“We Are Here, Baby”: DIY Renovations & the Right to the City

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SQUAT, or the Radical Community Builders of Reunified Berlin

Maya Green

6 episodes

9 months ago

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is known around the world as marking the triumph of the West and the fall of communism. However, when we zoom into the neighborhoods surrounding this infamous concrete structure, we see a different story... of radical young people who squatted empty buildings to explore alternatives to capitalism, express queer identities, and claim agency in a time of massive global change. With the help of a dynamic cast of former squatters, punks, and dreamers, Maya Justine Green integrates academic theory and personal narrative to tell a story of what people built for themselves in a city's "empty" spaces — and what it might teach us about how to navigate the world’s current crises.

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“We Are Here, Baby”: DIY Renovations & the Right to the City

SQUAT, or the Radical Community Builders of Reunified Berlin

45 minutes 47 seconds

1 year ago

“We Are Here, Baby”: DIY Renovations & the Right to the City

After several decades of neglect, many buildings in Berlin needed a lot of work to be made livable — but where others saw blight, squatters saw possibility. In this episode, Maya explores the spatial practices of squatting and how squatters used imaginative DIY renovations to claim a right to the city. However, that right was frequently challenged by non-squatters and the state, in violent ways… this episode also covers the forced eviction that some consider the end of the squatters’ movement, what even short-lived squatting meant for the people who participated, and the future of communal housing in Germany.

Citations:

Writings on Cities by Henri Lefebvre (1996)
"Excavating Lefebvre: The Right to the City and Its Urban Politics of the Inhabitant" by Mark Purcell (article in GeoJournal, 2002)
“The Right to the City” by David Harvey (2008) https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii53/articles/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city
“Precolonial Indigenous Education in the Western Hemisphere and Pacific” by Adrea Lawrence (article in The [Oxford] Handbook on the History of Education, 2019)
"Infoshops in the Shadow of the State" by Chris Atton in Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World (2002)
“Mehr als eine Heimwerker-Idylle” [More Than a DIY Paradise]. Retrieved from Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum Archives, 10 May 2023.
"Living in Common Places: The Communal Apartment" from Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia by Svetlana Boym (1994)
Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin by Alexander Vasudevan (2015)
“Underground Heritage: Berlin Techno and the Changing City” by John Schofield and Luise Rellensmann (article in Heritage & Society, 2015)
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240322-berlin-techno-scene-gains-unesco-status
https://metropolismag.com/projects/dont-call-it-a-commune-inside-berlin-radical-cohousing-project/
https://grist.org/cities/i-want-to-live-in-a-baugruppe/
https://www.freiburg.de/pb/1458899.html
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2022/07/germany-mietshauser-syndikat-property-housing

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