Blog

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.

The article describes the basic principles and some key exercises of the five-day participatory workshop that took place in Berlin in November 2022 with a group of young students. The aim of the workshop was to develop a progressive web application together with the young Berliners, which will later be used by the same students to create mental maps, a research method employed to record the routines, paths and experiences of young people in (their) spaces.

In West Africa, an entertainment genre called Afronovela is booming. Like South American telenovelas, they are romantic soap operas, but set in Africa. Especially in Senegal and the Ivory Coast, an industry of its own has emerged. In subproject C06, the French sociologist Séverine Marguin and the Congolese director and film scholar Daddy Dibinga Kalamba investigate how these series stage narrations of successful lives.

On the 22nd of November, 2022, Claudia Mock from the Methods-Lab of the CRC 1265 organized the hybrid lecture and workshop “Visualizing Narrative Spaces” with the visual artist Simone Rueß, who shared insights into her work, which deals with the inscription of politics into urban structures, home-making practices and memory processes within biographical narrations, contextualized through drawings, animations, objects and installations. In this blog post, Simone Rueß reflects on the hybrid workshop, which was conceived as a performative narrative in which diverse participants from various disciplines developed individual visual approaches in a collective action.

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.

After years of contention, Lützerath is completely demolished. In January 2023, police cleared the squatted village of climate activists near the open pit lignite mine Garzweiler II, with bulldozers following on their heels. These events make Lützerath the 22nd village or settlement to be resettled and demolished for mining purposes in the Garzweiler region alone, although none of the others have received comparable attention.

Viele werden sie kennen: die Werbespots von Airbnb aus dem Frühjahr 2022. Dort tauchen wir in „Airbnb Stories“ ein. Wir begleiten glückliche Urlauber:innen, sehen privat anmutende Fotos und hören stimmungsvolle Musik. Die authentischen Urlaube, die hier beworben werden, sind „made possible by Hosts“. Diese Hosts treten in den Werbespots aber gar nicht direkt in Erscheinung. Einzig kleine Grußkärtchen geben einen Hinweis auf sie, im Obstkorb oder bei der Einwegkamera als Begrüßungsgeschenk. Die Gäste, die wir sehen, residieren in eleganten Stadtwohnungen, sonnigen Villen oder gemütlichen Ferienhäusern. Diese Urlaube „made possible by Hosts“ scheinen wenig damit zu tun zu haben, dass jemand ab und zu ein kurzzeitig leerstehendes Zimmer oder eine Wohnung über Airbnb vermietet.

In the South Korean metropole of Seoul, queer people have been increasingly pushing their way into the public sphere for more than two decades. The Seoul Queer Culture Festival, for example, has made it to the forecourt of the city hall against quite a bit of resistance, and the first neighborhood pride event took place in the Mapo district in 2022. Sung Un Gang, a member of subproject B03, is interested in such space-appropriating changes in the LGBTQ movement. He is not only interested in already well-documented processes, but also in how queer people create new spaces and recode old ones through quite mundane everyday actions.