Provocations on the housing question

Whereas in the 20th century, parallel to the expansion of capitalist logics that of course impacted also the housing market, Europe's cooperatives, communes, charity and state institutions came up with socially equitable housing models, at the beginning of the 21st century there seems to be little space left for those approaches. Via a housing sector steered by meanwhile globally acting investors, dwelling – a basic human right but even prior to that, a moment of the production of space that gets continuously re-defined by and along with human beings' everyday practices – is reduced to mere commodity and homologated. Taking off from recently built “luxury housing projects” in Berlin (for example, in Mitte's Jakobstrasse, in Schöneberg's “diplomates quarter”, in the northern section of Gleisdreieckspark or in the “Prenzlauer Gärten” nearby Volkspark Friedrichshain), we shall firstly examine which kind of urbanity is being promoted nowadays – or maybe, rather: whether urbanity, as plurality of life forms in the city, can at all emerge. Leaning on Henri Lefebvre's theory on the Production of Space, we approach urban design and infrastructural features, routines, inhabitants and everyday culture on site; we thereby learn and apply various methods of urban studies, e.g. associative walks, photographing, rhythm analysis and participant observation.
Secondly, from the point of view of space strategies it is important to discuss on the fact that private projects as well as the today fashionable “Wohngruppen”, “housing groups” initiated by the financially feeble but highly educated “alternative” and “creative classes”, just contribute to the further concentration of relatively privileged sections of the population in the city centres and leave unchallenged the dominant private ownership structure. When progressive thinkers of his time proposed that the working classes be granted ownership of flats, Friedrich Engels refused the idea, which he defined anti-revolutionary as it did not tackle the dominant conditions of capitalist exploitation. Reading together his essay on The Housing Question, we will gain access to the issue and develop provocative, whether conceptual or performative, counter-tactics. The results will be then published in Space Strategies-Magazine Raum-zine.