Saila-Maria Saaristo is an urban anthropologist and global development scholar whose work explores housing precarity, housing justice, urban governance, and agency, juxtaposing the contexts of the Global South and the Global North. She earned her PhD in Social Sciences (2022) at the University of Helsinki and the University of Coimbra. Her doctoral thesis investigated gendered council housing occupations and struggles against evictions in the Lisbon metropolitan area, examining the roles of diverse actors in these processes.

Since 2022, she has been a researcher at DINÂMIA'CET - IUL, the Centre for Socioeconomic and Territorial Studies at ISCTE - University Institute of Lisbon. Saila-Maria's current research focuses on the nexus of migration, labour, and housing struggles among Angolan women, with particular emphasis on climate change-induced displacement. Her primary interest lies in ethnographic and action research, co-developing her work in collaboration with practitioners and housing activists. Recently, she has also devoted attention to non-commodified housing models, such as Community Land Trusts. Additionally, she is a team member of several research projects, including Care(4)Housing – A care-through-design approach to address housing precarity in Portugal, and UrbanoScenes – Post-colonial imaginaries of urbanisation: A future-oriented investigation from Portugal and Angola.