The Urban Studies Foundation is excited to announce six new Urban Urgencies grants, funding rapid-response, collaborative research into some of the most pressing challenges facing cities today. Each project is delivered in partnership with a non-academic organisation, helping translate research into real-world impact from the outset.
The cohort responds to urgencies from diverse contexts across the globe, addressing questions of housing precarity, food insecurity, climate risk, urban heat, social withdrawal, and the buried legacies of industrial land use.
This year’s Urban Urgencies grantees are (click titles for more information):
Urban collapse, care, and climate: Women’s narratives of polycrises in Tripoli, Lebanon
Partner organisations: CatalyticAction (Lebanon and United Kingdom), Polytechnic University of Turin (Italy), Ruwwad Al Tanmeya (Lebanon)
Investigators: Ms Joana Dabaj, Prof Camillo Boano
This project explores how women living in Tripoli, Lebanon navigate everyday life amid urban collapse, climate risks, and prolonged crisis. Through participatory research, professional audio storytelling developed with a local recordist and audio producer, and creative public engagement, it documents women’s experiences of care, survival, and adaptation in three marginalised neighbourhoods. The collaboration between Politecnico di Torino, CatalyticAction, and Ruwwad Al Tanmeya will generate academic research, policy recommendations, a digital archive of community narratives, and a public exhibition that together contribute to more inclusive approaches to urban resilience, climate adaptation, and justice.
GeoHeat-SSA: A GeoAI decision-support platform for urban heat governance in Sub-Saharan Africa
Partner organisations: Global Youth Innovation Center (Ghana), DISC, University of Oklahoma (United States), Mapkot Technologies (Ghana)
Investigators: Dr Andrews Korah, Mr Kwaku Twum, Mr Eric Anorrey
GeoHeat-SSA will help Ghanaian cities better understand and respond to urban heat. Working in Accra, Kumasi, Tamale, and Sekondi-Takoradi, the project will combine satellite data, climate and health information, and community knowledge to map heat risk and vulnerability. It will develop an open-access decision-support platform for municipal planners to compare interventions such as urban greening, cool roofs, and blue infrastructure. Through partnerships with researchers, technology specialists, public agencies, and communities, GeoHeat-SSA will strengthen climate-resilient planning in Ghana and create a model that can be adapted across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Vital grounds: Valuing urban soils in the afterlife of mining
Partner organisations: Durham University (United Kingdom), D2 Youth Zone Ltd (United Kingdom)
Investigators: Dr Anastasiya Halauniova, Ms Angela Smith
Urban soils are widely neglected and hidden beneath concrete or discarded as waste. But today, they are increasingly seen as providers of ‘ecosystem services’ essential to urban resilience. Yet, despite these intensifying engagements with urban soils, urban theory still lacks the tools to capture the role of urban soils within changing urban everyday life. This project addresses this gap and explores how urban soils mediate urban social relations with a focus on urban inequalities formed by long histories of coal mining and soil pollution. By turning to the Northeast England, this project draws on qualitative and participatory research to rethink the place of urban soils within social theory.
Open Kitchen: Weaving protection and care for communities on the move
Partner organisations: Fundación Casa B (Colombia), Fundación Social CRECER (Colombia)
Investigators: Prof Andrés Salcedo Fidalgo, Ms Liliana Gaviria, Ms Karol Viviana Cubillos Gutierrez
The Open Kitchen project is an initiative that aims to address the issues of food insecurity and structural poverty in two marginalized Bogotá neighbourhoods. Partnering with local foundations, the initiative empowers vulnerable groups—including migrant women, displaced Indigenous families, and informal workers—to claim food sovereignty as a fundamental urban right. Participants will co-create resources such as an interactive map, a multicultural cookbook, podcasts, and policy recommendations through participatory mapping, urban gardening, and cooking sessions. The project ultimately transforms community kitchens into vital social infrastructures that foster collective care and resilience, providing a replicable model for urban food justice in the Global South.
Co-researching with withdrawing subjects in Osaka and Seoul: Towards an urban political ecology of emancipatory metabolism
Partner organisations: Centre for Multicultural Collaborative Learning, Saitama University (Japan), New Start Kansai (Japan)
Investigators: Dr Didi Kyoung-Ae Han, Mr Atsutoshi Takahashi
Social withdrawal is often treated as an individual psychological problem. This project asks instead what it tells us about the city. Drawing on Urban Political Ecology, it reframes withdrawal as a bodily response to the exhausting “metabolism” of contemporary urban life. Working collaboratively with withdrawing people and peer support networks in Osaka and Seoul, and treating them as knowledge producers, the research compares how withdrawal has emerged in each city and what alternative, peer-led practices have grown in response—seeking a shared language for more humane, less exhausting urban futures.
PRIVATEVICTIONS: The rise of para-police antisquatting companies and the privatisation of eviction practices in Spain’s financialised housing market
Partner organisations: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Spain), Sindicato de Inquilinas de Madrid (Spain)
Investigators: Dr Ana Santamarina, Mr Raúl San Juan López, Dr Juan Roch
PRIVATEVICTIONS investigates the rise of private “antisquatting” companies and the privatisation of eviction practices in Spain’s financialised housing market. Focusing on Madrid, the project examines how these para-police actors operate within housing conflicts, legal grey zones and real-estate speculation, and how their practices affect racialised, migrant and working-class communities. Developed with UNED and the Sindicato de Inquilinas de Madrid, it combines mapping, collaborative research, policy engagement and movement-based knowledge to support tenant organising and advance debates on housing dispossession and securitisation.
These six projects capture just how varied, and urgent, the work of urban studies can be right now: soil, food, shelter, care, and the everyday pressures of city life, tackled through real partnerships to make a difference.
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