GRK 2892:  Societal Transformation and Spatial Materialization of Housing

• Subject Area: Construction Engineering and Architecture ; Geography ; Social Sciences
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 499392530

Everybody needs housing. If only because this banal statement is so uncontroversial that it provides the foundation for an internationally stipulated social right, we can assume that housing as a practice and the conditions that structure it socially and spatially have a social significance that is as enduring as it is compelling. For this reason in particular, housing and the structures that enable it reflect processes of societal transformation like almost no other aspect of human life. Housing thus provides a lens through which we can gain an understanding of epochal change, processes of transformation, and challenges. Housing is at the same time defined in a specific way by the tense interrelationship between societal change and its spatial manifestations in built form. The socially built environment influences everyday practices and social interaction, creates path dependencies, and structures future paths of social development. Under the conditions of a globalized and financialized capitalism, the provision of housing is currently undergoing fundamental change once again. New disputes as wells as some of the old ones are becoming hot topics once more. At the same time, ecological demands in light of climate change, the digitalization of the residential environment, the crisis of social reproduction, and emerging issues in the field of healthcare are moving the question of how housing is socially and materially constituted to the center of debate in society. The proposed research training group will explore the manifestations of these multifaceted changes in housing and focus on the field of tension between processes of societal transformation on the one hand and the inevitable material fixation of these processes in the form of a built housing environment on the other. As today’s social developments give rise to and become spatially fixed in tomorrow’s built environment, the research training group will ask what the resulting challenges, problems, contradictions, and conflicts are for housing and how the built housing environment shapes or is supposed to shape societies’ future paths of development.

• DFG Programme: Research Training Groups
• Applicant Institution: Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
• Co-Applicant Institution: Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
• Participating Institution: Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences; Institut Wohnen und Umwelt GmbH; Klassik Stiftung Weimar
• Participating Researchers: Professorin Dr. Verena von Beckerath; Professor Dr. Thorsten Beckers; Professor Dr. Bernd Belina; Professorin Dr. Susanne Heeg; Professorin Dr.-Ing. Eva Hornecker; Professorin Dr.-Ing. Sigrun Langner; Professor Dr. Stephan Lessenich; Professor Dr. Lars Meier; Professor Dr. Robert Pütz; Professor Dr. Carsten Ruhl; Professor Dr. Sebastian Schipper; Professorin Dr.-Ing. Daniela Zupan
• Spokesperson: Professorin Dr.-Ing. Barbara Schönig