) illustrates how disasters amplify pre-existing socio-spatial inequalities. A comparative perspective with French Guiana situates Mayotte within a broader framework of displacement-oriented governance. The paper ultimately calls for policies that secure housing pathways and reduce risk sustainably.

What is the role of things in the experience of homelessness? How do subjects engage with objects and what are the performative nuances of situated engagements of the kind? Can we talk about a political economy of things in a context of urban poverty management? This contribution revisits the core years of the Greek socio-economic crisis so as to suggest a re-materialisation of the homeless geographies of Athens. The suggestion is based on a multi-sited ethnographic practice conducted in the city's spaces of care, the latter being approached as spatialities in which care is performed in material ways. Therein, and after having experienced a "material schism" from their personal belongings, homeless subjectivities are actively involved in processes of rematerialisation through situated practices of care. Rematerialisation here consists of two major dialectical processes: first, a material provision of things of care; and second, a new, negotiated relationship of the homeless subjects with their own objects. For the analysis and presentation of the empirical findings materiality -as the active matter in spaces of care for homeless people- gets fractured into three interrelated typologies, namely, materiality as things, materiality as qualities, and materiality as practice (between subjects and objects). Overall, the contribution suggests that, by generating various material conduits throughout urban space, a specific political economy of things is enabled by Athens' spaces of care, actively shaping the ways care for "the homeless" is performed in the city. In such everyday performances, materiality as things, as qualities and as practices, produces subjectivities that might be characterised by the re-production of a material fragility which is -paradoxically enough- centred upon care.

Researchers and policy makers have focused on developing policies to support the resettlement of homeless shelter residents (HSRs). Shelter policies aim to ensure safety and order, yet inflexible regulations can unintentionally increase HSRs’ vulnerabilities. By analysing institutional policy implementation across three global cities, Athens (Greece), Manchester (UK), and Santiago (Chile), we aim to provide a deeper understanding of the interplay between regulation and HSRs’ wellbeing. This study introduces a three-level model: regulations create and shape the shelter space, which in turn shapes the risk environments residents experience, ultimately reproducing structural vulnerabilities. Regulations determine conditions of shelter stays, which influence daily experiences and well-being, and collectively reinforce structural inequalities, amplifying rather than alleviating residents’ challenges. This study explores institutional level policy, analysing key guidelines in shelters, including zero-tolerance substance use policies, payment for shelter accommodation, inflexible limits on shelter stays, and subsequent shelter transition for HSRs. The interconnection between safety and zero-tolerance substance policies in shelter settings, the detrimental effects of frequent transitions on HSRs’ wellbeing and substance use, and the need for a more individualized approach to permitted stay durations have emerged as key challenges in shelter spaces. This study highlights that vulnerability in shelters is environmentally produced, structurally patterned, and spatially regulated. We argue that managing substance use within shelters requires a closer examination of the impact of common policies, as well as the shelter transitions. Shelters should provide individualized support, flexible regulations, and harm-informed approaches while minimizing transitions to improve stability, well-being, and residents’ pathways towards social reintegration.

The experience of homelessness is not shaped solely by the absence of housing, but also by the institutional spaces designed to address it. Within this context, local actors operate as key service providers, functioning simultaneously as mechanisms of protection for the homeless and as instruments for safeguarding the image of the continuously transforming city. A paradigmatic example of such spaces is homeless shelters, which emerge as inherently ambivalent sites. On the one hand, they articulate a discourse of care, albeit residual, within the framework of an emergency-oriented model of homelessness management. On the other hand, they operate as spaces that obscure and render poverty invisible, while contributing to the reproduction of marginalization. At the same time, shelters constitute sites where social relations, identities, and practices, including forms of resistance and exclusion, are actively produced and negotiated under conditions of constraint. Drawing on ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews conducted in a municipal shelter in central Athens, this paper examines how the spatial position and regulatory framework of the facility shape the lived experiences of its residents. The shelter is approached as a socially produced space that, at both material and symbolic levels, determines who deserves to inhabit it, under what conditions, and at what cost. Situated within the broader urban context of crisis, the shelter is analyzed as part of the urban management of marginality: a mechanism that absorbs the most visible manifestations of housing deprivation without challenging the structural conditions that produce it. In doing so, the paper contributes to debates on the spatialization of urban vulnerability and the limits of temporary housing policies.