Send message to Contributor

Contribution short abstract

Through ethnographic fieldwork in 'wohnprojekts' in Göttingen in the current context of austerity and migration, this paper examines how utopian projects and the abstract notions of freedom and solidarity fare when confronted with real uneveness produced by capitalism.

Contribution long abstract

The 1960s was a generative moment for the political cultures on the left in Germany. Among the varied currents of left-wing politics that emphasised new expressions of radicalism, squatting emerged in the succeeding decades as a new frontier of protest against capitalist city-making. Originally addressing the questions of social housing in the cities, some of these surviving squats have evolved as housing commons that, although marginally, dot many German cities to this day.

Housing commons conceive themselves as utopian sites of mutual care and solidarity-based living that the capitalist regime of commodity, property and money discourages and endangers. As an intellectual tradition, kommonismus (commonism) emphasises commoning as a political practice against contemporary capitalism, and commons as underpinning values of inclusion, care, and collective disposition.

But how do such utopian projects and the abstract notions of freedom and solidarity fare when confronted with real uneveness produced by capitalism? Through ethnographic fieldwork in 'wohnprojekts' in Göttingen, this paper anthropologically examines the heightened contradictions in wohnprojekts today with austerity and migration crisis that define the current conjucture in European cities. Through participant observation and focused-group interviews among housing commons and migrant political groups in Göttingen, this paper examines the contradictions in utopian notions of care and solidarity. With this case study, the paper aims to highlight the limits of utopian notions of political community in ensuring 'right to the city'; instead , I foreground the embeddedness of utopian practice in imperial political economy and hegemonic civil society in capitalist metropolis.