Unsettlements

Co-convened with the National Museum of Denmark, this collective explores the state of unsettlements as an entry point for thinking about the genericity of living in heterogeneous urban spaces: the shifting material and social forms, the overlapping registers of financing, the syncopated histories, and the repurposing of resources, assets and values. 
 
For something not to be fully known it follows that it is not unknown. You simply cannot not have both. But what does it take for something to persist as manifest obscurity through and through? This question might seem as speculative as its premise appears contrived. But to a growing number of urban residents in cities across the world, it does capture a certain register of their everyday engagements with each other and with the transversal ordering mechanisms, which inconsistently insist on consistency across variegated social and spatial orderings. We think here of “estates” in European cities and the disrupted connections that often link their inhabitants to the spaces of their habitation.  Drawing upon the "estate"--which covers a range of housing situations, from social housing to private "affordable" housing to migrant hostels and encampments--we want to examine the ways in which the conventional modes of settlement are by definition unsettling, of the ways in which the composition of inhabitants--who they are and what they are capable of doing--instead of being domesticated by the "estate", are subject to a process of continuous recomposing, often without any destination in the minds of policymakers, brokers, managers, activists or residents themselves.
 
The collective has collaborated on an open source website The Real Estate Space which provides stories, dossiers, readings and workshop materials around what the estate is, and who it is for?

Team

AbdouMaliq Simone, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield

Alberto Corsin-Jiminez, Spanish National Research Council

Ana Vilenica, Radical Housing Journal

Claske Dijkema, University of Grenoble Alpes

Jayaraj Sundaresan, London School of Economics

Mara Ferreri, Northumbria University

Margherita Grazioli, Gran Sasso Science Institute

Michele Lancione, Urban Institute, Radical Housing Journal

Morten Nielsen, National Museum of Denmark

Sidse Martens Gudmand-Høyer, Aarhus University

Stavros Stavrides, National Technical University of Athens
 
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