Urban Planning and ‘Making Kin’: Reflections on Multispecies Environmental Justice in Spatial Planning

Cities did not come from nowhere like spaceships on an alien planet, but grew historically and relationally. This is often forgotten, precisely because they were often conceived and planned in isolation from the environment – an environment, on which they in fact depend in often exploitative and destructive ways. Not least, the climate crisis reminds us of this interdependence and forces us to ask the question of multispecies environmental justice in urban planning. As Sandra Huning argues in her “Kin City” talk, a multiple paradigm shift is needed to address this issue in a meaningful way.

The opening panel of the conference at the “Kin City” festival, moderated by Manuela Zechner, took place on October 17, 2024 at the ZK/U – Center for Arts and Urbanistics. You can listen to the recording by clicking on the play button above.

Sandra Huning talk is based on the following article: https://berlinergazette.de/multispecies-environmental-justice-in-spatial-planning/

More information about the “Kin City” festival: https://berlinergazette.de/projects/kin-city

The City of Milk, Honey, and Other Leftovers

Sari-Sari night: Pepe Dayaw

A short walk in the streets and around every corner you can find old clothes waiting to find their new emperors. There are renegades of the hunter- gatherer, scavenging food from various surplus coffers. There are recycled ghosts that come alive at night, armed with leftover hunger. The nextdoor neighbor harvests honey from her backyard. Milk is cheap and so is the chance for a new tomorrow. And then there is high-quality coconut oil. The city is a lush forest, all you need is love, determination, and a proper visa. In an auto-ethnographic pseudo-report cum variety show of sorts, Pepe Dayaw pays tribute to Berlin – the city that has become their home base for the past eleven years.

Pepe Dayaw’s Sari-Sari night at the “Kin City” festival took place on October 19, 2024 at the ZK/U – Center for Arts and Urbanistics. You can listen to the recording by clicking on the play button above.

More information about the “Kin City” festival: https://berlinergazette.de/projects/kin-city

VWagner City-Edda

Oral storytelling: Cata von Noxen, Sara Petrolova, and Model Y. Schrottkiste

A look from the future to the present. Cata von Noxen, Sara Petrolova and Model Y. Schrottkiste tell and decipher the forgotten “VWagner City-Edda.” How will future generations view all the hesitation and procrastination in the face of today’s climate change? How hopeless will the current situation appear from the perspective of the future? Is the city alive, dead, or even undead? Do we really want to know what the smart city thinks about us? Has everything been gambled away? What happened to the belief in the omnipotence of our own actions?

Cata von Noxen’s, Sara Petrolova’s, and Model Y. Schrottkiste’s oral storytelling at the “Kin City” festival took place on October 18, 2024 at the ZK/U – Center for Arts and Urbanistics. You can listen to the recording by clicking on the play button above.

More information about the “Kin City” festival: https://berlinergazette.de/projects/kin-city

Chuquicamata: Necropolitics and Autopoiesis of a Mining City

Performance lecture and installation: Constanza Mendoza

The Atacama Desert in Chile is marked as a colonial and imperial ‘empty’ space, conquered, occupied, plundered, and polluted for centuries. The first mineral extracted was silver, mined by the Spanish Empire in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. In the 19th century, sodium nitrate was ‘discovered,’ which led to the Pacific War with Bolivia and Peru. Atacama and the nitrate industry ended up under the Chilean flag, but in British hands until the late 1940s, when Germany invented synthetic nitrate. The Great Copper Mine emerged in the late 1940s as an alternative to the crisis in the nitrate industry. US private investment developed the Great Copper Mine in Atacama and the creation of the mining town of Chuquicamata. Constanza Mendoza was born in Chuquicamata in the year that President Salvador Allende nationalized copper mining. Using a multi-scalar approach, the artist relates the history and politics of Chuquicamata to her own family, linking times, spaces, and urban ecologies that have been separated for too long.

Constanza Mendoza’s performance lecture at the “Kin City” festival took place on October 17, 2024 at the ZK/U – Center for Arts and Urbanistics. You can listen to the recording by clicking on the play button above.

More information about the “Kin City” festival: https://berlinergazette.de/projects/kin-city

Climate (In)Justice in the Megacities of the Global South

In the megacities of the Global South, urban inequalities collide with erratic climatic conditions, creating new crises and exacerbating old ones. Megacities in monsoon deltas face climate-related water crises in a variety of ways. This is exacerbated in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, where development policies, haphazard urban planning, rapid urban population growth, and social inequalities reproduce multiple injustices and vulnerabilities at multiple levels and locations. Flooding, waterlogging and water scarcity coexist and pose a serious problem, albeit in a fragmented and unequal manner. As climate change alters hydro-social cycles, a kind of ‘climate class society’ is emerging, as Farhana Sultana shows in her “Kin City” talk. Here, the elite appropriate the city for their own interests, alienating, marginalizing, and essentially displacing up to a third of the urban population.

The eighth panel of the conference, part of the “Kin City” festival, took place on October 17, 2024 as a video stream at ZK/U - Center for Art and Urbanistics and was moderated by Magdalena Taube. You can listen to the recording by clicking the play button above.

Kin Cities in a Settler State – Whose Kin?

When the English settlers began to conquer and colonize Aotearoa to make it New Zealand, they began a process of erasure. They wanted a blank page on which to write their history: the story of thriving cities and tamed nature, populated by creatures that had been imported from their homeland, as had everything else. In her “Kin City” talk, Christine Winter rethinks decolonial urban ecologies from within and against these relations of violence.

The seventh panel of the conference at the “Kin City” festival took place on October 17, 2024 at the ZK/U – Center for Arts and Urbanistics and was moderated by Rose Wanjiku. You can listen to the recording by clicking on the play button above.

Christine Winter’s talk is based on the following article: https://berlinergazette.de/kin-cities-in-a-settler-state-whose-kin

More information about the “Kin City” festival: https://berlinergazette.de/projects/kin-city

Balkans as Mining Colony? Rebooting Urban Eco-Struggles

ZBOR (Združeni Balkanski Otpor i Rad) is a word with many layers of meaning for the people of the former Yugoslav countries. Most simply, it means gathering or assembly, and as such it is known in villages throughout the region. However, the Climate Justice and Just Transition Initiative ZBOR specifically evokes the meaning(s) from the days of Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist revolutionary liberation movement and socialist years, when ZBOR was the fundamental institution of direct democracy and self-management. ZBOR was a vital everyday democratic practice in every factory, organization, apartment block, school, workplace. ZBOR is a place and time where anything can happen. Today, the word is often reduced to the meaning of chorus, but the ZBOR initiative embraces this contemporary usage as well – as one of its main goals is to gather the voices of the many for our common world and time.

In their “Kin City” talk, the participants of the ZBOR initiative spoke about the founding of their initiative at the BG conference “Allied Grounds” (2023) and the first larger gathering they organized in the summer of 2024, bringing together many urban folks in a designated mining area in rural Bosnia and Herzegovina, and finally discussed their concerns, demands, and ideas for future action.

The sixth panel of the conference at the “Kin City” festival took place on October 17, 2024 at the ZK/U – Center for Arts and Urbanistics. You can listen to the recording by clicking on the play button above.

More information about the “Kin City” festival: https://berlinergazette.de/projects/kin-city

Urban Environmentalism in Sarajevo: Limits and Possibilities

Subjecting all livelihoods to capitalist appropriation does not simply mean robbing ‘us’ of what belongs to ‘us.’ It means depriving ‘the people’ of common resources, that is, ‘our’ infrastructure of life (air, climate, health care, education, public space, etc.) and thus preventing ‘us’ from organizing human and other-than-human life in a democratic and sustainable way, Svjetlana Nedimović argues in her “Kin City” talk, zooming in on struggles in Sarajevo for social, spatial, and environmental justice.

The fifth panel of the conference at the “Kin City” festival, moderated by Iskra Krstić, took place on October 17, 2024 at the ZK/U – Center for Arts and Urbanistics. You can listen to the recording by clicking on the play button above.

Svjetlana Nedimović’s talk is based on the following article: https://berlinergazette.de/urban-ecologies-in-sarajevo

More information about the “Kin City” festival: https://berlinergazette.de/projects/kin-city

Towards an Eco-Feminist Urban Metabolism: Turning Shopping Malls into Care Centers

Today, we are challenged to combine anti-capitalist approaches with eco-feminist approaches to enable the development of the caring city we so desperately need on this deeply troubled planet. A collective political consciousness (and thus a unifying class politics) could emerge if those of us in struggle (1) reclaimed the infrastructure of human life, including collective public systems such as mass transit, along with food and healthcare and affordable housing; (2) appropriated the ruins left by capital for post-capitalist and eco-feminist purposes (e.g., by converting shopping malls into care centers); and (3) understood this process as the basis and expression of new forms of social coexistence and politics, indeed an urban politics from below that can simultaneously develop a sense of kinship with other-than-human life and thus drive a truly sustainable urban metabolism. In their “Kin City” talk, Paula Mikat and Cléo Mieulet zoom in on a specific case in Berlin: the Sorge ins ParkCenter initiative, which is working on the socialization of a shopping mall and its transformation into a care center.

The third panel of the conference at the “Kin City” festival took place on October 17, 2024 at the ZK/U – Center for Arts and Urbanistics. You can listen to the recording by clicking on the play button above.

“Capitalism, Marginalized Communities, and Environmental (In)Justice in Berlin”

Environmental stressors, such as air and noise pollution or lack of green space, disproportionately affect marginalized communities and worsen mental and physical health outcomes. These stressors do not exist in isolation. They are products of systemic inequalities embedded in capitalist social relations. Drawing on research in Berlin’s inner-city neighborhoods, Debora Darabi’s “Kin City” talk discusses how poverty, environmental injustice, and public health crises intersect, challenging us to rethink the social structures that shape these phenomena. Ellen Gomes responds by drawing attention to racialization as a key principle in organizing social relations under capitalism and producing environmental injustice in Berlin.

The third panel of the conference at the “Kin City” festival, moderated by Ela Kagel, took place on October 17, 2024 at the ZK/U – Center for Arts and Urbanistics. You can listen to the recording by clicking on the play button above.

Debora Darabi’s talk is based on the following article: https://berlinergazette.de/capitalism-climate-and-class-understanding-the-social-roots-of-urban-environmental-injustice/

More information about the “Kin City” festival: https://berlinergazette.de/projects/kin-city