ON DECONSTRUCTION, COMPOSITION, AND THE NEGOTIATION OF URBAN SOLIDARITY

LECTURE 

Cities are not fixed structures but shifting constellations shaped by exclusions, hierarchies, and contested spatial orders. Drawing on critical urban theory and relational thought, this lecture examines how urban formations dissolve and reconfigure—how categories of belonging, visibility, and access are not given, but continuously negotiated. Michaela Ott’s concept of dividuation offers a way to think beyond rigid subjectivities, challenging the idea of stable urban actors, while Sara Ahmed’s affect theory helps illuminate how emotions structure spatial inclusion and exclusion. Naika Foroutan’s work on the postmigrant society further challenges the notion of the city as a space of clearly defined identities, instead foregrounding ongoing processes of negotiation and belonging.

Yet dissolution alone does not create new possibilities. Composition follows as a process of assembling—an exploration of temporary, relational arrangements that remain open to change rather than imposing fixed solutions. Echoing Latour’s Reassembling the Social, this approach resists static interpretations of urban space, instead framing it as a shifting network of human and non-human actors. Solidarity, in this context, is not a predefined state but an ongoing negotiation, emerging through the interplay of spatial, material, and affective conditions.

This lecture engages with the city as an evolving field of relations—where forms of coexistence are neither static nor predetermined, but constantly shaped and reshaped in response to the tensions and potentials of the urban landscape.


TH Lübeck — Lecture series “STADT IN DER KRISE” — 21.11.2024






MAIL