"Who owns the street? Urban negotiations about the uses of space in the context of the 'Verkehrswende'" (DFG, 2023-2028)
The project makes a first contribution, grounded in cultural anthropology, to the understanding of the "Verkehrswende" as a multiformly negotiated and objectified transformation process in urban contexts. Taking the city of Munich as an example, the project, which is situated between urban anthropology, sociological discourse analysis, empirical futurology, and sociological-geographical mobility research, explores (1) how, against the background of multidimensional knowledge orders, competing conceptions of reality and the future of urban mobility and space usage are produced, transformed, performed and materialized in heterogeneous, interacting fields of practice; in other words, how different groups of actors (re-)produce argumentative strategies according to specific rules and how they express them in political programs, mission statements, material-based infrastructures, etc. (2) Secondly, the project asks about current developments of urban spaces and streets as dynamic, socially constructed materializations and as presuppositional framings of past, present, and future negotiation processes. (3) Thirdly, it examines the meaning- and action-generating functions of sociomaterial constellations (as heterogeneous networks of actors, practices, material-based infrastructures, and moral orders) that (re-)produce, challenge, transform, and objectify competing conceptions of reality and the future of urban mobility and space usage, and that are thus instrumental in the production and transformation of social knowledge. The project also investigates how these arrangements, infused with affordances, favor and/or constrain changes of (mobility-related) everyday practices and motivations and how they are in turn transformed by these.
From a methodological-conceptual point of view, the project aims at bringing together process-oriented (urban) anthropological approaches with the analytical tools of discourse theory in order to further develop a differentiated methodology of "studying through". It develops ways of showing how knowledge orders can be analyzed in their transmission through different (power) levels and fields of practice; how they are produced and objectified through sociomaterial networks of actions, measures, architectures, infrastructures, performances, subjectifications, etc.; and how the nature of these transforming networks themselves feed back into multidimensional knowledge orders.
By making visible competing constructions of needs and futures, the project experiments with future-shaping possibilities of social research and contributes to a reflexive knowledge transfer between science, politics, and the (increasingly polarized) public.
Publications
- Becker, Alina/ Schwab, Christiane (in press): Experimentation, vision, process or coercion? – Negotiating the future in the context of urban street experiments. [Original: Erprobung, Vision, Prozess oder Zwang? – Zukunftsaushandlungen im Rahmen urbaner Straßenexperimente] In: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde.
- Becker, Alina/ Schwab, Christiane (2023): Discourse-analytical approaches to urban negotiation processes around mobility and the use of space. [Original: "Münchner Straßenkampf". Diskursanalytische Annäherungen an urbane Aushandlungsprozesse um Mobilität und Raumnutzung.] In: Bayerisches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde, pp. 83-97.
Lectures
- Becker, Alina: Contested street space. An anthropological perspective on street experiments in Munich. Lecture at the conference of the Royal Geographical Society, 27-30 August 2024, London.
- Becker, Alina: Parking spaces, trees & children playing: Anthropological insights into conflicts that arise from urban transformations in Munich. Lecture at the conference of the International Doctoral Programme Transformations in European Societies, 18-21 March 2024, Munich.
- Becker, Alina: Urban conflicts over mobility and the use of space. Presentation at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation doctoral conference, 5–7 February 2024, Bonn.
- Becker, Alina/ Schwab, Christiane: Urban negotiations around mobility and space usage in the context of the mobility transition as a process of social transformation. [Original: Urbane Konflikte um Mobilität und Raumnutzung im Kontext der "Verkehrswende" als gesellschaftlicher Transformationsprozess] Presentation in the panel 'When Knowledges meet – Environmental knowledge between natural sciences and everyday life' at the conference of the German Society for Social and Cultural Anthropology (DGSKA), 25–28 July 2023, Munich.
Events
- Interdisciplinary conference 'Cities in motion: Negotiating mobility and (living) space' [Original: Stadt in Bewegung: Aushandlungen von Mobilität und (Lebens-)Raum] on 27 November 2025 at the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation, Munich.
- Research colloquium 'Urban conflicts over space usage and mobility in the context of the mobility transition' [Original: Urbane Konflikte um Raumnutzung und Mobilität im Kontext der "Verkehrswende"] in the winter term 2023/2024.
- Student research project "Summer street, sidewalk café, cargo bike, SUV. Urban conflicts over space usage and mobility" [Original: Sommerstraße, Schanigarten, Lastenfahrrad, SUV. Urbane Konflikte um Raumnutzung und Mobilität im Kontext der "Verkehrswende"] in the summer term 2023 and winter term 2023/2024.
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