Georg-Simmel Center for Urban Studies

Cities become more and more important in local and global challenges. From the ideal of citizens of the world, we have moved to define cities as sites of citizenship. This makes urban settings relevant to agency in new ways. Pandemic, war, autocratic developments and climate crisis compromise ideas of individual and collective futures which tended to be taken for granted in privileged urban settings. At moments of crises, war and oppression, however, such routinized ideas become irrelevant and need reconsideration. Cities provide a special context to define and develop various scenarios of futures; they also connect large-scale structures and everyday life in various ways, and expose the agency of future-making.

Working from individual projects, the Scholars of Urban Futures at Risk Scholars Group addresses the broader question of who, how, and at which scales urban citizens and their cities can contribute to sustainable, peaceful and just futures. The scholars of this group share disruptions of their own lives by war and oppression. This provides a shared lens on agency and future from below, especially for urban futures at risk – but also the urban scholarship at risk.

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Einstein Guest Researchers to foster academic freedom (Einstein Foundation)

2023-2025

Marie Curie Global Fellowship (EU)

2021-2024

This project contributes to this interdisciplinary field, at the intersection of animal studies and urban anthropology, by paying particular attention to petting zoos as infrastructures of human-animal encounters in the city, the urban as a multispecies coproduction, as well as the ethical and political underpinnings of urban spaces designed for human-animal interactions. It hopes to analyze the presence of nonhuman animals as active elements participating in the assemblage and stabilization of a relatively new space of human-nonhuman relationships in European cities: the petting zoo. The project aims to describe how urban public spaces are reassembled and re-signified as infrastructures for encounters between humans and animals. Concretely, the project entails pursuing ethnographic research in two such multispecies locations in Berlin: the Kinderbauernhof at the Görlitzer Park and the Tierpark Neukölln.

DFG-Walter-Benjamin Postdoc Scholarship

2022-2024

In the last forty years the ascent of the neoliberal urban regime, marked by the impairment of formalized social security frameworks and privatization of risks, has fostered the subordination of urban social life to the rationalities of self-reliance and competition. As a result of this market-driven transformation, members of the urban populations have found themselves devoid of social protection assured by the state-based social solidarity and increasingly vulnerable to risks (associated with, i.a., economic crises, pandemics, climate change). Against this backdrop, the questions concerning informal means of social protection gain in importance. The proposed project considers urban care – which manifests itself through ordinary acts of support involving strangers in everyday urban spaces – as such a means of protection and examines the cultural-discursive, social-political, and material economic conditions which render it possible. It takes a practice-theoretical approach to study architectures of informal care for Polish homeless inhabitants of Berlin. Their lived circumstances, marked by both migration background and homeless situation, make a strong case for learning about care for urban others. The proposed project asks what creates the capacity (signaling both an ability and a desire) of ordinary people (clerks, cleaners, security guards, etc.) to support homeless urbanites in prosaic urban spaces (corner stores, shopping malls, train stations, etc.). By shifting the focus from care as a moral motivation for individual prosocial behavior to the host of interlocking factors that enable the enactment of care as a social practice, this project offers the prospect of a contextual explanation of the ‘happening-ness’ of urban care. The importance of questions raised by the proposed project, regarding informal care as a means of social protection and the conditions that make it possible, is strengthened by the universality of care needs and the incapacity of the state and its institutions to look after all members of society, revealed with the utmost acuity during the Covid-19 pandemic. Through examining the sociomaterial constitution of caring capacity of urban dwellers, this project is expected to generate valuable insights into the conditions facilitating protective societal response to precarity and vulnerability in times of growing social insecurity.

DFG-Walter-Benjamin Postdoc Scholarship

2023-2025

Urban Political ist ein Podcast von Ross Beveridge und Markus Kip, der sich mit zeitgenössischen städtischen Themen befasst und mit Aktivist*innen, Wissenschaftler*innen und politischen Entscheidungsträger*innen aus der ganzen Welt spricht.

Weitere Informationen und alle Folgen finden Sie hier.

Cities are critical zones where the intermingling of environmental processes, infrastructural arrangements and human lives is increasingly apparent and disputed. Physical waves, particularly heat radiation, sound waves and radio frequencies, constitute major environmental disturbances that invisibly cross the urban built environment affecting bodies, human and nonhuman, in harmful and uncertain ways. By asking how they come to matter, this project explores how waves become associated to specific bodies and environments, as well as how they become matters of public concern and design intervention. To answer these questions, this project entails extended ethnographic fieldwork at key locations where urban projects aimed at mitigating the urban heat island effect, abating environmental noise and building 5th generation wireless communication networks are currently unfolding.

2021-2026

The subproject “Geographic Imaginations II” adopts an international comparative perspective in order to examine the refiguration of rural spaces with regard to its effects on subjective geographical imaginations and related notions of security. We will empirically analyze how spatial conceptions of different population groups (especially in relation to age, gender, and social status) are undergoing significant changes due to processes of globalization, debordering, dis-embedding, re-embedding, and mediatization – leading to existential, subjective insecurities.

TU Berlin, FU Berlin IRS Erkner

2022-2025

Starting from a conceptualization of the city as critical zone of the Anthropocene, the subproject investigates the refiguration of urban spaces associated with microclimatic adaptation strategies. The project’s empirical focus therefore lies on the current formation of a microclimate regime in urban development contexts aimed at mitigating negative effects of creeping thermal stress on human and non-human life in the city. Using the interrelated examples of two pioneering cities with respect to microclimatic adaption strategies – namely Stuttgart in Germany and Fukuoka in Japan – three moments of the regime forming process will be examined from the perspective of spatial sociology: a) the problematization of urban heat, which is linked to certain socio-spatial arrangements of heat and affectedness; b) the infrastructuring of heat-resilient spaces, which is characterized by material-political strategies and conflicts with existing practices and infrastructures; and c) the translocal circulation of the microclimatic regime, which reveals variations in the associated refiguration of spaces.

TU Berlin, FU Berlin IRS Erkner

2022-2025

In 2016, the Berlin Senate designated two inner-city areas as model projects for community-oriented, cooperative urban development: the Haus der Statistik in Mitte and the Rathausblock Kreuzberg. Existing buildings are to be renovated and supplemented with new buildings to create affordable space for housing, administration and commerce. Newly created decision-making structures and mediating institutions have given rise to public-civic partnerships here, whose potential for public welfare-oriented building and urban development needs to be explored. Building on literature from organizational studies, social science technology and science studies, and cultural and social anthropology, we explore the idiosyncrasies and characteristics of the model projects studied.

2021-2023

This action will explore how place-making activities such as public art, civic urban design, and local knowledge production reshape and reinvent public space and enhance citizen participation in urban planning and design. Placemaking implies the multiplication and fragmentation of actors that shape public space. The aim of the action is to enable citizens* to contribute to different ways of interpreting local identities in European cities through citizen knowledge, digitalization and placemaking.

2019-2023

2023-2024

2023-2024

The study is prompted by the ongoing and worsening housing supply crisis, changing market structures and limited effectiveness of policy programmes implemented to provide affordable housing which can be found in many European cities. The project focuses on three main questions: a) What is the influence institutional investors have on the supply of affordable housing? b) Which housing policies and measures are implemented and conceived to control, regulate and cooperate
with institutional investors? and c) What is the policy-making process regarding institutional investors? The research project is exploratory in nature. Its main thesis states that an advanced understanding
of the impact of financialisation on housing affordability can only be achieved by integrating the financialisation of housing with the highly variable and changing forms of public policy which are implemented in different contexts. In order to capture as many variations of housing policy and market dynamics as possible, the project uses a comparative case study design. It looks at cities that represent different housing systems. We have therefore selected a total of six cities (Athens, Berlin,
Brussels, London, Malmö, Milan) that represent different levels of institutional investors determining housing issues as well as a wide variety of housing policy pathways and instruments.

2023

This research project will do a comparative analysis of the two largest wildlife sound archives in Europe: The British Library’s Wildlife and Environmental Sounds collection, and the Animal Sound Archive at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, to explore how the archives were produced, how archived sound recordings are maintained, circulated, and consumed and how sound recording technologies, techniques, listening cultures, and ethics have shaped the objectives, functions, and uses of archived sound recordings

2023-2024

2023

The German–South African International Research Training Group (IRTG) investigates the impact of religion on processes of social transformation and the impact of these transformations on religion in contemporary global societies. It seeks to contribute to recent academic research and public debates on the complex relationship between religion and society. Against the backdrop of the
discursive and hierarchical differences in perceiving and positioning religion in the field of knowledge between the Global North and Global South, this IRTG aims at a critical epistemology through which the situatedness of religious knowledge production and reception in processes of social transformation can be made the subject of research. It seeks to investigate religion as specifically situated knowledge functioning as a resource and as a site of social transformation. The Project engages scholars from two continents and a variety of disciplines to go beyond conventional research approaches. The IRTG’s studies are conducted within four thematic fields in which the relationship of religion and social transformation is approached empirically: national identity,
development, migration and healing. Transcontinental joint supervision and evaluation procedures as well as transdisciplinary theoretical, methodological and professional training, will be part of an overall strategy that promotes innovative research and excellent qualification of young researchers as well as equal opportunity at all levels

2022-2026

Our project seeks to investigate how design methods and practices have contributed to changing politics throughout the 20th century and to analyze contemporary forms of governing through design. It is our goal to establish the interdisciplinary study of design as a new field of research in
the humanities and to provide an account of how design has since the mid-20th century become increasingly political. An interdisciplinary collective of researchers based at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts,
the University of Basel ,and Concordia University approaches these developments through studying the role of design methods and practices in the transformation of international institutions and decision making processes, in the infrastructural transformation of urban centers and rural spaces, and in the computational management of ecological and social processes. At the heart of the project sits a bottom-up perspective: we do not assume global and homogeneous politics of design, but combine archival research and fieldwork in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America to investigate locally specific mergers of design strategies, infrastructural planning, and politics. An important goal of the project is to contribute to current political debates. Governing through Design links perspectives and methods of design studies, urban studies, media studies, anthropology, sociology, political science, and science & technology studies to develop a
comprehensive understanding of how politics and design are interrelated today. The project therefore intervenes in contemporary debates about opportunities to act on the effects of the ‘anthropocene’ and seeks to confront global solutions with in-depth studies of local projects and
processes.

2021-2024

The DFG-funded RTG Minor Cosmopolitanisms is located at the University of Potsdam. In cooperation with Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Freie Universität Berlin, the RTG offers doctorate researchers support by experts from various locations within global academia. To this aim, each PhD student is advised by a team of supervisors and local as well as international. In addition,
a range of qualification measures ensures the acquisition of academic and professional skills. The RTG Minor Cosmopolitanisms wishes to establish new ways of studying and understanding the cosmopolitan project against and beyond its Eurocentric legacies with a fundamental interest in ‘doing cosmopolitanisms’, i.e. concrete critical, artistic as well as everyday practices that performatively bring cosmopolitanisms into being by virtue of their worldmaking capacities. For this purpose, the RTG draws on the expertise of postcolonial literary and cultural studies in particular, as well as on postcolonial sociology, history, Jewish studies, border studies and cultural anthropology to investigate the concrete aesthetic, translational, medial, and material dimensions of cosmopolitical practices. The dissertation projects assembled under the roof of Minor Cosmopolitanisms shall cluster around five major thematic fields, which demarcate pertinent aspects of the project: Minor Cosmopolitan Theory, Minor Cosmopolitan Justice, Minor Cosmopolitan Memory, Minor Cosmopolitan Bodies, and Minor Cosmopolitan Indigeneity.

2021-2024

2016-2025

Aims of the conference
• To bring together scholars from all over the world to develop innovative perspectives on the theme of ‚Seeing Like a City / Seeing the City Through’ for sociologically addressing the ‘City’ as a set of local state institutions that categorises and intervenes in the urban and shapes citizenship and belonging while practices and logics outside of the view of the state defy those standards and categories. This should result in a series of publications (edited collections, special issues in journals) as well as in international cooperation for new research initiatives between participants.
• To strengthen the network of urban scholars within the context of the Research Network 37 of the European Sociological Association and to involve junior scholars in this network.
• To strengthen the profile of excellence of Humboldt University, to strengthen the collaboration between universities within Berlin, and to generate and enhance visibility and networks of German urban scholars.
• To theoretically and empirically advance our understanding of the tension between ‚Seeing Like a City’ and ‘Seeing the City Through’ within the framework of comparative urbanism, and to contribute to the current debates on these in urban sociology and urban studies more generally.

2022-2023

2016-2025

In the current situation of the global Covid-19 pandemic, infection control measures in many African countries are particularly targeted at open markets, which are especially important for vulnerable
groups. These are thus a relevant arena for the negotiation of competing claims and interpretations of health. The unintended or unrecognised effects of the current security-oriented measures, which
are often imposed 'from above', are particularly drastic here. The research project aims at an acute assessment of the implications of the Covid-19 intervention on the two largest markets in Ghana
using qualitative methods. Based on a relational concept of health, which also takes social and location-related determinants into account, it is possible to determine more targeted measures of infection protection and health promotion in the acute situation. On the other hand, the example allows the conceptual sharpening of an urban geography of embodied inequalities.

2021-2022

The DFG project "Superdiversity and Ageing Cities? The Convergence of Growing Multiethnicity and an Ageing Population" is looking at the spatial interaction of demographic change and social diversity, using Berlin as an example. The aim of the project is to close two research gaps: firstly, to show how characteristics of diversity, e.g. educational background, gender, ethnicity, migration path, religion, health, sexuality or social class jointly shape the aging process and life in old age. To do justice to the complexity of current social diversity, we work with Stephen Vertovec's concept of superdiversity. Secondly, diversity and aging are made accessible to a spatial perspective with the help of the thematic complex of housing
and neighbourhood in old age. Furthermore the spatial perspectives are explored in a superdiverse-aging space of ideas of urban space, proximity and distance. The research project is interdisciplinary and is being worked on together with applied geoinformation processing (Prof. Dr. Tobia Lakes) and landscape ecology (Prof. Dr. Dagmar Haase). The combination of qualitative methods and quantitative modelling offers an innovative methodological approach to the development of future scenarios for the superdiverse, ageing city.

2021-2022

On behalf of the Kreuzberg district office, Prof. Dr. Talja Blokland and Dr. Hannah Schilling, together with a research team from the Georg Simmel Centre for Metropolitan Research, interviewed 323 residents in 2019. The team rang doorbells around the "Kotti" and asked detailed questions. Unlike other surveys on this topic, the interviewees were able to justify their assessment of safety without any instructions from the researchers.
"With the survey of residents at Kottbusser Tor, we want gain an improved understanding of how people feel in their living environment, what particularly affects them and how the feeling of safety can be improved," says District Councillor Knut Mildner-Spindler. The cooperation of
administration and science is an important concern, and we are very happy about the cooperation with the Department of Urban and Regional Sociology and Prof. Blokland to gain scientific knowledge about social spaces. Based on the exciting results recommendations for action and
concrete measures will be developed by the administration and other local actors together and across disciplines." "Even around a place like Kottbusser Tor, where many people do not like circumstances like drug
dealing, littering and especially the unmanageable traffic situation," says study author Talja Blokland, "people can develop confidence through mutual recognition and live without fear in their neighbourhood. To improve the quality of life through crime prevention at Kottbusser Tor, creative concepts are needed to promote informal social control, all the more so since there is no majoritythat simply wants an increase in police presence

2018-2020

The project brings together the Department of Circular Economy and Recycling Technologies (TU Berlin) and the Urban Laboratory for Multimodal Anthropology (HU Berlin) to develop and explore games and game design as formats of public engagement with the Circular Economy (CE). We are experimenting with games as a particular form of science communication that enable accessible, speculative, and interactive forms of participation by non-homogeneous publics in complex issues. In collaboration with actors from the civil society platform “Haus der Materialisierung” in the Berlin model project for community-oriented neighborhood development Haus der Statistik, we will develop a game that explores potentials and conflicts in the societal transition to a collaborative-driven circular economy.

2021-2022

This project looks at the social and political consequences of the Corona crisis in the urban context. The focus will be on the role of neighborhood organizations in providing access to information and resources under pandemic conditions, especially for migrants. The project is comparative and works with case studies in Berlin, Copenhagen and Tel Aviv. In this way, different framework conditions for local action will be taken into account.

2021-2022

Today, dealing with cultural heritage is a significant aspect of urban development. With many years of expertise in this research area, the Georg Simmel Center for Metropolitan Studies is participating in the international research project “Open Heritage: Organizing, Promoting and Enabling Heritage Re-use through Inclusion, Technology, Access, Governance and Empowerment” from June 2018 to May 2022. The project promotes the re-use of neglected and non-touristy cultural heritage sites with the help of a transferable management model and the promotion of civil society engagement. The EU is supporting the European consortium consisting of 16 partner institutions through the Horizon2020 funding line.

2018-2022

The subproject investigates how increased spatial mobility affects social network relationships and their spatial arrangements, how spaces are constituted in social networks through a heterogenization of action references, and whether and how these spaces can be used as resources by residents. From the perspective of a sociology of social inequality, the project asks how, under conditions of increased mobility and translocal experiences, social networks are accessed, created and transformed, and how their resources are used to cope with or improve one’s own life situation. From a spatial sociological perspective, the project investigates whether and how the constitution and activation of networks make translocal use of locally bound preconditions, generate polycontextural references, and thus produce new spatial consolidations.

2018-2022

State interventions move between control & care, also in the current pandemic: (new) control measures are implemented for the protection of the population. Partners in São Paulo, Santiago, Abidjan, Barcelona & Berlin use their expertise on contexts of different authoritarian & democratic regimes to develop a research agenda that explores this tension. The focus is on the consequences for urban participation & inequality of health opportunities.

2020-2021

In the last Urban Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Goals 4, 10 and 11 respectively addressed the issues of quality of education, reducing In-equality, and sustainable cities and communities. In this proposal we are addressing these goals in two African counties: Egypt and South Africa representing the Northern and Southern African contexts. Both countries share similar challenges in the urban planning practices that affect socio-spatial justice, equality and accessibility in the city. Accordingly, we propose investigating multiple local case studies in cities such as Cairo, Alexandria, Cape Town and Johannesburg in order to understand and reflect on the practices of planning in the different Global North and Global South contexts. The themes are: 1) Planning theory & education; 2) Planning politics & urban policy; 3) Planning practice, field & civil society.

2020-2021

Converting historic industrial complexes is a new and important task in many European cities. Architectural and planning practices show that historic industrial complexes are composed of urban spatial structures that might be conserved and enhanced during conversion to new uses. For research, the question arises, of what constitutes best practice for conservation and enhancement when converting historic industrial complexes. Best practice will be discussed and identified on basis of five criteria coming from debates in architecture and conservation.

2018-2021

The project “Geographical Imaginations: People’s Sense of Security and Insecurity in a Cross-Generational Comparison” focuses on the extent in which the increase in complexity and re-figuration of spaces is expressed in security-related geographical imaginations. Subjective spatial knowledge will be empirically examined by conducting group discussions and problem-oriented interviews (both based on photo-elicitation) at three different places (Vancouver, Berlin, Singapore). We will analyze the geographical imaginations of 15–30-year-olds, 35–50-year-olds and 55–70-year-olds. Using the visual methodology of photo-elicitation, we want to particularly shed light on the emotional and affective dimension of security-related spatial knowledge. It is for the first time that a research project investigates the subjective spatial knowledge of different age groups in a polycontextural way at three different study sites, thus allowing for a comprehensive analysis of the contours of a global re-figuration of spaces.

2018-2021

Many European cities are facing the challenges of massively overhauling their urban water infrastructures. This is due both to the requirements of the European Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive (UWWTD), and the fact that most of their main water infrastructures were installed in the 19th century and now have an outdated structure (exacerbated by climate change, especially in coastal locations). We will focus on the specific role and risks of financial R&I in these city investments and conduct a case study involving two cities (London, Milan).

2019-2021

The aim of the application is to develop strategies and establish working platforms for interdisciplinary media use and data archiving in the field of urban research at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

2020-2021

The aim of the workshop is to bring together anthropologists, sociologists and geographers from four CENTRAL-partners to develop a multi-disciplinary shared research perspective on the development of class as social science concept and as lived practice or ‘culture’ in the context of post-socialist de-industrialization and the development of service- and platform economy, and develop a collaborative research agenda. Starting from the idea that not only political systemic changes into post-socialist cities, but also the changing nature of work in neoliberal economies affect people’s lives in the last 30 years, it brings together scholars from Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland and, as a contrasting case, the United Kingdom (where work disappeared and affected class-based communities and practices under capitalism) to explore possibilities for a shared research project, for which we will explore funding options, or graduate students’ group application (Graduiertenkolleg).

2020-2021

This research project intends to contribute to the growing field of research on modern industrial heritage in the countries of Iran and Egypt and to build local capacities for successful participatory conversion and adaptive re-use through a series of workshops involving post-graduate students, junior and senior researchers and local experts.

2020-2021

The research project “Income, Rent, and Inequality” is based on an updated and in-depth analysis of housing conditions as an effect and cause of social inequality. In former studies on housing provision we were able to show a fundamental lack of affordable housing for households with low income in mostly all large cities. In the course of this follow-up study, the key figures on housing conditions and supply situations will be refreshing with new data. Questions from the research project are directed at the (1) impact of income inequality on housing conditions, (2) the impact of housing costs on the structure of social inequality in the German cities, and (3) the provision with affordable housing in the large cities.

2020-2021

2021-2022

2020-2021

2020-2021

2020-2021

2020-2021