Blog | Urban

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.

Within the framework of the project seminar “Nature, Space and Biopolitics: Understanding the Conservation Regime in Planetary Urbanism,” we spent the last year investigating the refiguration of the modern institutions […]

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.

How does the Kenyan middle class live? Subproject A05 “Being Home” examines living spaces in Nairobi and their significance for identity formation, drawing on urban developments of its colonial past. Project leader Jochen Kibel and cooperation partner Makau Kitata talk to journalist Brenda Strohmaier about their first findings.