Housing in the Margins
Negotiating Urban Formalities in Berlin's Allotment Gardens
Studies in Urban and Social Change
1. Auflage Mai 2021
192 Seiten, Softcover
Fachbuch
Kurzbeschreibung
Critical shortages of affordable housing force people into housing precarity across the globe. Housing in the Margins is an exploration of unruly housing practices and their regulation in the context of the German housing crisis. Through ethnographic research on the ways in which Berliners dwell in allotment gardens (despite a law that prohibits housing at these sites) it illustrates how these gardeners negotiate the possibilities of residency with the local bureaucracy, gardening associations and amongst themselves. This analysis highlights the contested terrain of enacting regulations and the exclusions that these negotiations entail. Building on postcolonial urbanism, anthropology of the state and critical legal geography, the book draws attention to the power of negotiations in the governance of urban space, thereby outlining how the state is constructed and performed in the everyday.
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Housing in the Margins is a rich and original empirical data on the governance of housing precarity at the periphery of Berlin.
* One of the few discussions of urban informality in Euro-American cities
* An empirical exploration of the governance of housing precarity in Berlin
* A novel theoretical approach to understanding the nexus of informality and the state
* An innovative account of urban development in Berlin that bridges analytical divides between debates about Northern and Southern states
* A theoretical understanding of the ways in which negotiations and transgressions are embedded in the making of urban order
* A historically informed narrative of the development of allotments in Berlin
Series Editors' Preface vii
Acknowledgements viii
1. Introduction: Housing in the Entanglements of Formality, Informality, and the State 1
2. Negotiating Formalities: Informality and the Everyday State 15
3. Footnotes on the History of Housing: Allotment Dwelling in Berlin, 1871-2019 31
4. Housing in the Margins: Halfway Between Exclusion and Homeownership 54
5. The Colony and the Turf: Planning and the Politics of Land Use Change 76
6. Constellations of Consent: Navigating the Politics of Regulatory Enforcement 97
7. Working the Legal Threshold: Regulation, Translation, and Boundary Work 116
8. Conclusion: The "Gallic Village" 134
Glossary of German Terms 144
References 146
Index 173
