Blog | Urban Research

In digital media, places are often invoked in political debates. Over time, these conjunctions of locations and issues can shape our understanding of where pressing public concerns, like the housing crisis, are truly located and must be addressed. Daniela Stoltenberg dives into this dynamic in her new book, exploring how Twitter users locate the housing crisis. She shows how housing is constructed as an issue that arises in the urban center, but can be solved in the periphery.

The workshop “Space and Power from a Gender and Intersectional Perspective” was part of the International Participatory Summer School on “Power and Space”, which took place from September 13th to […]

A thin line between ethics and aesthetics haunts these reflections on field research in an African city, approached through the positionality of a researcher from a European context. Based on some visual impressions encountered during the fieldwork, the researcher Francesca Ceola retraces the process of reorientation in a place geographically and culturally very far away from her habitat recognizing what she knows in what she sees. In doing so, she contests the abstraction of “going to do fieldwork” as separate from everyday scientific practices.

CRC 1265 researcher Eric Lettkemann unravels the intriguing dynamics between digital technology and public spaces. Uncovering contrasting approaches to the of hybrid reality game Pokémon Go, from cemetery bans in Germany to seamless integration in Tokyo, he discusses the social implications and future challenges of such locative media as we navigate an evolving world where the digital of physical increasingly overlap.

CRC 1265 Project leader Ignacio Farías in conversation with Brenda Strohmaier Cities and city dwellers not only contribute significantly to global warming, but they are also particularly affected by it. Using Stuttgart and the Japanese city of Fukuoka as examples, subproject C05 investigates how this very knowledge reaches the work of scientists, urban planners and politicians, and how it is being translated into concrete measures. Project leader Ignacio Farías, Professor of Urban Anthropology at Humboldt University, explains how a social science analysis serves survival in a broken world.

This blogpost uses the phenomenon of the fata morgana – mirage – to illustrate the dynamics of real estate advertisements for exclusive housing developments in Cairo. In doing so, we investigate some of the ways in which public media and advertising create a display of the urban that does not reflect the lived social, spatial, and economic reality of the majority of the population. At the same time, this urban visual is produced and shaped by the intersectional dynamics of embedded societal norms.

Aufbauend auf eine Auswahl biographischer Interviews skizziert dieser Blogbeitrag, inwiefern die Konsequenzen territorialer Stigmatisierungsprozesse ungleich erlebt werden. Die Gespräche mit ehemaligen Bewohner*innen symbolisch abgewerteter Nachbarschaften betonen das Wechselspiel mit anderen Dimensionen sozialer Ungleichheit (insbesondere der ethnischen Herkunft) – und verdeutlichen, weshalb ein intersektionales Verständnis bei der Analyse behilflich ist.

Olena Kononenko has been a guest researcher at the CRC 1265 since mid-May 2022. With Lucie Bernroider and Sarah Etz, she spoke about Kyjiw’s past, present and future, similarities and differences between Kyjiw and Berlin, her experiences at the CRC 1265 and her hopes for future returns – to both Kyjiw and Berlin.