Explore and Experience the Urban Field
Urban transformation focuses primarily on the process of gentrification, urban renewal, neo-liberalization of the city, and housing (Smith 1996, Brenner 2002, Larsen 2016). Understanding these processes requires on-the-ground research on the everyday struggles and resilience of urban actors who are constantly adapting to emergent twenty-first century challenges, such as the negotiation of rights to the…
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Mary Dellenbaugh-Loose and Stavros Stavrides discussed a variety of issues around urban commons and commoning as process and practice. Around the question of power relations that define, sustain or disable urban commoning, Stavros clarified that the sharing of power is both a precondition and result of commoning, power thereby to be understood as something done…
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Methods Approach & Fieldwork “You have been told to go grubbing in the library, thereby accumulating a mass of notes and liberal coating of grime. You have been told to choose problems wherever you can find musty stacks of records based on trivial schedules prepared by tired bureaucrats. This is called “getting your hands dirty…
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Text by Carolin Genz & Diana Lucas-Drogan, first published in The Urban Transcript Journal, Berlin. One can observe a renaissance in architecture, art and urban anthropology as in other cross-disciplines, rethinking the concepts of maps and cartography to capture the perceptions of the urban everyday. Moreover, academic as well as non-academic disciplines with a research…
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Commoning is about complex and historically specific processes through which representation, practices and values intersect in circumscribing what is to be shared and how in a specific society. – Stavros Stavrides Experiences of space commoning in contemporary metropolises create forms of shared public life that overspill the boundaries of existing public spaces. Common space produced…
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RENT REBELS BERLIN In the last years Berlin has changed a lot. Flats that once were unattractive are now being used as secure investment objects. The transformation into owner-occupied flats and massive rent increases become an everyday phenomenon. The visible tenant protests in the vibrant metropolis of Berlin are a reaction to the growing shortage…
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Sebastian Bührig presents a critique of housing blocks from his research at Leipziger Straße beyond the “dictatorship of lines” and is interested in the “interfaces of communality,” the interpersonal and inbetween (buildings, people, city). Life in a high-rise is anonymous. That’s the prejudice. The high houses from the outside: upright in file. A strict grid puts…
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As part of our skill-building approach, we integrate into our workshop and provide material and tools for urban ethnographic research. For a little exercise to start with the method approach of “mapping”, the participants had to REmap their morning trip – with a very creative and deep thinking outcome.
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The spaces we inhabit are structured by power structures and rules. In this dependency, our body, performances, and the way we navigate urban space interlink. In her works Diana Lucas-Drogan (re)draws and performs the cultural codes in counter-mappings and reflects on methods of representing the research field. Working as a freelance architect and artist, she…
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Prof. Talja Blokland Professor for Regional and Urban Sociology, Humboldt University of Berlin That the urban is undergoing transformations is inherent: whereas urban studies may have searched for the city of stability and equilibrium, more and more scholars now focus on the dynamics of the urban. This means, however, that our understanding of the urban…
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