Please join us in extending congratulations to our researchers Chiara Valli, Martin Grander, and Marwa Dabaieh, who recently received funding for these two projects:
Going separate ways. Intersectional perspectives on gendered housing trajectories and wealth redistribution after divorce (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond)
This project will be led by Chiara Valli as principal investigator, alongside Martin Grander and Helena Bohman (Department of Urban Studies, Malmö University).
Separation and divorce are pivotal life-course events that reshape housing wealth trajectories, yet they remain poorly measured in Sweden due to the absence of post-2007 wealth statistics. This project examines how housing wealth is (re)distributed after separation and how gender, ethnicity, income, and geography structure post-divorce housing pathways. We integrate a feminist, intersectional account of the asset economy with life-course and urban geographical lenses to theorize how household relations and spatial opportunity structures produce inequality.
Methodologically, we develop ways to study wealth without direct wealth data by combining: (1) cohort based register models following individuals up to 10 years around separation; (2) spatial analysis linking municipal housing supply and local housing/labour market conditions to post-separation housing outcomes; (3) qualitative interviews with former couples to unpack financial negotiations before, during, and after separation.
Expected outcomes include the first systematic evidence on gendered redistribution of housing wealth mediated by ethnicity, class, and geography. Conceptually, we propose divorce as a revealing mechanism for understanding wealth accumulation inequalities that are otherwise masked within households.
CARE – Centrum för adaptiv och regenerativ omställning av byggda miljöer / Center for adaptive and regenerative transitions of the built environment (Formas)
This project will be led by the University of Gothenburg and Malmö University in collaboration with 15 other partners, including municipalities, regions, property owners, and representatives from the construction industry and civil society organizations. Martin Grander and Marwa Dabaieh will work on the project from Malmö University. Martin Grander will serve as the deputy center director.
The construction and real estate sector accounts for nearly 40 percent of all waste in Sweden and is one of the country’s largest sources of climate emissions. The premise behind CARE is that the sustainable society of the future must, to a much greater extent than what is currently done, be built using what already exists.
The project will work in Swedish urban areas with strained housing markets to rethink how buildings and neighborhoods can be used and adapted efficiently to create inclusive and equitable cities. The researchers will also operate in areas experiencing population decline, where many properties stand vacant and municipalities often feel compelled to demolish them rather than adapt them to a new demographic reality.
Well done to Chiara, Martin, and Marwa – we look forward to following this research as it progresses!
