Stadtgespräch. Metropolitan Perspectives #7

Wednesday, March 18, 2015, 7 pm
Low–Budget Urbanity: How enforced cuts and saving options create cities
Alexa Färber (Professor for Urban Anthropology / Ethnography, HafenCity University Hamburg)

Saving imperatives pervade cities and saving practices in many ways create urban space. The perspective of “low–budget–urbanity” makes this performative relation of urban society and saving visible by emphasizing the relationships between the different dimensions of saving: what connects enforced cuts, saving options, and saving out of necessity? Since the property crisis of 2007 the transformation of urban infrastructures under the dictate of austerity policies becomes visible above all in cities in the US. What has the so–called “austerity urbanism” got to do with saving on the basis of positions critical of growth? And how do the saving practices of people, who have to run a household with very limited financial resources, relate to the above? These different articulations of saving are rarely brought into relation with one another. The enforceability of austerity measures therefore remains unexplained. “Low-Budget Urbanity” unfolds saving as a space producing practice, in order to trace the forces characterizing urbanity, common sense and its transformation.

Since 2010 Alexa Färber has been a Professor for Urban Anthropology and Ethnography at the HafenCity University in Hamburg. Hithero she was a lecturer at Humbold University zu Berlin. Her research focuses on the connection of urban anthropological questions and actor–network theory as well as the conceptualization of the “tangibility of the city”. She is a member of the editorial board of Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, Berliner Blätter – Ethnographische und ethnologische Beiträge and Zeitschrift für Volkskunde.