At the heart of this paper is a detailed reconstruction of the relatively unknown history of illegal occupation in East Berlin otherwise known as Schwarzwohnen. The paper explores the relationship ...between Schwarzwohnen and the articulation of alternative forms of dwelling and occupation that challenged official state priorities. To do so, it argues that the rise of Schwarzwohnen was part of a growing body of informal practices used by citizens in the GDR in response to housing insecurity and scarcity. These were efforts that highlighted the various ways in which citizens took control of their own housing needs outside the official housing system. They also anticipated the development of the oppositional cultures and infrastructures that erupted in the Eastern half of the city in the winter of 1989. At stake here, is an approach to housing insecurity that challenges our understanding of the socialist city and its (largely) peripheral place within urban theory.
•Urban vacancy as a key feature in the making of the precarious city.•Geographies of housing precarity better understood through an historical lens.•Connects urban vacancy to broader logics of ...dispossession and displacement.•New models of vacancy highlight the further normalisation of the precarious city.
In this paper, we examine the relationship between precarity, property and urban vacancy. Our main aim is to develop a conceptual framework that connects recent geographical scholarship on precarity to the production of vacant urban landscapes. The paper extends recent geographical scholarship on urban vacancy as a key site of antagonism for post-crisis forms of urbanisation. In so doing, it highlights the role of urban vacancy as a key feature in the making of the precarious city. Particular attention is paid to the rise of Property Guardianship and its relationship to the production and management of vacant urban land and property in the case of the ongoing financialisation of housing in London. Vacancy, in this context, is best understood as a spatial process that produces a varied geography of insecurity and disposability. This is, moreover, a geography that must be positioned within wider and longer trajectories in the urbanisation of injustice. The paper therefore combines a contemporary analysis of guardians living 'on the city's edge' with a historical look back at the 1970s and the little-known practice of 'short-life co-operative housing'. Taking a longitudinal view on the management of vacant buildings through temporary living arrangements across the last forty years enables us to examine old and new geographies of housing precarity and their relationship to the logics of large scale urban transformation.
A laissez‐faire Yes‐In‐My‐Back‐Yard (YIMBY)‐ism is not a solution to Not‐In‐My‐Back‐Yard (NIMBY)‐ism; rather it represents the other side of the coin of capitalist development. YIMBYism reproduces ...the ‘Housing Question’ as Engels posed it, by shifting housing problems across time and space, and in their form. Until YIMBYism contains a critique of capitalist uneven development, it will not fundamentally address the causes of housing problems.
Recovering the politics of planning Helbrecht, Ilse; Weber-Newth, Francesca
City (London, England),
20/1/2/, Volume:
22, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The goal of this paper is to recover the politics of planning with a focus on the state-planning tool 'developer contributions'. We draw on David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession ...(2003). The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press and Spaces of Hope (2000). University of California Press to identify not only (new) spaces of inequality, but also cracks in contemporary capitalism-material and discursive spaces for alternatives. These theoretical foundations are invaluable in developing and building-on Engels' discussions in 'The Housing Question' (1872). Accessed March 3, 2016.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/
and add complexity to the post-political perspective as championed by Erik Swyngedouw (2007). "The Post-Political City." In Urban Politics Now. Re-Imagining Democracy in the Neoliberal City, edited by Guy Baeten. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. In scrutinising the potentials of developer contributions within the contemporary housing question, Harvey is not only helping lay the foundation for more pragmatism within leftist camps, thus fulfilling an ethical imperative within planning. Harvey's theories are also invaluable in terms of analysing empirical contradictions 'on the ground' that are more ambiguous than both Engels and Swyngedouw suggest. In order to make our case, we review existing literature on developer contributions, exploring the ways in which developer contributions can be analysed as both a sign of hope and as a disaster. We offer a dialectical reading, and make a proposal as to 'what next'?
Für alle, die im Mietverhältnis wohnen, kann es plötzlich sehr schnell gehen: ein Brief der Hausverwaltung, der die Kündigung aufgrund baulicher Verdichtung und Aufwertung enthält. Mieter*innen sind ...gezwungen, wegen Abrissen oder Sanierungen auszuziehen oder gar das Quartier zu verlassen, um eine bezahlbare Wohnung zu finden. Die Autor*innen geben durch eine qualitative Studie, angelegt im Schweizer Mittelland, vielschichtige Einblicke in diese Lebensrealität. Im Mittelpunkt stehen die Perspektiven Betroffener und deren Umgang mit dem (drohenden) Wohnungsverlust. Das Erleben direkter Verdrängung liefert wichtige Hinweise für wohnungspolitische und sozialarbeiterische Initiativen.
El presente artículo reflexiona sobre la noción de problematización (Foucault, 1999) en el análisis de la cuestión de la vivienda en Rosario. Da cuenta de los desplazamientos teórico-epistemológicos ...que esta noción inspira y señala las implicancias metodológicas que el trabajo con problematizaciones supone a partir de su operacionalización en los conceptos de saberes expertos y tecnologías de gobierno. Para cada una de esas dimensiones construye una técnica de análisis específica: la descripción arqueológica y la caracterización microfísica. Tras aplicar estas técnicas al caso de estudio, sistematiza los resultados alcanzados y las potencialidades y dificultades del enfoque escogido.
Social Media platforms, from being simply a mode of communication, have, recently, evolved into digital “marketplaces”, which have been facilitating the exchange of commodities within the ...working-class. In addition to the digitalisation of the medium of exchange value creation, which gives the worker a certain amount of regulated autonomy, this has also reinvigorated the debate about owning property and its utilisation for credit and profit generation by the working-class. The term, ‘Property’ in the paper, is not restricted to only real estate property but encompasses everything which has the potential to generate an exchange value for its owner. The paper generalises Engels’s ideas about property owned by the workers from two of his major works, “The Housing Question” and “The Condition of the Working-Class in England” and uses the same to analyse the political economy and growing popularity of social media- based commerce among the working-class. Through data collected from the university town of Dunedin in Aotearoa New Zealand, a town with an extensive and established system of social media-based commerce, the paper puts forward the relevance of the Engelsian critique of the idea of uplifting the working-class simply by giving them control over the possession of property, in the age of digital capitalism. In doing so, the present paper talks about how digital capitalism utilises social media and its associated platforms for commercial exchange to keep the cycle of accumulation in the capitalist social system intact by further exploiting the working-class.
Deutschland steht vor einer neuen Wohnungsfrage. Der anhaltende Boom am Immobilienmarkt spaltet die Gesellschaft in Gewinner*innen und Verlierer*innen. Auf der einen Seite haben die Preissteigerungen ...seit 2011 deutsche Immobilienbesitzer um etwa drei Billionen Euro reicher gemacht. Mehr als die Hälfte der Kapitalgewinne entfiel auf die reichsten zehn Prozent der Deutschen, aber auch Haushalte der oberen Mittelschicht (80. Perzentil) haben stark profitiert. Städtische Mieterhaushalte mit geringem Einkommen sind die großen Verlierer des Booms. In den Städten sind die Mieten im letzten Jahrzehnt dort am stärksten gewachsen, wo einkommensschwache Haushalte leben (»Gentrifizierung«). Obwohl steigende Mieten zeigen, dass das zu geringe Angebot von Wohnraum und nicht das niedrige Zinsumfeld den Boom am Immobilienmarkt treibt, versäumt es Deutschland weiterhin, die niedrigen Zinsen für zusätzliche Investitionen zu nutzen. Unsere Prognose des Wohnungsbedarfs bis 2030 lässt erwarten, dass das soziale Konfliktpotenzial der neuen Wohnungsfrage weiter zunehmen wird: Im Jahr 2030 werden knapp eine Million Wohnungen fehlen, davon allein 340.000 in den sieben größten Städten.
Wohnraum für alle? Barbara Schönig, Justin Kadi, Sebastian Schipper / Barbara Schönig, Justin Kadi, Sebastian Schipper
2017
eBook
Seit Jahren steigen Mieten und Wohnungspreise - vor allem in wachsenden Städten und Regionen Deutschlands. Günstiger Wohnraum wird zunehmend knapp und gerade untere und mittlere Einkommensgruppen ...sind von hohen Wohnkosten belastet.Der Band bringt gestalterische, gesellschaftliche und politische Lösungsansätze in einen Dialog. Die Beiträge erkunden die Gründe für die Wiederkehr der Wohnungsfrage und stellen Strategien vor, mit denen bezahlbarer Wohnraum für alle geschaffen werden kann. Akteure aus Wissenschaft, Praxis, Politik und sozialen Bewegungen finden hier aktuelle Perspektiven auf ein drängendes urbanes Problem.
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