Laris­sa Fassler builds and draws space. Yet noth­ing here is cleaned up or ordered accord­ing to scale. In the large-for­mat draw­ings of cities, she shows us what we expe­ri­ence when we walk over traf­fic islands, through under­pass­es, and pas­sages, or into the entrances of build­ings. The artist over­lays the built space with appro­pri­a­tions. She observes and walks through the space over and over again, col­lect­ing and map­ping what she finds. This is also the case with her work Kot­ti (revis­it­ed). The many frag­ments lay­ered on top of each oth­er tell sto­ries of a com­plex space that proud­ly says: »I am city. I am nei­ther easy to under­stand nor easy to plan. I will defend myself if you seek to ques­tion my exis­tence.« The big col­or­ful pic­ture calls for plan­ning to take care of and work with lived space instead of against it. Because where is this city going to go if it has to leave here?

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That the hous­es assem­bled here seem to be thrown togeth­er is because the indi­vid­ual build­ings, as they stand there, do not nec­es­sar­i­ly exist as built struc­tures. They are mem­o­ries mixed with visions of one’s future four walls. Built by refugees from Iran, Syr­ia, Moroc­co, and Pak­istan, World City, as the project is called, was cre­at­ed togeth­er with Berlin-based asso­ci­a­tion Schlesische27 and oth­er orga­ni­za­tions. This glob­al city of a dif­fer­ent kind is both spec­u­la­tion and dream: about a future with­out bor­ders, the city as a process of dia­logue and its polypho­ny, of which there’s still too lit­tle to date.

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Hous­ing, just like land, must not be a commodity—this is the goal of the Miet­shäuser Syn­dikat in a nut­shell. Since its offi­cial foun­da­tion in Freiburg in 1993, it has devel­oped and pro­mot­ed self-orga­nized hous­ing projects. The unique fea­ture of the syn­di­cate is that land and build­ings are per­ma­nent­ly decom­mod­i­fied. This means that the orga­ni­za­tion, togeth­er with the ten­ants of a house, buys the prop­er­ty and the land, thus dis­solv­ing tra­di­tion­al own­er­ship struc­tures or oth­er depen­den­cies. By with­draw­ing build­ings and the land they stand on from the real estate mar­ket, the syn­di­cate posi­tions itself explic­it­ly against spec­u­la­tion and prof­it. Today, around 160 projects in Ger­many, the Nether­lands, and Aus­tria exist under the syndicate’s umbrel­la, mak­ing long-term afford­able res­i­den­tial, work­ing, and liv­ing spaces a reality.

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In the 1980s, Tox­teth is the set­ting for vio­lent class strug­gles. Peo­ple move to oth­er parts of Liv­er­pool; many of the Vic­to­ri­an row hous­es fall into dis­re­pair. As a result, a group becomes active in the neigh­bor­hood. They clean up, plant flower beds, paint win­dows, and estab­lish a mar­ket. A Com­mu­ni­ty Land Trust is set up. The aim: to cre­ate afford­able hous­ing that is owned by the peo­ple from the neigh­bor­hood. The group con­vinces the munic­i­pal­i­ty not to demol­ish the hous­es. Lat­er, the archi­tec­ture col­lec­tive Assem­ble comes on board and devel­ops a plan for the area. Although the work is still unfin­ished and many hous­es are still in need of fur­ther atten­tion, the people’s goal of tak­ing the future of their area into their own hands has been achieved for the time being.

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All over the world, large hous­ing estates like Cité du Parc rise upwards out of spa­cious park land­scapes. They are often con­sid­ered »social hotspots.« As is the case here. In the ear­ly 2000s, the French state decid­ed to rethink the future of such hous­ing estates. This is where the archi­tec­ture firm Laca­ton & Vas­sal with Druot comes in. The team had been work­ing on this ques­tion for some time: How can spa­tial trans­for­ma­tions be planned and imple­ment­ed so that they do not lead to occu­pant dis­place­ment? The office’s work illus­trates that alter­na­tives to demo­li­tion and new con­struc­tion do exist. And they define new qual­i­ties in build­ings, which many believe can­not be improved.

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We peer into a pit dug deep into the ground. In the mid­dle: a last iso­lat­ed house on a mas­sive clump of earth. Nail hous­es, that’s what these structures—left in appar­ent wastelands—are called. For Ahmet Öğüt, these hous­es are »expres­sions of indi­vid­ual every­day resis­tance against strate­gies of state or cor­po­rate con­straint.« They are rem­nants of hasty urban­iza­tion process­es and, at the same time, speak of dis­place­ment. Öğüt’s mod­el rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the nail hous­es record this state of things as a warn­ing. And so, resis­tance to the relent­less glob­al real estate indus­try and spec­u­la­tive land devel­op­ment is made vis­i­ble in the long term and thus nego­tiable for others.

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