Ioana Florea

I completed my PhD in Sociology in 2011, at the University of Bucharest with a dissertation on teenagers’ perceptions/experiences of urban public spaces, using participatory and collaborative methodologies (in Romanian). I have previously collaborated as a researcher with the Babeș-Bolyai University (Cluj-Napoca, Romania), for the project “Class formation and re-urbanization through real estate development at an Eastern periphery of global capitalism” (2021-2023). And with The University of Gothenburg, for the projects “Housing, Social Mobilisations and Urban Governance in Central and Eastern Europe” (2017-2020) and “Urban Gardens as Meeting Places in Göteborg, Budapest and Bucharest: Building Collaborative Capacity for Sustainability in Different Socio-economic Contexts” (2020-2025).

I am interested mostly in researching urban transformations, the manifestations of uneven development in Eastern European cities, and possibilities for collective action against capitalist extraction. I have been engaged for almost 20 years in policy- and action-oriented research, co-authoring an unprecedented country report Come Closer. Inclusion and Exclusion of Roma in Present Day Romanian Society (2008). I have been involved as an action-researcher for the Common Front for Housing Rights (since 2016) and for the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and to the City (2016-2022).

I am co-author of the monograph Contemporary Housing Struggles. A Structural Field of Contention Approach, with Agnes Gagyi and Kerstin Jacobsson (Palgrave 2022) and co-editor of Uneven Real Estate Development in Romania at the Intersection of Deindustrialization and Financialization (Routledge 2024). My recent contributions have been published in the International Journal of Housing Policy, Antipode, European Urban and Regional Studies, Radical Housing Journal, Environmental Sociology, Studia Sociologia, Journal of Political Ecology, Critical Housing Analysis, Voluntas.

Key research areas

• Uneven development, revisiting writings from David Harvey;
• Financialization of housing and of urban development, following writings from Daniela Gabor and Manuel Aalbers;
• Social movements, contention, collective action;
• Possibilities for collaborative and militant research.

Ongoing research project

I am currently part of the Sustain Action External link. team, in the project Sustaining Civil Society in the Context of Multiple Crises External link., (2023-2028). It is an international project of activist-researchers from Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Sweden, funded by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies, coordinated by Prof. Dominika V. Polanska.