Home and Housing in Urban Regeneration Processes: Studying the Macro through Historiographies of the Micro in Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Frankfurt am Main

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Sebastian Schipper
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 451071600

This project investigates the dialectic of home and housing in current struggles over urban regeneration and gentrification in four particular neighborhoods in Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Frankfurt am Main (Givat Amal B and Salame in Tel Aviv-Jaffa; Gallus and Westend in Frankfurt). The overall objective is to propose a new theoretical, methodological and policy oriented approach that offers a different understanding of the dialectic relationships in the built environment between the lived space of the home and the housing markets, revealing politics and struggles that come to the fore in regeneration processes. It uses a new methodology that focuses on certain addresses within these neighborhoods. The history of each address is reconstructed through archival research as well as an investigation of the subjectivities of current and former residents and information collected from interviews with other relevant actors (home renters and owners, developers, municipal and state planners, local politicians, and fair-housing activists). While an address was or is a home to its former and/or current residents, it was and is at the same time an element in housing markets, in planning and development politics, and in public struggles. In this project, we bring into dialogue two different and often unrelated strands of theory that exist in the literature: one concerned with structural aspects of housing, focusing on political, financial, economic and legal systems, nation building, ethnicity and racism (the ‘macro’), and another concerned with the personal, emotional and community-oriented aspects of home, focusing on (dis)belonging, (dis)comfort, memory, identity, place attachment and fear (the ‘micro’). In our neighborhood case studies, economic, legal, and ethno-national aspects of housing are significant in current struggles over homes to varying degrees. Their investigation emphasizes the study of the macro through the micro. We propose a new approach of studying the macro through the micro that presents a breakthrough, yielding an impact beyond a specific discipline as it proposes discourse, jargon and concepts for promoting recognition of formerly and currently displaced individuals and communities in housing and regeneration policies. Its novelty lies in addressing models of action that can be initiated at various scales. Because of its multifaceted and multilayered approach, this project includes a rich set of methods (including archival work, interviews, workshops, etc.), utilized jointly through the new methodology termed the historiography of the address as a contact zone, two concepts that will be further developed in this project. It is based on the reconstruction of the complex, power-laden relationship between the multiple aspects of the dialectic of home and housing by reconstructing the history of each address through archival work, identifying and interviewing past and current residents and planners, policy makers and private developers.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Israel
• International Co-Applicant: Professorin Dr. Tovi Fenster
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Bernd Belina