URBAN TALKS

June 29 2022, 6.00 pm | Floating University, Lilienthalstraße 32 10965 Berlin

Jos Boys & Roberta Burghardt

The urban talk series at floating university is a joint public lecture and discussion event organized by Habitat Unit/TU Berlin with the Design Studio „Safer City, Safer Housing?“ (Dr. Anna Steigemann/Dr. Christian Haid) and the BA Thesis Seminar „Collective housing at Berlin’s city borders” (Dr. Moritz Ahlert) and UdK studio raumproduktion’s seminar „Talking about collectivities and inclusion in housing“ (Prof. Markus Bader).

The lecture series adresses different aspects of collective and alternative housing for marginalized groups, such as for refugees, the queer community or for the urban poor, asking what solidary and urban commons models, practices, strategies, approaches, and spaces can be understood as possible catalysts for a larger urban and societal transformation towards a just city.

Jos Boys

In her talk “Cripping/Queering Built Space” Jos will explore what it means to ‘crip’ or ‘queer’ urban space. As well as using examples from her own work with Matrix feminist design collective in 1980s London, and more recent activities with The DisOrdinary Architecture Project in the UK and Europe, Jos will discuss some of the creative and critical interventions coming out of contemporary disability activism, arts and scholarship internationally; discussing how it both challenges normative built environment practices and can richly inform alternative forms of designing.

Dr. Jos Boys is Programme Director for the MSc in Learning Environments, and director of the Learning Environments Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Centre (LEEDIC) at The Bartlett, UCL UK. She was a co-founder of Matrix feminist design collective in the 1980s, and of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, with disabled artist Zoe Partington in 2008. Jos is author of Doing Disability Differently: an alternative handbook on architecture, dis/ability, and designing for everyday life Routledge 2014 and editor of Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader Routledge 2017.

Roberta Burghardt

Must we stop dreaming of safe housing, where we can choose how to associate with each other freely, collectivize reproductive tasks and share abundant joy in a world where people have to be increasingly happy just to have a roof over one‘s head? No! Let‘s start drawing, defy austerity and proclaim communal luxury!

Roberta Burghardt is co-founder of the architects-cooperative coopdisco (www.coopdisco.net) in Berlin. She thinks and writes on the possibilities of communal architecture in a capitalist world and has been engaged in various right-to-the city initiatives, most recently the Rathausblock in Berlin-Kreuzberg.

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