Urban Ethnography Lab

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…