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S. Knierbein:
"Public Space and Housing Affairs, and `resistance combined´ - About silences, absences and the public articulation of critique";
Keynote Lecture: Summer School in Urban Studies 2016 "Understanding Public Spaces: Unravelling Complexities", Wien (invited); 2016-07-01 - 2016-07-08.

Cities of the Global North witness an increase in urban inequalities which is visible and can be analysed both through public space and housing research. With a combined dialectical focus on city publics and city dwellers, their spatial practices and patterns of acting space, urban researchers can try to understand patterns of increasing precarious living conditions, poverty and discrimination. They can detect exclusion of more vulnerable urban groups from shared spaces on the action level, and from policy programmes on the discursive level: What is silent and absent from public space (e.g. underrepresented groups, minorities or those who do not have a strong voice) can firstly be found and analysed with a look on private households (housing research). Secondly and vice versa, what remains in the homes and households seemingly understood as a private problem, can be brought to critical reflection and discussion in public space and can be articulated as a structural problem, rather than as private fate: When for instance urban dwellers face situations of becoming indebted due to finanicialization of housing policies, resulting mortgage-burdens and a missing labour income, many of these seemingly private problems remain behind the private curtain of shame and guilt. Once they start to be articulated in public space - an insurgent geography of the public sphere - an exchange between those affected by housing crisis and those offering support in solidarity may eventually lead to an emerging structural critique and contribute to a successive formation of a critical counter publics against exclusive housing policies, against the impacts of speculative capitalism and the resulting financialization of housing affairs. Combined housing and public space activism, to offer a core hypothesis for the talk, helps urban forms of resistance emerge that seek to defend human rights for decent housing against neoliberal urban policies which generative massive evictions and socially insensitive acts of displacement of more vulnerable urban groups (hypergentrification).