Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen
This episode is a talk by Joanna Kusiak at the Think&Drink Colloquium of Georg-Simmel-Centre for Urban Studies at Humboldt University Berlin. It gives insights into her new book Radically Legal: Berlin Constitutes the Future (2024).
Right in the middle of the German constitution, a group of ordinary citizens discovers a forgotten clause that allows them to take 240,000 homes back from multi-billion corporations. In this work of creative non-fiction, scholar-activist and Nine Dots Prize winner Joanna Kusiak tells the story of a grassroots movement that convinced a million Berliners to pop the speculative housing bubble. She offers a vision of urban housing as democratically held commons, legally managed by a radically new institutional model that works through democratic conflicts. Moving between interdisciplinary analysis and her own personal story, Kusiak connects the dots between the past and the present, the local and the global, and shows the potential of radically legal politics as a means of strengthening our democracies and reviving the rule of law. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Link to the book:
Guest:
Joanna Kusiak
Dr. Joanna Kusiak is a scholar-activist who lives in Berlin and works as a Junior Research Fellow at King’s College at the University of Cambridge.
Her work focuses on urban land, and on how social urban movements are using law to push ahead radical agenda.
Her article titled ‘Legal technologies of primitive accumulation: Judicial robbery and dispossession-by-restitution in Warsaw,’ which analyses how legal engineering can neutralize political dissent, won the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research’s 2019 Best Article Prize.
In 2021 she was one of the spokespeople of Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen, Berlin’s successful referendum campaign to expropriate stock-listed landlords. She also writes and performs poetry.