Rebuilding Feminist Urban Futures after Disasters is an LDE Global project exploring what feminist urbanism can mean after disasters. It brings together researchers, practitioners, and communities across geographies to rethink rebuilding through care, justice, and lived experience. In this article, Dr Bahar Sakizlioglu, IHS Senior Specialist in Housing, reflected on the lessons learned from the project.
The project is both a literal and figurative road trip of feminist urban action research, running from October 2024 to October 2025 across Chile, Morocco, and Turkey. Our method centers collaborative, grounded research. During the initial action research lab, locally embedded teams shaped the research focus around specific disaster contexts from a feminist perspective. The project then continued with two traveling labs: one in Santiago and Valparaíso, Chile (April 2025), and the next in Rabat, Morocco (July 2025). This approach roots knowledge production in community realities and fosters South-South, place-based learning from below. Working across geographies also allows us to build a comparative perspective by tracing both the distinct and overlapping ways gender, urban vulnerability, and recovery take shape.
What happens when knowledge doesn’t just travel, but transforms?
During our April 2025 traveling lab in Chile, we visited communities in Valparaíso and Viña del Mar, meeting women leading post-wildfire recovery. We recorded video testimonies that will support their ongoing struggles against eviction and housing violence. These videos are more than documentation. We hope they are small acts of solidarity, part of a growing feminist archive of resistance and collective memory. A tool for action, and for claiming the right to stay and rebuild on their own terms.
Practicing feminist ethics of care, solidarity and holding space
Doing research this way has been a process of unlearning and relearning. We leaned into feminist ethics of care and refused extractive methods. During our action lab, we invited Prof. Dr Linda Peake for a moment of intergenerational feminist exchange. Her reflections on the GenUrb project regarding feminist ethics of care were mind opening. She reminded us that care means building solidarity that goes beyond closeness or friendliness. This insight stayed with us.
Can feminist learning hold space for both grief and feminist imagination?
We also had a dialogue with Giulia Maci from Cities Alliance Gender team, exchanging experiences as feminist researchers and practitioners. Together we reflected on different geographies of dispossession, where wars, disasters, and crises reshape lives. Despite all, women are remaking homes, neighborhoods, and futures. In these spaces, hope does not disappear but is reassembled. Hope is not a choice but responsibility for feminist futures.
How does affective labor play out in feminist research and practice?
This kind of work takes more than intellectual labor. It demands affective labor. Sitting with stories of loss and injustice. Navigating group dynamics. Making space where trust and vulnerability can meet so that solidarity and transformation can take root. Within our group, moments of uncertainty and openness have allowed care and trust to grow.
As we listened and shared, deeper learning became possible, reminding us that the solidarity we seek must also be cultivated among ourselves.
That is part of the care work, and it will keep us busy.
Responding to IHS strategic directions
This feminist action research incorporates the IHS Strategic directions by addressing urban inequality through feminist lenses. At its core, the project advances knowledge decolonisation by exposing epistemic violence in dominant theories and practices. It centers silenced voices, challenges mainstream urban assumptions, and embraces action research, South-to-South exchange, and feminist ethics of care as decolonial methodologies.
Our work embraces transdisciplinarity with feminist ethics of care, moving across geographies, disciplines, and institutions. We reimagine academic practice as an act of care, centering relationships and collective knowledge over extractive expertise.
Our action research challenges narrow, metric-driven definitions of academic impact, often disconnected from real-world change. For us, impact means creating space for alternative ways of knowing, connecting, and contributing to meaningful transformation beyond the walls of academia.
Feeding back into our classrooms and research
This action research informs and enriches our teaching and scholars at IHS and beyond. It supports the Urban Housing and Land Justice Master track and the Feminist Urbanism academic cluster at IHS, while also deepening collaboration across Leiden, Delft, and Erasmus through joint publications, research and guest lectures.
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Partners in Building Feminist Urban Futures LDE Project
Building Feminist Urban Futures after Disasters is an LDE Global project developed in partnership with Florencia Muñoz Ebensperger (Universidad de Playa Ancha, Chile), Yasna Contreras Gatica (University of Chile), Sanae Aljem and Imane Hmoudou (École Nationale d’Architecture, Morocco), Ceren Lordoğlu (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University), feminist activist Cansu Yapıcı, Bahar Sakızlıoğlu (IHS, Erasmus University), Darinka Czischke (TU Delft), Cristiana Strava (Leiden University).
Acknowledgments
We thank LDE Global for supporting this project. Our deepest gratitude goes to the women leaders and communities in the settlements of Villa Unión in Valparaíso and Manuel Bustos in Viña del Mar, Chile, for sharing their time, stories, and struggles with us.