Speaker: Alex Vasudevan (University of Oxford)
In-person at Niagara C0826 and on Zoom.
Abstract: This paper re-traces the early history of housing struggles in West Berlin as a history of radical care work. It focuses, in particular, on the relationship between care work, inhabitation and the making of an alternative urban imagination. In so doing, the paper proposes a new reading of the communal spaces and autonomous youth projects that first flourished in West Berlin in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on extensive archival research, the paper connects the everyday spatial practices of squatters and other housing activists in the city to matters of care that politicized health and were intimately intertwined with a wider struggle over the meaning of political action, community organization and collective city living. Taken together, these orientations aimed to make visible the actual physical sites – the radical urban infrastructure – in which alternative (and undeniably intersectional) forms of solidarity and social reproduction were actually assembled and developed from clinics to communes, squats to youth centres. At stake here, is the recognition of a largely neglected archive of care and social pedagogy that was assembled in response to intensifying forms of housing insecurity and labour precarity and the wider terrain of social marginality that they ultimately produced. This was an expansive landscape of political action that ultimately encompassed struggles over housing, migrant rights, youth services and social welfare while opening up a critical space to imagine and conceive of the city as a livable space of empowerment and self-organisation.
This seminar is part of the IUR Brown Bag Seminar Series. If you have any questions, please contact Defne Kadioglu and Julie Goodrich.