“Local self-governance and urban property relations: Historical and present perspectives”

The workshop is collaboratively hosted by the historical subproject B07 “Property concepts and conflicts in the process of privatisation: Communal self-government and communal property in Eastern Europe since 1990” (Joachim von Puttkamer and Florian Peters) and the sociological subproject C04 “Debating the public sphere and the future of the commons: Property relations in the context of welfare state transformation” (Silke van Dyk, Markus Kip, Luzie Gerstenhöfer).

Urban property relations have recently re-emerged as a key field of political contestation. After decades dominated by a paradigm of privatisation of public goods and services, the question of *Who owns the City?* has sparked new debates and struggles throughout Europe.

At the same time, claims for urban ownership of housing, public space, and local infrastructure draw on an intensified discourse on self-governance. While municipal governments face new expectations for participation from below, self-governance ideas are also realised on smaller scales, such as housing communities, cooperatives, or district committees.

Both practices of claiming ownership and experiments in self-governance refer to a broad range of historical traditions. Yet, the relation of self-governance discourses to property issues has been all but straightforward over time.

This workshop brings together new research on diverse struggles over urban property relations from the fall of state socialism in Eastern Europe to present efforts to socialize privatized housing estates in Berlin. We aim to spark academic debate by re-assessing past endeavours to self-governance and contrast them with new insights from research on ongoing struggles for the city.

Programme

Here you can download the programme.