“We Are Here, Baby”: DIY Renovations & the Right to the City

After several decades of neglect, many buildings in Berlin needed a lot of work to be made livable — but where others saw blight, squatters saw possibility. In this episode, Maya explores the spatial practices of squatting and how squatters used imaginative DIY renovations to claim a right to the city. However, that right was frequently challenged by non-squatters and the state, in violent ways… this episode also covers the forced eviction that some consider the end of the squatters’ movement, what even short-lived squatting meant for the people who participated, and the future of communal housing in Germany.

Citations:

• Writings on Cities by Henri Lefebvre (1996)
• "Excavating Lefebvre: The Right to the City and Its Urban Politics of the Inhabitant" by Mark Purcell (article in GeoJournal, 2002)
• “The Right to the City” by David Harvey (2008) https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii53/articles/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city
• “Precolonial Indigenous Education in the Western Hemisphere and Pacific” by Adrea Lawrence (article in The [Oxford] Handbook on the History of Education, 2019)
• "Infoshops in the Shadow of the State" by Chris Atton in Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World (2002)
• “Mehr als eine Heimwerker-Idylle” [More Than a DIY Paradise]. Retrieved from Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum Archives, 10 May 2023.
• "Living in Common Places: The Communal Apartment" from Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia by Svetlana Boym (1994)
• Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin by Alexander Vasudevan (2015) 
• “Underground Heritage: Berlin Techno and the Changing City” by John Schofield and Luise Rellensmann (article in Heritage & Society, 2015)
• https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240322-berlin-techno-scene-gains-unesco-status
• https://metropolismag.com/projects/dont-call-it-a-commune-inside-berlin-radical-cohousing-project/
• https://grist.org/cities/i-want-to-live-in-a-baugruppe/
• https://www.freiburg.de/pb/1458899.html
• https://tribunemag.co.uk/2022/07/germany-mietshauser-syndikat-property-housing

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