UFR IUGA Institut d'urbanisme et de géographie alpine

Critical shortages of affordable housing force people into housing precarity across the globe. This talk starts from my recent book Housing in the Margins, which was published by Wiley in 2021, to explore unruly housing practices and their regulation in the context of the German housing crisis.
Through ethnographic research on the ways in which Berliners dwell in allotment gardens despite a law that prohibits housing at these sites, I discuss how these gardeners negotiate the
possibilities of residency with the local bureaucracy, gardening associations and amongst themselves.
This analysis highlights the contested terrain of enacting regulations and the exclusions that these negotiations entail. Building on postcolonial theory, anthropology of the state and critical legal geography, the book draws attention to the power of negotiations in the governance of urban space. On this basis the seminar seeks to discuss novel approach to theorizing
the nexus of informality and the state in ways that bridge analytical divides between debates about Northern and Southern states.

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