Housing in the margins. Negotiating urban formalities in Berlin's allotment gardens.

Abstract

Critical shortages of affordable housing force people into housing precarity across the globe.“ Housing in the Margins” is an exploration of 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, it illustrates 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 exelusions 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. Urban geographer Hanna Hilbrandt thereby outlines how the state is constructed and performed in the everyday.