Veranstaltungsprogramm

In this talk I will present the results of a revisited study. I compare two sequences of urban social change in Duisburg in order to develop a superordinate model of the ‘process model Duisburg’. In figuration sociological research, such empirically generated process models are developed in order to visualise the mechanisms and functions of a gradual change that is concealed behind the superficial banality of everyday life. The aim is to gain a kind of overview of an extended process that cannot be achieved in any other way.

The first sequence of my Duisburg research covers the years 1996 to 2010. Back then, I observed and analysed ten interaction fields of everyday urban social intergroup life, from which the pattern of a tilting established-outsider figuration emerged. This tilting figuration was responsible for the social polarization of urban society and for the intergroup conflicts that characterised local everyday life. Since 2021 (probably until 2026), I have been researching the same ten local interaction fields again. A new pattern of intergroup relations and local conflicts is currently emerging. The new pattern is based on a refigured and at the same time diversified established-outsider configuration. Although the refigurated established/outsider figuration differs from the older figuration in terms of the composition of the groups involved, it essentially performs the same polarizing function.

In addition to reconstructing and contrasting the two established/outsider figurations, my aim in this lecture is to identify the conflict-sociological mechanisms of the reconfiguration process. My thesis is that the interaction between the integration of former antagonists driven by crisscrossing conflicts (mechanism 1) and the daily updating of the truce (mechanism 2) is currently bringing about a new form of polarisation of intergroup relations in Duisburg urban society – a highly diverse established-outsider figuration.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the rhythms of urban life slowed, paused, or shifted into private space, and much of public life entered a state of suspension. Cleaners, as well as many other essential workers, however, continued to move — unseen, uninterrupted, and more important than ever.

Their temporal experience was often not defined by disruption but by continuity under new pressures, such as intensified schedules and increased risk. In this sense, the pandemic highlighted a striking temporal contradiction and at the same time reinforced existing temporal hierarchies in the city: Who could pause, withdraw, or reflect, and who had to carry on sustaining urban spaces and infrastructure from within its emptied shells. As this temporal privilege was not equally distributed during the pandemic, cleaners were caught in a temporal double bind: declared essential in crisis time yet anchored in the invisible, cyclical routines of pre-crisis normality.

At the same time, the pandemic restructured access to urban space. Public institutions, office buildings, and schools became temporarily inaccessible to many, but not to those tasked with maintaining them. Cleaners entered spaces emptied of their usual users, navigating buildings in unfamiliar temporal settings and under exceptional sanitary regimes. Additionally, homes became semi-public workplaces, as domestic cleaners were invited into increasingly intimate zones. These shifts reveal how the reconfiguration of spatial boundaries was deeply entangled with labor roles. While some were protected by distance, others were expected to cross physical and symbolic thresholds to secure urban life.

This paper explores how time itself became stratified during the COVID-19 crisis and how cleaning labor was shaped by conflicting temporalities: emergency vs routine, public rhythm vs private endurance, and symbolic recognition vs structural repetition. Based on a qualitative interview study with 30 different actors in the cleaning industry in Germany, which was conducted as part of the BMBF-funded project ‘Corona and Care - Care Dynamics in the Pandemic’ (Co-Care), I analyze how workers experienced and navigated these temporal and spatial orders, such as the routinized time of maintenance, the accelerated time of hygiene urgency, and the suspended time of emptied offices and silent streets.

Time-sensitive urbanism, as an emerging form of urbanism, is defined by the range of approaches and sensibilities that acknowledge and explore the underappreciated values of time and temporal qualities. This orientation explores the change in pace of environmental and socio-political crises that subject cities to unsettling or unrelenting forces of change. It also interrogates why we fail to make sense of these pressures so that appropriate or necessary changes to our methodologies of research and practice could be considered and incorporated into our intellectual and practical repertoire responsive and responsible tools. Drawing on interdisciplinary efforts, this contribution aims to respond to the questions of 1) How do temporal structures shape processes of urban change within and across space as well as 2) What methodological implications are raised by deploying a temporal lens to share and reflect on efforts to co-create an edited volume following the Special Session Doing justice to Time-sensitive Urbanism at the 2024 Association of European Schools of Planning Conference. Including considerations for taken-for-granted procedures in research methodology that have prevented the acknowledgement of temporal casing, to efforts to form a new dialectical understanding of controversial time horizons that generate co-opted, concerted or co-produced temporalities when addressing unsettled and settled urban temporalities, to questions of how coud temporal aesthetics and affects be better integrated into urban design, we aim to uncover a common thread on time and temporality as matters for which we care, thereby addressing the temporal dimensions of care commons as social infrastructures of hope, active attention through politics of care, and responsibilities to the futures we collectively shape.

Housing programmes have recently experienced a renaissance in the Global South. Typically, they are framed as social welfare that should improve the lives of insecurely or irregularly housed household. For some housing recipients, accessing new housing and acquiring formal homeowner for the first time in their lives represent a unique, potentially life-changing opportunity they have longed for decades. For others, housing programmes merely represent displacement. They feel forcibly evicted from livelihoods and places of belonging and struggle to re-home at disintegrated and anonymous peripheries. However, these people-centred perspectives are not fixed but interact with the wider temporalities of urban change. Meth et al. (2023) differentiate between two key temporalities; first the experience of actual change over time (pre- and post-relocation), and second perspectives towards the future. Both dimensions offer a useful analytical lens through which we need to advance people-centred analyses of state-subsidized housing programmes.

With regards to “distant landlords” in Addis Ababa who did not (yet) inhabit their allocated housing units in the context of the Integrated Housing and Development Programme (IHDP), I’d like to stress the significance of time-sensitive approaches by advancing the notion of time-lagged displacement. Although many of them rent out their condominiums at the periphery, their experienced (im)possibilities of inhabiting a violently changing Addis Ababa increasingly pressure them to accept displacement towards the peripheries in the future. Some see the condominium as a last resort, struggling to remain emplaced at places of belonging despite recurrent experiences of eviction. Others tend to protract their own resettlement in order to prepare for a life inside their condominium. In both cases, condominium ownership functions like a social protection that is hoped to offer some security for the future. Our biographical perspective may not only add an important time dimension to conceptual dualism such as ‘welfare vs. displacement’, but shows the volatility of urban resettlement beyond Addis Ababa’s condominiums.

In urban development, various actors (e.g. city officials, planners, engineers, citizens and scientists) fabricate the urban future. Modern planning references in terms of climate-neutrality, clean energy transition and sustainability are nearly undiscovered areas with methods and best-practices just recently being discovered and approved. When developing a new urban district within those guidelines, the actors do not only imagine but project those futures while taking their peculiar temporalities into account. On this matter, this contribution presents ethnographic and qualitative data from a longitudinal interdisciplinary research project which was part of the urban development project „Heimat Hafner“ in Konstanz in South Germany. This contribution highlights three main topics with a conversational and interactional focus: first, the findings about the planning practices itself, in which planners shift from the concrete to the unconcrete and imaginative back and forth, while past decisions, present conditions and anticipated future problems are taken into consideration simultaneously to get closer to realizing the project. Second, the practices in which the different temporalities of the urban development measure oscillate between the city and citizens, between the planned and imagined future and between the dwellers and future residents. In participation formats and events on the building area itself, future imaginations and projections address the life that will gradually become impossible there and the transformation into other ways of living or newly designed spaces. The extent to which urban futures are intertwined with e.g. nostalgic retrospections of the past, as well as the past of these places and their reformulatons play a crucial role in projecting the urban future. Third, the methodological implications that come with applying a sociological and ethnographic perspective on temporalities in urban future-making. Discussed will be the challenges in theorising urban temporalities as socially produced as well as the role of sociologists as a „reflexitivity authority“ for urban development itself. With this perspective triangle, the contribution illustrates the interwoven temporalities and their underlying practices in urban future-making based on empirical qualitative data and discusses them in a broader sociological context.

In this paper, I explore how urban residents navigate dark futures in contexts of prolonged uncertainty. Departing from an ethnographic case in a marginalized neighborhood of Murcia (Spain), where an integral urban renewal project was planned two decades ago, but has not started yet, I analyze how residents make sense of this situation marked by infrastructural decay, persistent inaction, and broken promises. My analysis shows the production of coexisting and sometimes conflictual temporal imaginaries of past neglect, urban aspirations and threatful futures. The analysis builds on a twelve month-long ethnographic project that spanned between 2014 and 2017 and included in-depth participant observation, archive research, and 60 semi-structured interviews with residents, property owners, schoolteachers, social workers, activists, and a real estate developer.

Working in the intersection of affect theory and the sociology and anthropology of temporality, I argue that threat is an orientation to the future, which emerges in the form of distinct conditional “what if” logics, when hopeful futures are exhausted and nothing else seems to replace them. I identify three of these distinct vernacular logics of threat: gentrification, further abandonment, and ruination, and show how they are anchored in material cues such as half-built buildings, crumbling façades or broken elevators.

By analyzing how these residents formulate these speculative logics, I show that threat can become a vernacular mode of temporal reasoning, providing an analytical lens for the study of the entangled temporalities of urban transformation.