The exchange on the topic of ownership-as-practice took place over two digital events: a workshop on 17-19 June 2021 and the subsequent conference on 23-25 February 2022. The organisers provided historical and global perspectives on the complex relationship between citizenship and urban belonging in the age of "planetary urbanisation". Furthermore, they highlighted the many interdependencies between "owning cities" and "making a home". The intent of the project, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, was to redefine what it means to "own the city" in a time where unequal access to and scarcity of urban spaces and resources have become commonplace. To explain these dynamics, aspects such as residential segregation, marginalisation, housing and social movements have been taken into consideration. Moreover, ongoing critical debates that are transforming notions of public and private space motivated the discussion of both the privatisation processes of former public spheres and resources in the context of neoliberalism, hyper-capitalism, and changes to the “commoning” of the urban. The interdisciplinary exchange addressed the gap in the critical discourses of urban (history) research by broadening the scope on practices and emotions.

The first panel explored dimensions of home-making practices as unfolding public spaces and their connections to emotions, identity and property claims. TIM VERLAAN (Amsterdam) related the concept of home-making to the social conflicts of Dutch urban renewal from the 1950s to the 1970s. With a shared sense of solidarity based upon the rejection of modern technocatic planning ideals and traditional historical rootedness, residents, young architects and members of the urban middle class began to feel a sense of collective ownership. Public activism and emotionalised media narratives of social values in neighbourhood life and communal spaces influenced renewal practices, which led to a shift in local planning culture in the late 1960s.

MARCUS CIORLI (Turin) addressed the emerging demands on public social institutions as spheres of local integration and "low-intense meeting places" through the examination of public libraries in Bologna. He contextualised practices in and as a public urban space while employing both individual and collective approaches to belonging and ownership. From a sociological-ethnographic perspective, he discussed the potential of libraries as an equal alternative of leisure and cultural consumption. At the same time, he stressed its danger of becoming a catalyst of social cohesion, affective place-making of a target group and thus promoting territorial inequalities and structural exclusions.

ABDALLAH ZOUHAIRI (Casablanca) illustrated the function of construction sites both as work and living spaces, especially for male migrant workers on construction sites in Morocco. This temporary appropriation of public spaces functions as both a physical space (free housing, greening as boundary) as well as a symbolic space holding the potential for ethnicity and community building. Here, the temporality of home and strategic home-making stands in contrast to the emotional connection and belonging with spatial and cultural origin.

The second panel addressed practices of experiencing private ownership from different actors' perspectives. KERSTIN BRÜCKWEH (Berlin) presented the property claims of East German dwellers before, during and after the German reunification in 1989/90, with a focus on human-house-relationships. The unexpected political transition resulted in fears concerning the loss of residences that had become home to many through mostly bottom-up and collective practices. Basing her case studies on ruptures in modern German history, she traced the shifts in legal residential ownership beginning in the 1930s. Interfaces between the individual and social understanding of private property on everyday life as well as legal regulations, such as expropriation, compensation or restitution processes mattered. The state's powerlessness after German reunification influenced emotional, social and everyday practices of home-making.

SAMUEL ZIPP (Providence) approached the topic of ownership through the intellectual history concerning the production and institutionalisation of the idea of property. During the 1920s and 1930s in the US, notions that real estate and private home ownership were limited to white middle class men were transformed by urbanisation. Hence, new modes of economic, cultural and political citizenship emerged, which Zipp explained resulted in the evolution of a new model of "selfhood" that correlated with new dynamics distinguishing between private and public as they related to understandings of family, gender, class and race.

The third panel focused on the connections between ownership and everyday practices in claiming urban property in the city, both individually and collectively. By analysing the annual Park(ing) Day event in Australia and North America, where street space is taken back from cars, AMELIA THORPE (Sydney) demonstrated how residents claimed their property. Her argument highlighted that, above all, emotion and play as informal performances of ownership for a day create a sense of ownership, engagement and identity.

KAAN KUBILAY ASAR (Vienna) spoke about shopkeepers as political and economic actors in claiming urban property in Istanbul's Kadıköy district. Dynamics of radical gentrification influenced critical reflections on class and social movement. The paper used inclusion and exclusion practices of shop owners to present negotiation processes related to the sense of belonging and practices of place-making. Both led to new demarcations and intersections of public and private space.

HALIMAT SOMOTAN (Pittsburgh) highlighted practices of landlords and residents that were formed against the slum clearance policy of the British colonial government in Lagos during the independence struggles of the 1950s. Through various forms of protest, the use of bodies and voices was deployed as neighbourhood activism in the debate on future urban development. The paper revealed the “perceived” and “competing” voices, such as external negative slum perceptions and internal ascriptions of home, in the urban negotiation process for the city's image and sense of belonging.

In the fourth panel, the contributions focused on the interplay of practices and property regimes. SARAH BALAKRISHNAN (Minneapolis) illustrated the necropolitics of the British colonial government in late 19th century Ghana. Here, the associated colonial claims to power over land and bodies clashed with local burial and mortuary culture in the struggle of place-making.

DEIRDRE HARSHMAN (Newport) explained the dynamics of the 1918/19 Soviet Revolution on thinking about housing, new spatial politics and urban practices in the context of communist understandings of commons and the “spirit of collectivism” vis-à-vis various claims to power and power hierarchies.

The fifth panel dealt with aspects of shared spaces and collective housing as experimental fields of collective ownership. JENNIFER MACK (Stockholm) compared the implementation of a social housing programme in Stockholm's New Town neighbourhoods, Hallunda and Norsborg, built in the 1970s with similar modernist urban plans. She showed the development of both suburbs up to the present day through the question of material and social ownership, rental and housing rights in the context of regulations of the Swedish government of private and public services.

VALERIA PROCUPEZ (Baltimore) and MARÍA CARLA RODRIGUEZ (Buenos Aires) spoke about processes of organisation and production in low-income housing cooperatives in Buenos Aires. They showed the tensions between collective projects, cooperative ownerships and individual claims for home-ownership of heterogeneous tenant groups and argued that the practices of commoning particular forms of appropriation of socially produced urban spaces shape everyday lives as well as the built city structure.

DANA MAZRAANI and MONA HARB (Beirut) explained how the few public spaces in Beirut are practiced and (re)produced. Going beyond the dichotomy of private and public, they differentiated levels of "outside and inside". In their explanation of gendered, classed, generational dynamics and temporalities they showed new possibilities of practices of proximity and inhabitation, which enable solidarity, shared collective places and senses of belonging.

The interdisciplinary presentations by participants from the USA, Argentina, Europe, Morocco, Ghana and Lebanon to Australia opened up new dimensions on global trends. Thus, neoliberalism and the relationship between private and public property, goods and resources could be understood through a broad range of local examples in the context of national politics and transformation processes related to notions of property, citizenship and inequality. Both the workshop and the conference broadened the understanding of ownership and citizenship as more than a legal status, but as a means of investigating socio-cultural dynamics, such as practices, experiences and emotions, which are an equal and essential part of exploring and claiming the city. Returning to the "who owns the city" discourse and the conceptual assumptions of David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre regarding the "right to the city", the participants questioned power in relation to access private and public spaces and needs of urban citizens. The presentations clarified how and where different groups of actors practically claim and create a sense of ownership and how they define or destabilise boundaries between the "private" and the "collective", "theirs" and "mine". At the same time, it became clear that the questions "what does urban ownership mean?" and "how does private ownership contribute to the social of the city?" cannot be answered easily. Nevertheless, the conference took an important step towards answering these questions by developing new dimensions on how urban citizens perceive the city. In this way, the event counter-argued the still dominant Western understanding of ownership in material, economic and legal categories. At once, the conference and its outcome will contribute to a critical urban history research in general and a stronger overlapping and more differentiated consideration of informal forms and legal entitlements of ownership.

Conference overview:

Panel I: The Right to the City I. Homemaking in Public Spaces
Chair: Joachim C. Häberlen

Tim Verlaan (University of Amsterdam): Domesticity, Collective Ownership, and Emotional Attachment. The Dutch Conflict over Urban Renewal, 1950-1980

Marco Ciorli (University of Turin): Housing the Public and Practicing the Common. Public Libraries Between Boundaries, Justice and Affects

Abdallah Zouhairi (Université Hassan II, Casablanca): Precarious Ownership: Material Practices of Homemaking and the Temporary Habitations of Migrant Construction Workers in Morocco

Panel II: Experiencing Private Ownership. Social and Emotional Practices
Chair: Christiane Reinecke

Kerstin Brückweh (Berliner Hochschule für Technik): Home Sweet Home. Property and Everyday Life in East Germany before, during and after 1989

Samuel Zipp (Brown University, Providence): Expressive Property. Homeownership and the Challenge of Social Selfhood in the Early Twentieth Century United States

Panel III: The Right to the City II. Property and Urban Protest
Chair: Dorothee Brantz

Amelia Thorpe (School of Law, University of New South Wales, Sydney): Property and Play

Kaan Kubilay Asar (Central European University, Vienna): Resisting Privatization, Gentrifying Urban Space? Shopkeepers’ Republican Enclave in Istanbul

T. Halimat Somotan (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh): Resisting Displacement. Neighborhood Activism and the Question of Home in Colonial Lagos

Panel IV: Making Private, Making Public: Dealing with Changing Property Regimes
Chair: Joachim C. Häberlen

Sarah Balakrishnan (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis): Colonial Space-craft, Cemeteries and the Necropolitics of Property in Colonial Ghana

Deirdre Harshman (Christopher Newport University, Newport): The Public and the Private at Home: Delineations of Space in the Early Soviet Apartment Building

Panel V: Experiencing Collective Ownership. Shared Spaces & Collective Housing
Chair: Christiane Reinecke

Jennifer Mack (Kungliga Tekniska högskolan, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden): Twins in the Funhouse Mirror. Owners, Renters, and Suspicion in Two Stockholm Suburbs, 1970s to the Present

Valeria Procupez (John Hopkins University, Baltimore) / María Carla Rodríguez (University of Buenos Aires): Ownership in Common. Collective Projects and Individual Aspirations in Low-Income Housing Cooperatives in Buenos Aires

Dana Mazraani / Mona Harb (American University of Beirut): Inhabiting Urban Fragments. Owning Beirut