00:00 Introduction
04:24 Gentrification as Strategy of Neoliberal Urbanism
09:49 Current Cities: Places of Diversity or Inequality?
15:24 The Divide Between Squatter’s and Tenant’s movements
22:50 Lessons learnt from Homeless Migrant Workers
25:09 The Politics of Urban Rioting
32:13 Components of the Urban Political
37:30 The Need for Organized Social Movements
42:45 Prospects of Urban Protest
47:49 Alliances for Just Housing?
Whose City? Urban Struggles in the Age of Gentrification
with Lisa Vollmer, Mustafa Dikeç, Christian Volk and Robin Celikates
Gentrification and neoliberalization have shaped the cities we live in but also given rise to urban struggles, from uprisings to social movements advocating for rent control and tenants’ rights. What are the dynamics shaping the city as both a field and object of social and political protests and movements? What possibilities and limitations characterize the various forms of urban struggle, and to what extent are they able to create concrete alternatives and to transform urban politics? And how can urban struggles overcome the many cleavages that characterize the modern city and develop counterstrategies to neoliberal individualization and state repression?
Lisa Vollmer is a researcher and lecturer at the Institute for European Urban Studies at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and a member of the Berlin-based political initiative Stadt von unten/City from Below. Her research interests include urban social movements, gentrification and housing. Among her recent publications is Strategien gegen Gentrifizierung (Schmetterling, 2018).
Mustafa Dikeç is Professor of Urban Studies at the École d’urbanisme de Paris (EUP) and researcher at Malmö University. His work is located at the intersection of space and politics, urban uprisings, and temporal urban infrastructures. His most recent book is Urban Rage: The Revolt of the Excluded (Yale University Press, 2017).
Q&A
00:00:08 What are the historical beginnings of gentrification?
00:02:12 Is the movement for the decommofication of housing a way out of the dead ends of the squatter’s movement by fighting again for those in dire straits?
00:06:27 Is there something to distinguish emancipatory and non-emancipatory uprisings if riots are always political and have liberating effects?
00:07:38 How to decommodify land and housing?
