Saila‑Maria Saaristo is an urban anthropologist and global development scholar whose research examines housing precarity, urban informality, and city‑making across the Global South and the Global North. She received her PhD in Social Sciences in 2022 from the University of Helsinki and the University of Coimbra.

Her recent book, Transgressive City‑Making and Governance (Brill, 2025), addresses the urgent global problem of housing precarity and forced evictions through an ethnographic study of two council estates in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. Rather than framing occupations and evictions solely as moments of crisis or disruption, the book conceptualises them as active practices of city‑making. In this perspective, housing occupations emerge as a transgressive and feminised form of urban agency—practices of resistance led largely by marginalised women confronting severe housing exclusion. The book explores whether and how such acts can generate new forms of urban citizenship and democratic participation, challenging dominant neoliberal and capitalist modes of urban governance.

Since 2022, Saaristo has been a researcher at DINÂMIA’CET‑IUL, the Centre for Socioeconomic and Territorial Studies at ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon. Her current research focuses on the intersections of migration, labour, and housing among Angolan women, alongside emerging work on environmental vulnerability in informal housing contexts in Angola. Committed to ethnographic and action‑research approaches, she develops her work collaboratively with practitioners and housing activists. She is currently involved in several funded research projects, including Care(4)Housing and UrbanoScenes, and serves on the Editorial Collective of the Radical Housing Journal.