Connecting urban studies, housing studies and critical demography, Dolly’s research seeks to understand the spatial politics and lived experience of housing. She is currently conducting PhD research at the PBL (Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency) and within the AISSR’s Urban Geographies research group. How can studying housing shed light on the formation and everyday experience of urban inequalities? Her interest in socio-spatial justice and housing started as a teenager in the Dutch squatting scene. Her concern with housing access, migration and the impacts of market forces deepened as she pursued a bachelor’s in Human Geography at the University of Amsterdam and research master’s in Urban Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the University of British Columbia, and continue in the context of her PhD research.

In search of home: housing trajectories of recent labor migrants in the Netherlands

Dolly’s PhD research seeks to provide a deeper understanding of the variation of labor migrants’ housing trajectories. While the Dutch economy increasingly relies on labor migrants from the European Union, this group of residents faces significant challenges in accessing affordable and appropriate housing.  Current scholarship tends to focus on the challenges these migrants face on arrival, with much less attention to their longer-term housing trajectories. In addition, housing research and policy often approaches EU labor migrants as a generic group, neglecting important intra-group differences. The central aim of this PhD research is to identify differences in housing trajectories and to explain these by taking life course negotiations and intermediaries into consideration. The outcomes will provide much needed empirical knowledge that can help national and local policy makers address problems associated with the migrant housing market.

By connecting theoretical insights from life course, migration and housing studies, it extends these fields in three ways. First, it challenges homogenizing accounts of migrant housing careers by being attentive to inter-group variance along various intersecting axes. Second, where existing work generally explains residential trajectories by studying social networks, this project explores the role of intermediaries. Third, it contributes to current life course studies by taking an explicitly relational and mixed-method approach; combining register data analysis with the lived experience of migrants themselves, it draws attention to the embodied and active nature of residential moves, putting the focus back on the ‘life’ in life course.

Two articles associated with this research have been published, one on long-term housing trajectories in Housing Studies and one on labor migrants’ geographical pathways in Population, Space and Place.

Homelessness

Under supervision of dr. Nienke Boesveldt, Dolly has worked on a study on homelessness and deinstitutionalization of people in sheltered housing in Dutch cities. This study on a housing-led approach to homelessness aimed to identify the lived experiences, opportunities and obstacles associated with the roll-out of this approach. The outcomes of this research have been published as an article in Urban Studies and as a Dutch-language opinion piece in Sociale Vraagstukken.

Mortgage regulation

As part of her research masters in Urban Studies, Dolly conducted a comparative study of post-crisis mortgage regulation in Amsterdam and Vancouver. In both cities, increasing numbers of households are compelled to engage in risky lending strategies in order to achieve home ownership, specifically borrowing outside regulated markets. Where pre-crisis mortgaging practices involved risks for financial institutions, the outcome of post-crisis regulations is that these risks are overwhelmingly borne by households. The research findings have been published as an article in the International Journal of Housing Policy.

Dolly is also involved in teaching:

• Supervision of master thesis titled “Studentification in a new country-specific context: state-led gentrification through partnerships for student housing in the Dutch cases of Amsterdam and Utrecht” by Pelin Zenginoglu together with prof. dr. Dorien Manting.
• Guest lecture titled “Outsiders in the City” in the course Advanced Urban Geography: Global and Local Perspectives on Cities as part of the Urban Geography master program.
• Guest lecture titled "Labour Migration and Housing” in the course Migration and Population as part of the Urban Geography bachelor program.