Martha Ingund Wegewitz

Memories of Marginalized Spaces. The Meaning of Loss and the Lost in a Dematerialized Perception of Space by Homeless People in Berlin (working title).

The housing crisis in urban spaces has been a pressing issue for years, and has become even more apparent in the context of the Corona pandemic and the concomitant need to stay and work in one’s own home. Driven by an ever-increasing capitalization of the housing market, a precariousness of wage labor relations, and the neoliberalization of social policies, the number of those affected by homelessness and houselessness in Berlin and other cities is rising ceaselessly. At the same time, the pressure on public spaces is increasing due to progressive privatization and commercialization. All people affected by homelessness have in common that they are exposed to the public – the impossibility to withdraw into the personal shelter of their own space. Homeless people are dependent on carrying out their essential living activities, which otherwise take place in private, precariously and temporarily in public space. The constitution of space associated with this is an ephemeral one. Spaces of homeless people are created through an appropriative use of spatial niches. Due to repression, techniques of exclusion or the discontinuity that determines everyday life, they are made inaccessible, are destroyed or can disappear. Since the temporary processes of appropriation leave no or only few traces and do not allow for a permanent design or materialization of their own, loss and lostness are constitutive for the (spatial) memories of homeless people.

The PhD project links the research on homelessness and the constitution of space with critical discourses around marginalized perspectives in identity and heritage. Homelessness as an occasion for marginalizing perspectives and memories is particularly worth pursuing because intersectional contexts agglomerate in this phenomenon. Despite its spatial ephemerality, it is a phenomenon that exposes social injustices in urban spaces. On the one hand in dealing with the individual perspectives, (spatial) memories and identity constructions of homeless people the focus is on the subjects and the effects that violence and recurring loss of necessary places and objects have on them. On the other hand, in the consideration of the exclusion of marginalized perspectives from collective identity constructions and the examination of the emergence of selective cultures of memory, reference is made to a societal level.

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Publications (Selection)

Köpper, Julia; Wegewitz, Martha; Pelger, Dagmar (2022): fem*MAP Berlin 2049: Feminist spatial systems for a non-sexist city. In: Cidades, Comunidades e Territórios, Autumn Special Issue: Action! Feminisms and the spatialization of resistances (Oct/2022), 45-65.

Köpper, Julia; Wegewitz, Martha; Pelger, Dagmar; Stollmann, Jörg (Hg.) (2021): fem*MAP BERLIN. Feminist spatial systems for a non-sexist city. CUD Work Reports No. 1. Berlin: Technische Universität Berlin.

Roberta, Burghardt; Barthel, Bettina; Coelho, Pedro; Tajeri, Niloufar; Pelger, Dagmar; Rochlitzer, Lisa; Rosenthal, Caroline; Teske, Tilmann; Wegewitz, Martha (2018): Study Gemeinwohl entwickeln: Kooperativ und Langfristig!. Berlin: Bezirksamt Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg.

Lectures (Selection)

A feminist perspective for Berlin today! What could a non-sexist city look like?. V International Congress Architecture and Gender | ACTION. Feminisms and the spatialization of resistances. 04/2021. with Julia Köpper and Dagmar Pelger.

Die Arbeits- und Koordinierungsstruktur für gemeinwohlorientierte Stadtentwicklung. Raumkonferenz zur Zukunft unserer Städte. Dresden. 06/2019.

Moderation of one Hands-on Workshop Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt – in der Welt. Conference of the SFB 1265 Re-Figuration of Space: Mapping as a Joint Spatial Display. HKW Berlin. 11/2018. with Séverine Marguin and Dagmar Pelger

Mapping Spatial Commons: An investigative Method for understanding the preconditions for collectively coordinated spatial (re-)production. Symposium Urban Studies in Education and Research. TU Dresden. 10/2018. with Paul Klever and Steffen Klotz