[Image Copyright: Xinyu Guan]
From May to September 2016, I conducted research into the 1973-84 Steilshoop Project in Hamburg, Germany, for my Master’s dissertation in Urban Studies at University College London. I contacted and interviewed seven former residents of the building, and I also consulted archival material at the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg and the Staatsarchiv Hamburg. The following is the abstract of the final dissertation write-up:
“This dissertation is about a 1973-1984 communal housing project in Hamburg, Germany. The Steilshoop Project was an experiment in constructing state-funded social housing with the participation of the residents in planning the space. With the idea of combatting social fragmentation, the Project also featured multi-family units where families and/or single people could live together; various socially-marginalised groups, such as single mothers, families in debt and ex-convicts, also lived in the Project. Nevertheless, the Project eventually failed in a decade, because of the high turnover rate of residents and its inability to pay the stipulated rent.
In this dissertation, I try to situate the Steilshoop Project along two lines of thinking about a communal housing architecture that is not confined to its physical boundaries, but which rather seeks to work on the larger society in a revolutionary way. One is the social condenser of Moisei Ginzburg and the Soviet constructivist architects; the other is Ricardo Bofill’s City in Space in late-Francoist Spain.
From archival research and interviews with former Project residents, I construct a history of the Steilshoop Project in relation to the two lines of thinking outlined above. The Steilshoop Project shows how the City in Space and other user-participatory housing projects need to consider the politics of inclusion and exclusion, should they wish to have a greater social impact, on the level of the urban. On the other hand, the Steilshoop Project, as a social condenser, may have intensified and brought to light the many social contradictions of 1970s and 1980s West Germany, but more often than not, it has rather distorted and ‘refracted’ (Humphrey 2005, 43) these contradictions in different ways.”
This project has been selected for presentation at the 6th Student Conference of the Georg Simmel Center at the Humboldt University of Berlin, January 2017 (although I will not be able to attend due to the lack of travel funding). Please contact me via the contact form below for more information regarding this project:
The New Bjork Times 