Speaker: Joanna Kusiak, Junior Research Fellow in Urban Studies at King’s College

Bio: Dr Joanna Kusiak is a scholar-activist who works at the University of Cambridge. Born in Poland, she has been shaped by the emancipatory tradition of the Solidarność movement and by the brutality of the neoliberal transformation. Her work focuses on urban land, housing crises, and the progressive potential of law. In 2021 she was one of the spokespeople of Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen, Berlin’s successful referendum campaign to expropriate stock-listed landlords. She is the winner of the 2023 Nine Dots Prize for ’thinking about the box’ about contemporary social challenges. Her winning book ‘Radically Legal: Berlin Constitutes the Future’ will appear in May 2023 in Cambridge University Press.

Do we need a revolution to save our cities from the rampant housing crisis? Yes – but this revolution is powered by the law. Right in the middle of the German constitution, a group of ordinary citizen discovers a forgotten clause that allows them to take 240.000 homes back from multi-billion corporations. My talk describes the story of a grassroots movement that convinced one million Berliners to pop the speculative housing bubble a design a new institutional model for managing urban housing.

For more about the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group see:

https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/researchfaculty-centres-networks-and-groups/cambridge-socio-legal-group