Habitat Unit

Seminar SoSe 2021
Prof. Dr. Philipp Misselwitz, Dr. Christian Haid, Prof. Dr. Elke Beyer

Architectures of Care
Spaces of Social Reproduction

In this seminar in the summer term of 2021 the leading question was: How are practices of care organized spatially?

Spatial arrangements of housing, care work and urban social infrastructure co-constitute the socio-spatial patterns of global supply chain capitalism. In the seminar, we have been exploring the spatial organization of care, social reproduction, and the division(s) of labour it embodies, as integral aspects of industrial and post-industrial urbanization in different geographic contexts across the planet. Readings reflected current debates on care economies and (spatial) divisions of labour in geography, social and architectural studies including critical queer and feminist approaches, complemented by guest lectures by Elke Krasny, Torsten Lange, Natacha Quintero Gonzalez, Tekla Tevdorashvili and Anke Hagemann.

In research-based analytical drawing and mapping projects, seminar participants investigated how diverse architectures and urban spatial typologies perform as infrastructures for care work and social reproduction on different scales, including trans-local practices and networks.

By questioning common spatial arrangements of production and reproduction in a relational, planetary perspective, as well as underlying assumptions about race and gender, the course aims to contribute to a critical assessment of dominant architectural and urban planning principles. By building this sensitivity, we seek to encourage architectural and urban interventions with the potential to offer alternatives, to counter and reprogram unsustainable and injust mechanisms of exploitation, and to set care and due diligence in primary focus.

A digital archive was created to showcase seminar results:

https://architecturesofcare.cargo.site

Students+

Panagiotis Tsiamyrtzis Bakas
Sarah Baur
Olga Cherniakova
Hsiao-Lan Chuang
Karla Citlalli Contreras Marin
Simeon DaskalovArita Dreshaj
Julia Carolina García Juárez
Alexander Hartway
Rowaa Ibrahim
Carolina Moreno Londono
Elizaveta Mozalevskaya
Solveigh Paulus
Pablo Prado Serrano
Md. Esfaqur Rahman
André Sacharow
Ani Tashi
Anouk Vogel

Teaching+

Prof. Dr. Elke Beyer & Dr. Christian Haid