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I currently serve as an Associate Professor in Social Geography and Urban Studies (tenured) at the University of Zurich (UZH) Department of Geography. My research aims to advance a global, comparative research agenda on processes of marginalization in housing and urban development in the context of globalizing financial markets and heightened climate crisis. Through my focus remains predominantly with the urban everyday, my work links the negotiation of global regulatory changes to its imprints on urban life, incorporating different regional foci (in Mexico, Switzerland and Germany) and theoretical approaches (including postcolonial, feminist, political and critical urban theories).

My book Negotiating Formalities. Housing, Governance and the State in Berlin's Allotments, published in the IJURR-SUSC series in 2021, examines spaces of mundane transgression, planning conflict and housing exclusion at the peripheries of Berlin. Through ethnographic research on the ways in which Berliners dwell in allotment gardens despite a law that prohibits housing at these sites, it illustrates how these gardeners negotiate the possibilities of residency with the local bureaucracy, gardening associations and amongst themselves. Building on postcolonial theory, anthropology of the state and critical legal geography, the book draws attention to the power of negotiations in the governance of urban space.

My current research delves further into concerns about housing precarity, property and displacement. Building on research on the eviction of the housing complex Hannibal II (Dortmund Germany) I became interested in the abdication of responsibility in dominant property regimes as well as processes of material decay and home unmaking. I currently lead two collaborative projects that expand on this work:

• The Responsible City (2024-2028, funded by the SNSF, with ETH-Z, EPFL, UniNe) builds on political philosophy of responsibility and our conceptualization of a radical housing responsibility, a notion of the responsibility that derives relational commitments from our co-being in one common world. Through research into socio-ecological controversies about housing in Zurich and Geneva, we unpack concerns about how to maintain the built environment, establish hospitality, densify cities and invest in housing in the context of populist discourses, renovictions, and housing demolitions that characterize these cities.
• In SNSF Spirit project the Home-Debt Nexus (2025-2028), a collaboration with feminist scholars in Mexico, Columbia, Argentina, we investigate how household debt intersects with spatio-material transformations of housing development. Thinking with feminist perspectives on debt, associated relations of dependency and processes of making home, we track the mundane and political responses of women to cope with and come out ahead of their debt crisis and ask how these responses are shaped by the material (home-)geographies of the city.

Alongside this housing research my work is guided by epistemological concerns about knowledge production. Earlier work explored strategies to pursue comparisons across seemingly incommensurable sites. Since working at the University of Zurich, I have explored epistemological questions in three further ways: thinking about eurocentrism and complicity in research from privileged sites; considering geographical knowledge practice in crisis times, and working with students in collaborative and transdisciplinary ways.

I recently concluded the SNSF-funded research project the Urbanization of Global Climate Finance that examined how local bureaucracies embed global financial flows in the urban development of cities. Focusing on Mexican and Indian cities, the project examined dominant trends in financing of climate action in Southern cities, the urban visions behind Global Climate Finance Initiatives, the uneven geographies and violences of investment, focussing on intermediary actors and the power of bureaucratic reasoning. That project builds on postdoctoral work as a DAAD PRIME fellow, which examined urban negotiations through an ethnographic perspective on the ways in which local bureaucracies anchor global financial flows in the urban development of cities, looking specifically on the issuance of green municipal bonds in Mexico City.

I am also the co-founder of two collaborative and transdisciplinary initiatives in Switzerland: the City Collaboratory, a network of Swiss urban scholars and the discussion forum Urban Publics Zurich (upZ). I am a board member of the Research Committee RC21 (Urban and Regional Development). I also serve as the editor-in-chief of the Geographica Helvetica, a European multilingual free open-access journal of geography.