Housing after the Neoliberal Turn: International Case Studies
Texts: Rana Dasgupta, Mariana Fix, Andrew Herscher, Sandi Hilal, Anne Kockelkorn, David J. Madden, Reinhold Martin, Justin McGuirk, AbdouMaliq Simone
English
ISBN 978-3-95905-048-7
EUR 16.00
Available at bookstores, the shop at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and online at Spector Books.
The housing question is a universal question. Everywhere, it speaks differently but directly to the challenges that define our times: social inequality, ecological crisis, displacement, asylum, migration, and privatisation. The volume International Case Studies brings together contributions from Delhi, Hong Kong, Berlin, New York, London, and other cities around the globe. Its formats range from architectural research to literary and artistic projects.
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The housing question is a universal question. Everywhere, it speaks differently but directly to the challenges that define our times: social inequality, ecological crisis, displacement, asylum, migration, and privatization. The volume Housing after the Neoliberal Turn: International Case Studies interprets the neoliberal context as a defining condition for contemporary housing. The book consists of two parts: a series of essays by authors from the fields of architecture, anthropology, economy, and literature depicting various, often-contradicting contexts, and, part two, an Atlas of global housing that takes the neoliberal turn as its starting point.
The essays shed light on the challenges and conflicts of contemporary housing production: from Andrew Herscher’s research on the politics of “blight” in Detroit, AbdouMaliq Simone’s investigation of the struggle between formal and informal infrastructures in Jakarta, Rana Dasgupta’s description of the pseudo-farmhouses of the new middle class in Delhi, Mariana Fix’s analysis of the implementation of large-scale housing policies in Brazil, Sandi Hilal’s “Roofless” on the inherent contradictions of refugee housing in Palestine, David Madden’s critique of the concept of neighborhood describing the transformation of Brooklyn’s waterfront, to Justin McGuirk’s text on domesticity as data and the universal housing question disappearing in the “Internet of Things.”
“Atlas,” conceptualized and compiled by Anne Kockelkorn and Reinhold Martin, serves as a starting point to discuss and think about housing produced and consumed under a neoliberal doctrine. Developed as a tool for the Wohnungsfrage Academy (directed by Reinhold Martin), the Atlas does not assume a complete history of housing, but sets thirty-three examples side by side which are rarely seen in parallel, and whose juxtaposition in a densely synthesized framework puts national conditions and local settings in perspective; it invites the reader to think of housing as an unstable constellation evolving within the power relations of territorial processes.
