I’m slowly catching-up with things I’ve missed over the last weird year-or-so, including the publication of books by people I used to know…
Below are details of an online launch event (tomorrow!) for a new book by Hannah Hilbrandt, Housing in the Margins: Negotiating Urban Formalities in Berlin’s Allotment Gardens. The event is organised by The Urban Salon. Amongst other things, the book works over debates about ‘Theory from the South’ and associated themes by making use of ideas developed in relation to informality in fields of ‘development studies’ and non-western contexts and seeing how they help make sense of things going on in Berlin.
Online Book Launch and panel discussion
Informality and housing precarity: Urban perspectives across North-South
5pm UK time Wed 16 June
For the zoom link and registration please visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/informality-and-housing-precarity-urban-perspectives-across-north-south-tickets-157588733143.
The Urban Salon is delighted to host a panel discussion together with the Center for Metropolitan Studies, TU Berlin on the occasion of the launch of a new book from Hanna Hilbrandt (University of Zurich), Housing in the Margins: Negotiating Urban Formalities in Berlin’s Allotment Gardens. Inspired by concepts of informality which have been generated across the global South, the book develops new perspectives on practices of housing governance in Berlin through the twentieth century: normative judgements, room for manoeuvre and ongoing minor acts of negotiation add up to a way to mobilise the concept of informality as “routine enactments of rules and regulations”. The panelists will respond to Hanna’s detailed ethnography of the technically illegal use of allotment garden structures as dwellings in Berlin, both at times of housing crisis and on an ongoing basis.
Hanna Hilbrandt is assistant professor of social and cultural geography at the University of Zurich. Her research explores marginality and exclusion in housing and urban development as well as socio-spatial inequalities in the context of global economic restructuring.
Panelists are:
Julie-Anne Boudreau (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)
Francesco Chiodelli (Università degli Studi di Torino)
Alex Vasudevan (University of Oxford)
Respondents: Matthew Gandy (University of Cambridge) and Dorothee Brantz (Technische Universität, Berlin)
Chair: Jennifer Robinson (University College London)
For further details, and to subscribe to the Urban Salon mailing list, please visit http://theurbansalon.com/