Housing Struggles in Berlin: Talk with Sandy Kaltenborn
Thursday, April 18, 2024
Kuckhoffstr. 24 (K24), seminar room 11
4:00 pm – 5:15 pm CET/GMT+1
Sandy Kaltenborn, housing activist and co-founder of the rent and urban policy initiative Kotti & Co, will give a talk as part of the course Civic Engagement and Engaged Research: Berlin Lab.4:00 pm – 5:15 pm CET/GMT+1
Starting in 2012, the tenant’s initiative Kotti & Co turned a summer street fair into a permanent protest camp at Kottbusser Tor (Kotti) in Berlin Kreuzberg. Their protest hut, called Gecekondu, became a central platform to render tenants’ concerns visible and to make the struggle of many accessible and concrete. At the initiative's core were demands that opposed an infinite raise in rent for privately owned subsidized housing declared in 2011. Kotti & Co was impactful in shifting media attention and academic research to the structural problem of social housing and the city’s increasingly pressing housing question, and, most importantly, putting it back onto Berlin’s political agenda. On 17 September 2021, after 10 years of hard, passionate work, the great demand for the (re)communalization of houses was met by the state-owned housing associations, a total of 14,500 apartments around Kotti and in the rest of Berlin. Sandy Kaltenborn will talk about urban policy and neighborhood mobilization since 1990, and the beginning of a housing movement.
Please register via email to Faiza Lynar: [email protected]
Sandy Kaltenborn, actually Alexander Sandy Paul Omar Abdullah Kaltenborn, is a communication designer and runs the design studio image-shift, which operates in social, cultural, artistic, as well as political and urban contexts. Kaltenborn has been living in Berlin since 1990, is co-founder of the rent and urban policy initiative Kotti & Co, and has been actively engaged in socio-political matters for many years. Currently, he teaches as a visiting professor at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle.
Time: 4:00 pm – 5:15 pm CET/GMT+1
Location: Kuckhoffstr. 24 (K24), seminar room 11