Blog | Urban

By Zoé Perko Introduction It’s 7:53 a.m. I hurry through the endless drizzle of a Brussels winter, weaving my way toward the subway station. Businesspeople stride across the crowded sidewalks, […]

Care can be understood in different ways depending on the social-political context in question. What for some may seem like a lack of care, for others is just a different way of caring. By researching environmental/urban education activities with children, the author seeks to relate children´s autonomy regarding urban issues in Berlin to care practices. This blog article shows some of the first reflections of Joana Martins' field work in Berlin as a visiting fellow at CRC.

How does spatial theory inform spatial practice? What can we, as practitioners, gain from reading a scientific paper? The following lines are a personal reflection on our recent CRC 1265 working paper on multiple understandings of rurality and its links and parallels to the practice of Gyaw Gyaw, a locally-run architectural NGO located at the rural Thai-Myanmar border.

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.

This blog article explores the elusive materiality of the Yellow Sand phenomenon: The sandy dust that originates in the Gobi Desert and travels above all of Asia, carrying hazardous components. What does it mean to ethnographically research something barely visible? What happens if we take Yellow Sand’s materiality seriously? How do we write about a phenomenon with no clear spatial or temporal boundaries? Here, CRC 1265 researcher Margherita Tess reflects on ethnography's communicative possibilities for dealing with hyper-objects, the atmospheric, and the refiguration of spaces in the Capitalo-Anthropocene.

What is your favorite waterbody? What do you like about it? Chances are that you thought of a lake or a river, maybe even an entire ocean. For the collaborative workshop at the CRC 1265 on ‘water, flows, space, and other stuff’, Moritz Kasper and Afra Foli decided to use the notion of ‘waterbody’ to talk about slightly unorthodox containers of water: an urban river-turned-drain in Accra and bright yellow jerry cans in Nairobi.

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 […]

From August 2nd to 12th, a group of Kenyan and German students conducted the fieldwork of their study project in Nairobi, Kenya. The main goal was to explore the food system in the urban region of Kasarani, a constituency of Nairobi. Various methods, such as mapping and interviews, were used to gain insights into the food security status of the local people and the different factors that influence it.