Methods — Co-Production in Practice
We adopted a co-productive methodology designed to prioritise collaboration, reflection, and knowledge exchange with the movements and their communities.
Primary methods included:
Participatory Photography – inviting community members to document their spaces, everyday routines, and forms of resistance through their own lenses.
Imaginative Mapping – co-creating maps that visualise relationships, resources, and aspirations within and beyond the occupations.
Situated Observation – embedding ourselves in daily life to observe spatial practices, rhythms, and interactions over an eight-day field engagement.
Secondary Research – situating our observations within broader socio-political and urban contexts.
This approach allowed us to identify and document labours of endurance—repetitive, often invisible acts of care and maintenance that sustain the occupations. These labours are profoundly gendered and racialised, with the burden frequently carried by Black women and single mothers, whose unpaid work is central to the functioning and resilience of these spaces.
Key Findings
Our research found that occupations are far more than housing solutions—they function as pedagogical, cultural, and political infrastructures. They operate as radical infrastructures of care, where solidarity kitchens, childcare, and collective cleaning not only meet material needs but also foster a deep sense of belonging. They are also spaces of political education, where cooking workshops, public theatre, and other collective activities cultivate leadership, critical consciousness, and community agency. At the same time, they serve as alternative urban futures—“urban laboratories” in which communities actively experiment with new models of governance, resource-sharing, and cultural production. Despite operating under constant threat of eviction and political hostility, these movements sustain forms of urban life that resist and counter the alienation and inequality embedded in capitalist urbanism.