WHERE AND WHEN? Mildmay, Islington, London, UK. From 2018. Involvement in the Comensi project. WHAT’S GOING ON? Mildmay has recently become a preferential target for real estate investment, and it has seen a rapid increase in the number of affluent peope decidig to move in the ward. The new inbalance between housing supply and demand has broght […]
Forgotten for almost a decade, the complex of buildings that once constituted the offices for the administration of statistics under the old socialist regime came to the center of the public discourse as a symbol of an across-the-board struggle for the right to the city of Berlin. Civic society actors and public stakeholders joined their efforts to put the unconditional selling of publicly-owned buildings to a halt, stressing the need to replace the monetary principle with the pursuing of the societal common good. The professionalization of bottom-up forms of activism claiming space for culture and diversity transformed the Haus der Statistik initiative into a large-scale project. This currently aims at regenerating the buildings to benefit local neighborhoods, refugees and cultural producers alike through the implementation of participatory practices of urban development.