A talk on Hope, Affection, and Welcoming the 'Other'
To live in the age of precarity is a tolling, everyday struggle. It erodes one's strength to carry on, live another day, and keep the hope for a modicum of prosperity due to come in some vague future. And when things get unbearably harsh, when the hegemony of neoliberalism has individualised the problems and told those who sustain life by the skin of their teeth to keep their head above the surface without having an eye for care from the retreating state that sees no obligation towards the lesser-able citizens, and when the politics of fear buffets on the anxiety evoked by the physical proximity of the Other, refugees —the most vulnerable of all living in the city— are scapegoated for all the problems befallen on daily life. Refugees are easy targets. They, on principle, lack most forms of capital to claim status; they look different and sound different with sometimes an uncanny unbeknownst culture that attracts all forms of shaming and stigma; they are 'foreigners', somebody else's 'problem' who happened to be dropped at 'our' doorstep; and they are easy to blame for everything that goes amiss, be it housing shortage, street violence, economic stagnation or what have you. However, we all have witnessed the compassion, solidarity, and affection given to refugees and all those who found little option but to flee from prosecution, war, climate disasters, and countless other unfortunate conditions that make one's life in her own home unbearable. We all can remember people congregating in Frankfurt, Munich and Humburg's Hauptbahnhof to welcome the war-stricken. We do remember protests, mass gatherings, the signs hung behind the windows to denounce the dehumanisation of the refugees, and countless families took in Ukrainians before they could find permanent residency. We remember the giving, hosting, embracing, and naturalising. We do remember the host society forcing itself to acculturate to new shapes of living. And we do remember hope. Yes, there were, and still are, heinous facets of hate. But there are hopes for cosmopolitan solidarity, too, and in this episode, we will talk about the latter.
Erschienen: 12.01.2024
Dauer: 01:02:38
Beata Siemieniako on the restitution of housing and tenants' struggles
Unregulated restitution of property to prewar owners (or rather their legal successors) remains a major source of conflict over housing in Poland, most notably in Warsaw. This episode features Beata Siemieniako, a Warsaw lawyer and urban activist who has been supporting tenants in their struggle against ruthless developers for years. In her book „Re-privatising Poland. The History of a Great Scam“ (Reprywatyzując Polskę. Historia wielkiego przekrętu, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej 2017), she tells the story of conflicting claims to urban property and reflects on the pitfalls of restituting past property orders while neglecting present-day social rights. Florian Peters has talked to her about law, grassroots activism, and the impossibility to achieve justice by trying to turn back time.
Erschienen: 30.11.2023
Dauer: 00:26:17
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "Property Rights Versus Tenants in Poland"
The second in an ongoing series hosted by Mathilde Lind Gustavussen.
This is episode two of the Rent Strike Series, focusing on the Veritas Tenants Association’s ongoing multibuilding rent strike in San Francisco to demand a say in the terms of sale of their buildings. On August 30, corporate landlord Ballast Investments won the auction for Veritas Investments’ delinquent debt and will take over 75 Veritas-owned buildings. And on September 1 the strike expanded. In this episode, we get an update on these developments and the implications for the strike from Brad Hirn, lead organizer with the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco.
Erschienen: 21.09.2023
Dauer: 00:24:37
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "Rent Strike Series Episode 2"
Against the Commons underscores how urbanization shapes the social fabric of places and territories, lending awareness to the impact of planning and design initiatives on working-class communities and popular strata. Projecting history into the future, it outlines an alternative vision for a postcapitalist urban planning, one in which the structure of collective spaces is defined by the people who inhabit them.
Erschienen: 01.09.2023
Dauer: 01:10:26
the Veritas Tenants Association’s (VTA) in San Francisco
The first in an ongoing series hosted by Mathilde Gustavussen
Erschienen: 25.08.2023
Dauer: 00:48:12
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "Rent Strike Series Episode 1"
Ross Beveridge, Philippe Koch and their critics
We live in an urban age. It is well known that urbanization is changing landscapes, built environments, social infrastructures and everyday lives across the globe. But urbanization is also changing the ways we understand and practise politics. What implications does this have for democracy? This incisive book argues that urbanization undermines the established certainties of nation-state politics and calls for a profound rethinking of democracy. A novel way of seeing democracy like a city is presented, shifting scholarly and activist perspectives from institutions to practices, from jurisdictional scales to spaces of urban collective life, and from fixed communities to emergent political subjects. Through a discussion of examples from around the world, the book shows that distinctly urban forms of collective self rule are already apparent. The authors reclaim the ‘city’ as a democratic idea in a context of urbanization, seeing it as instrumental to relocating democracy in the everyday lives of urbanites. Original and hopeful, How Cities Can Transform Democracy compels the reader to abandon conventional understandings of democracy and embrace new vocabularies and practices of democratic action in the struggles for our urban future.
Erschienen: 01.08.2023
Dauer: 00:59:30
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "Book Review Roundtable: How Cities Can Transform Democracy"
Adam Auerbach and his critics
As the Global South rapidly urbanizes, millions of people have migrated from the countryside to urban slums, which now house one billion people worldwide. The transformative potential of urbanization hinges on whether and how poor migrants are integrated into city politics. Popular and scholarly accounts paint migrant slums as exhausted by dispossession, subdued by local dons, bought off by wily politicians, or polarized by ethnic appeals. Migrants and Machine Politics shows how slum residents in India routinely defy such portrayals, actively constructing and wielding political machine networks to demand important, albeit imperfect, representation and responsiveness within the country’s expanding cities. Drawing on years of pioneering fieldwork in India’s slums, including ethnographic observation, interviews, surveys, and experiments, Adam Michael Auerbach and Tariq Thachil reveal how migrants harness forces of political competition—as residents, voters, community leaders, and party workers—to sow unexpected seeds of accountability within city politics. This multifaceted agency provokes new questions about how political networks form during urbanization. In answering these questions, this book overturns longstanding assumptions about how political machines exploit the urban poor to stifle competition, foster ethnic favoritism, and entrench vote buying. By documenting how poor migrants actively shape urban politics in counterintuitive ways, Migrants and Machine Politics sheds new light on the political consequences of urbanization across India and the Global South.
Erschienen: 01.07.2023
Dauer: 01:00:16
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "Book Review Roundtable: Migrants and Machine Politics"
Thinking about Appropriation, Dispossession and Expropriation in Theory and Practice
In this second part of the series Urban Lives of Property, Hanna and Markus talk to Vera Smirnova, a human and political geographer to discuss property and territory from a Russian perspective. Smirnova’s genealogical account moves from the Czarist period to this day, illuminating also the current Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Smirnova offers a tour de force through Russia’s moving history of the last 150 years, addressing practices of serfdom, enclosures in the early 20th century, land collectivization following the Russian revolution and waves of privatization after 1991. Throughout this period the institution of property is shown to be fuzzy, insecure, and informal, a legacy that continues to this day as evidenced in current urban planning legislation and extra-legal practices of land grabbing. Similarly reflecting a pliability for powerful political interests, territory has been historically considered as vast, borderless and expansive. Smirnova identifies three ontologies of territory (commoning, assembling and peopling) that have determined the dynamics of Russian state territorialization as evidenced in the accounts of 19th century geographers and anthropologists whose ideas continue to influence foreign policy today. As decolonial rhetorics have been integrated and instrumentalized for Russia’s geopolitical strategy for the past century, Smirnova “thinks between the posts” – postcolonialism and postsocialism – and considers the role of Russia today in postcolonial discussions. Her reflection on the Russian land commune (obshchina) is a fascinating, as Smirnova discusses the origins of the land comnune, the persistence during feudalism and state-building, its instrumentalization during land collectivization and its ongoing powerful imaginary.
Erschienen: 19.06.2023
Dauer: 01:17:53
Conversation with Oleg Pachenkov
Meet urban scholar Oleg Pachenkov who left Russia few weeks after the invasion of Ukraine. Oleg talks about his personal and professional trajectory as a critical scholar bringing him to Berlin. The conversation covers the breakdown of the public sphere within weeks after the war and Oleg's personal confrontation with a repressive system ready to crack down on critical voices. Self-censorship, Aesopian language and the retreat to the private sphere are aspects that now characterize dynamics of discussion in the attempt to cope with the authoritarian reality in the country. Oleg talk to us about the institutionalization of Urban Studies and the discrepancy between those parts who have arranged themselves within the regime, and those that didn't, between those actors who have stayed in the country and those who have fled. We hear Oleg reflect on these divisions and what needs to be learned for the future - for scholars both in Russia as well as beyond.
Erschienen: 22.05.2023
Dauer: 01:51:11
Thinking about Appropriation, Dispossession and Expropriation in Theory and Practice
This podcast series explores the "life of property" in urban theory and practice. In conversations with scholars who have led the way in property debates, it aims is to advance conceptual and theoretical groundwork on this notion that fundamentally shapes everyday urban lives and political discussion about the city. Within the social sciences and critical urban research property has lived a mostly implicit and underexamined life for several decades. Over the last years, it has become more central to conceptual, theoretical, and empirical work. Taking up this (renewed) interest in the concept, the series employs property as an entry point into critical urban debates about appropriation, dispossession and expropriation. The series seeks to situate the notion of property within urban research and to scrutinize power dynamics around property and their impacts on urban trajectories. Moreover we aim to provincialize Eurocentric understandings of property by bringing post-colonial, Indigenous, post-socialist (along with other "more global/Southern") approaches into the conversation. In this first conversation we are joined by Nick Blomley, Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University (FRSC). His work focuses on legal geography, particularly in relation to property. He is interested in the spatiality of legal practices and relationships, as well as the worldmaking consequences of such legal geographies. His new book, Territory: New Trajectories in Law, was published with Routledge in 2023. Building on Nick Blomley's foundational work, this episodes serves to clarify conceptions of property, related social theories and their trajectories in urban debates. Moreover, we scrutinize contestations of property and delve into questions of territory that are raised in Nick's new book. Podcast Hosts: Hanna Hilbrandt, University of Zurich; Markus Kip, University of Jena Stay tuned for the next conversation in this series with Vera Smirnova, Kansas State University.
Erschienen: 02.04.2023
Dauer: 01:20:04
