Rea Zaimi

I am a critical urban geographer whose research and teaching center on the political economy of housing and real estate in US cities. I use archival and ethnographic methods, and I draw from urban geography, critical race studies, and feminist political economy. My research examines how historic property regimes structure contemporary processes of speculative and predatory real estate investment, and their implications for housing precarity in Chicago and Atlanta. My work is committed to advancing our understanding of the mechanisms that embed social difference within the economic and institutional infrastructures shaping access to shelter.

I joined USI as a postdoc in 2021. Before that, I earned my MA and PhD in Geography at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.