Saila-Maria Saaristo is an urban anthropologist and global development scholar whose work examines housing precarity and urban informality, contrasting the contexts of the Global South and the Global North. She earned her PhD in Social Sciences (2022) from the University of Helsinki and the University of Coimbra. Her recent book, titled Transgressive City-Making and Governance (Brill, 2025), investigates the urgent global issue of housing precarity and forced evictions, focusing on two council estates in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. The book views occupations and evictions not just as crises or disruptions but as active practices of city-making. In this context, occupations emerge as a transgressive and feminised form of city-making—an act of resistance by marginalised urban residents, particularly women, facing severe housing exclusion. It explores whether and how such transgressive acts can create new forms of urban citizenship and democratic participation, challenging dominant neoliberal and capitalist urban governance. 

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 concentrates on the connection between migration, labour, and housing among Angolan women. Her main interest is in ethnographic and action research, aiming to develop her work collaboratively with practitioners and housing activists. Recently, she has also explored environmental vulnerability within the context of informal housing in Angola. Additionally, she is a 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 study from Portugal and Angola. She also serves on the Editorial Collective of the Radical Housing Journal.