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This is a paper about radical filmmaking and housing justice in the Märkisches Viertel in the 1970s. The satellite estate on the outskirts of West Berlin was one of the largest housing projects in West Germany and, for many residents, a space of increasing marginality and insecurity. As this paper argues, it was also a site of experimental filmmaking that documented the conditions faced by residents living in the Märkisches Viertel. The paper focuses on a group of students closely connected to the Deutschen Film- und Fernsehnakademie (dffb or the German Film and Television Academy) who began in the late 1960s to film various political activities and discussions in the neighbourhood. It places particular emphasis on the work of Helga Reidemeister, a social worker and student at the dffb whose documentary films adopted a working practice that depended on the direct participation of the families and women, in particular, with which she collaborated. Through a close reading of her 1979 film, Von wegen ‚Schicksal’ (1979), the paper foregrounds Reidemeister’s role as a feminist filmmaker whose work explored the mechanisms of displacement faced by tenants living in the Märkisches Viertel and the wider ‘structures of feeling’ that they generated. At stake here, is a broader commentary on the history of housing struggles in West Berlin and the importance of documentary filmmaking as a methodology for housing justice.

Dir. Matthew Gandy. 2017. UK and Germany [Film, 72 min., color]. Matthew Gandy, ed. 2019. Natura Urbana: The Brachen of Berlin. Collection of essays to accompany the DVD publication with contributi...

First published: 30 November 2016 a In this paper we examine the precarious everyday geographies of property guardianship in the United Kingdom. Temporary property guardianship is a relatively new form of insecure urban dwelling existing in the grey area between informal occupation, the security industry and housing. Young individuals, usually in precarious employment, apply to intermediary companies to become temporary 'guardians' in metropolitan centres, most notably in London. The scheme allows guardians to pay below market rent to live in unusual locations while 'performing' live-in security arrangements that are not considered as a form of 'work'. The experiences of becoming and living as a property guardian can be ambivalent and contradictory: guardians express economic and social advantages to being temporary, while also exposing underlying anxieties with 'flexible living'. In this paper we offer a detailed description of the various practices of property guardianship and how they must be understood, on the one hand, in light of recent geographical scholarship on housing insecurity and, on the other hand, as an example of a precarious subjectivity that has become normalised in recent decades in cities of the global North. Drawing on in-depth interviews with long-term property guardians in London, we unpack the narratives and rationales of university-educated and highly skilled individuals for whom the city is a site of intensified insecurity and flexible negotiation. In the end, we conclude that the form of permanent temporariness experienced by property guardians needs to be understood as a symptom of wider dynamics of work and life precarisation in urban centres and argue that it is imperative to extend recent geographical debates around work and life insecurity to include new housing practices and their role in co-constituting urban precarity.

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. Schwarzwohnen was not a marginal phenomenon but involved thousands of citizens in the 1970s and 1980s in East Berlin and other major cities including Halle, Dresden, Leipzig, Potsdam, Erfurt and Jena. The paper follows the everyday practices adopted by so-called squatters in East Berlin. It places particular emphasis on 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.

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.

This paper explores the recent resurgence of occupation-based practices across the globe, from the seizure of public space to the assembling of improvised protest camps. It re-examines the relationship between the figure of occupation and the affirmation of an alternative ‘right to the city’. The paper develops a critical understanding of occupation as a political process that prefigures and materializes the social order which it seeks to enact. The paper highlights the constituent role of occupation as an autonomous form of urban dwelling, as a radical politics of infrastructure and as a set of relations that produce common spaces for political action.

Today, forced evictions in the name of ‘progress’ are attracting attention as growing numbers of people in the Global South are ejected and dispossessed from their homes, often through intimidation, coercion and the use of violence. At the same time, we have also witnessed the intensification of a ‘crisis’ urbanism in the Global North characterized by new forms of social inequality, heightened housing insecurity and violent displacement. This introductory chapter examines how these developments have led to an explosion of forced evictions supported by new economic, political and legal mechanisms, and increasingly shaped by intensifying environmental change. It does so with reference to the 8 chapters on forced eviction that follow from across urban Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

This chapter explores the recent rise of forced evictions (Zwangsraumungen) in Berlin focusing on the relationship between housing insecurity and the emergence of new forms of urban displacement. While it is often argued that the elementary brutalities of forced evictions are symptomatic of a wider austerity urbanism that has recently emerged in the cities of the Global North, these are developments that must also be seen, as this chapter argues, within a much wider historical frame. The chapter thus provides, on the one hand, an overview of the contemporary logics of forced eviction in Berlin focusing on how evictions take place and the various arrangements, materialities and practices that they depend on. On the other hand, it re-positions the relationship between forced evictions and struggles over housing in Berlin within a much longer history of dispossession, insecurity and resistance.

While concepts of “enclosure” and the “commons” are becoming increasingly popular in critical geography, there have been few attempts to think them together. This paper sets out a dialectic of enclosure–commons as a means for thinking through contemporary processes of exclusion, violence and alterity. We examine what is at stake through a geographical reading of enclosure, that is, the processes through which neoliberalism works through—and summons into existence—certain forms of spatiality and subjectivity. In doing so we confront the spatialities of enclosure's “other”: strategies and practices of commoning which assemble more inclusive, just and sustainable spaces. We examine the materiality of enclosure across a range of sites, from processes of walling to a more substantial assessment of the diverse assemblage of materials and subjectivities drawn into modalities of enclosure. We go on to explore the inscription of enclosure on the human body through an examination of, first, law, and second, biopolitics. In conclusion, we explore the implications of this argument for critical geographical scholarship.

This paper builds on an emergent scholarly interest in the political geography of the contemporary city. If recent struggles over the meaning of urban space testify to the interarticulation of neo-liberal norms with an increasingly revanchist approach to local governance, the main aim of the paper is to acknowledge various attempts to contest these developments. More specifically, it seeks to highlight the role and significance of the German Hausbesetzerbewegung (squatter movement) from the 1960s onwards. Despite a growing body of literature on the role of ‘1968’ as a watershed moment in the evolution of new social movements in West Germany, there remains little empirical work on the role of squatter movements within a broader matrix of protest and resistance. To what extent was the squatter movement in West Germany successful in articulating a creative reworking of the built form and urban space more generally? In what way were these counterclaims to the city performed? And how were these alternative car...

In this article I explore the work of the Canadian artist Jeff Wall whose innovative photographic methods have come to challenge the traditional pictorial protocols linking the photographic image with its referent. Wall uses large format images enlarged on transparent synthetic film and mounted in lightboxes as a medium to explore various aspects of everyday life in capitalism. My main purpose is to reflect on the historical specificity and ontological complexity of Wall's turn to deep pictorial illusion. To do so, I argue that Wall's back-lit transparencies point to a re-materializing of longstanding historical connections between pictorial representation and art's social function as a relation of radical critique. Such traffickings between the `visual' and the `material' have increasingly become the source of debate with cultural geography and cultural theory more generally, and this article draws particular attention to the various patternings of landscape, spectacle, and everyday life that have come to characterize Wall's formal photographic repertoire. As I hope to show, not only does Wall's work give new credence to the notion of `representation' but it also testifies to a revivified engagement with the materialities of picture-making. Indeed, what is ultimately at stake in Wall's work is an emphasis on presencing the material possibilities that are, in his view, inescapably inscribed within the practice of photography.

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The author builds on recent geographical approaches to the investigation of scientific experimentation. While a number of studies have explored the various sites of scientific practice and the role of space in the constitution of experimental matters of fact, far less attention has been directed toward the cultural geographies of experimental science and the extrascientific zones in which modes of experimental practice were themselves developed and contested. Drawing on the reception of professional psychiatry in interwar Berlin (1919–1933), the author traces an alternative set of ‘experimental systems’ which seized on and countered the credibility of psychiatric expertise. The focus is on a series of modernist experiments in interwar Germany which actively reconfigured psychiatric science as a series of critical aesthetic interventions themselves tasked with performing ‘scientific experiments’. The paper is triangulated around three case studies, which chart the multiple traffickings between psychiatric experimentation and modernist art. The first revisits the traumatic reenactments of Berlin Dada in the broader context of mechanized war, rationalized work, and metropolitan life. The second explores the psychotechnical techniques that were crucial to the operations of Brechtian epic theatre, and the third case study explores the relationship between clinical therapy and modernist fiction as it came to characterize the work of Alfred Döblin during the 1920s. The paper concludes with further reflections on the significance of the ‘modern experimental turn’.

That the historical geography of the modern city is intertwined with the practice of biopolitics has in recent years gained wide currency. In this paper I seek to deepen and complicate this perspective by focusing on Weimar Berlin (1919–33) and on the active role of the experimental life sciences in manufacturing a new habitus for a rapidly modernising metropolis. To do so, I investigate the ways in which contemporary psychiatric theories and experimental practices seized on and transformed different aspects of the metropolitan experience, and turn, in particular, to accounts of the psychotechnical testing enterprise ( Psychotechnik). In addition to the development of a series of experimental embodiments which were scientifically fashioned and tested, I also shift attention to the widespread dissemination of new realms of everyday conduct that were equally tasked with accommodating the impact of the modern urban experience. Ultimately, I hope to show to what extent the various incarnations of Weimar psychiatry were themselves enrolled in a larger project of policing and recuperating a national Gemeinschaft. As I argue, these experimental arrangements not only represented another example of the pervasive injunction of the period to ‘perform or else,’ but also spoke to the wide governmental reach of a pouvoir psychiatrique (Michel Foucault, 2003 Le Pouvoir Psychiatrique Seuil, Paris) through which experimental procedures for analysing, shaping, and regulating a new habitus were introduced, tested, and widely circulated.

In this paper I explore the textual performance of Berlin in the early 20th century, focusing on the multiple spaces of classical German modernity (1900–33) as they are described and reinvented within the poetics of a rapidly modernizing metropolis. It is argued that writing Berlin cannot offer a unifying text or conceptual system which arranges the city ipso facto into a single territory, a generalise space of selected indices and icons. Alternatively, the writing of the city explores the ongoing transformation of the city in text. My purpose in this paper is, therefore, irrefutably bound up with the capacity of the urban text to remap imaginatively the changing condition of the city onto the text itself—hence the fashioning of textual presences as surrogate city spaces. The notion of performance is furthermore deployed to account for the immediacy and evanescence characterizing the Berlin of classical modernity, a period that rehearsed the contradictions of modernization in accelerated form. From journalistic reportage to novels, the textual performance of Berlin necessitates an enabling reception and adaptation to the destabilizing nature of urban industrial modernity, which in turn can be plotted in two interrelated ways: first, in the proliferation of textual strategies which approximate the montage effect of the incipient modernization of the city; second, in the writerly anticipation of cinematic innovations as the scripting of a ‘moving’ urban culture of modernity. Taken together, these writings inhabit traveling geographies which provide models of performative identification for appropriating and embracing the complexity of the modern city.

This chapter explores the historical development of the squatting movement in Berlin from the late 1960s to the present. It charts the everyday spatial practices and political imaginaries of squatters. It examines the composition and assembling of alternative collective spaces in the city of Berlin and takes in developments in both the former West and East Berlin. For squatters, the city of Berlin came to represent a site of both political protest and creative reappropriation. The central aim of this chapter is therefore to show how this squatting can plausibly be understood as one historically specifi c example of an alternative autonomous urbanism in which theoretical ideas about politics and place were transformed into methodologies for assembling “times and spaces for alternative living” (Pickerill & Chatterton, 2006, p. 743). In particular, I will focus on the role and signifi cance of the German squatter movement (Hausbesetzerbewegung) from the 1960s onwards. Despite a growing body of literature on 1968 as a watershed moment in the evolution of new social movements in West Germany (Von Dirke, 1997; Rucht, 2001; Thomas, 2003), there is little empirical work on the role of the squatter movement within a broader matrix of protest and resistance (cf. Karapin, 2007; Koopmans, 1995). To what extent was the squatter movement in West and later a reunifi ed Germany successful in articulating a creative reworking of the built form and urban space? In what ways were these counterclaims to the city expressed as a form of architectural activism? What “micropolitical” tactics were adopted by squatters in Berlin? In its detailed focus on the practices of squatters, the chapter should also raise questions about the revival of occupation-based forms of resistance in a new age of austerity. To what extent, it asks, can squatting articulate a renewed form of emancipatory urban politics and the possibility of forging new ways of thinking about and inhabiting the city? In what way might squatting connect up with recent struggles for the “right to the city” and new forms of urban commoning?

Utopian thought and experimental approaches to societal organization have been rare in the last decades of planning and politics. Instead, there is a widespread belief in ecological modernization, ...

Writing at the end of their now classic study on the experimental landscape of Restoration England, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer reflect on what they believe to be “the origins of a relationship between our knowledge and our polity that has, in its fundamentals, lasted for three centuries” (Shapin & Shaffer, 1985 p. 342). It is, they insist, “far from original to notice an intimate and an important relationship between the form of life of experimental natural science and the political forms of liberal and pluralistic societies” (p. 342). But as they go on to suggest, “we are no longer so sure that the traditional characterization of how science proceeds adequately describes its reality, just as we have come increasingly to doubt whether liberal rhetoric corresponds to the real nature of the society in which we now live” (p. 343). Although written over 20 years ago, their remarks still seem on the surface to be tellingly apposite.

This article introduces the dossier of responses to the RETORT collective's Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (2005). We seek to ground this text in its political and theoretical context, identifying its relevance to scholars and activists alike. We introduce the four commentaries, which collectively provide a challenging set of observations concerning RETORT'S analysis of the contemporary geopolitical moment, focusing in particular on their theorization of the spectacle, the nature of U.S. imperialism, and the politics of modernity.