Teaching

Project / Helena Cermeño / Details on HisPos

In the face of a global housing crisis exacerbated by market-oriented policies that treat housing primarily as a commodity, innovative and community-oriented alternatives are gaining traction. This introductory project takes a critical look at models of community housing - including cooperatives, co-housing, community land trusts (CLTs) and self-organized initiatives, from building communities with communal spaces to co-living communities with a shared economy - and considers them as possible answers to the pressing challenges of housing affordability, social inclusion and sustainability. A central element of these projects are residents' communities that work for the common good in order to remove land from the speculative market and secure affordable housing in the long term. Nevertheless, research and knowledge exchange in this area remains fragmented despite the growing relevance of communal living models worldwide.

Through a structured, project-based learning approach, students will engage in a comparative analysis of community-oriented housing projects in different geographical, social and political contexts. They will apply basic planning methodologies, explore strategic and spatial planning tools, and develop policy-oriented solutions to improve the effectiveness and scalability of community projects. In addition, this introductory project will be linked to the Kassel SDG+ Lab to align with global sustainability goals and foster interdisciplinary collaboration. As part of the SDG+ Lab 's ongoing Community Housing Challenge, students will investigate how community projects deal with institutional frameworks, governance structures and participatory processes, addressing structural tensions, collaboration mechanisms and regulatory challenges. The project concludes with a student-led research synthesis that combines visual mapping, different representation techniques and policy recommendations to inform and advance the discussion on a future roadmap for collaborative housing projects in Kassel. Based on the collaborative housing group anchored in the SDG+ Lab, the students' work is intended to produce outputs that can contribute to the creation of a municipal support structure for collaborative housing in the long term - comparable to the housing advice centers in Frankfurt, Marburg or Göttingen. The aim of this initiative is to support the realization of such community projects, to strengthen their feasibility, scalability and long-term sustainability and to establish Kassel as a model for sustainable neighbourhood development and community living in Hesse.

At the end of the introductory project, students will have acquired practical skills in the areas of team-oriented research, spatial analysis and visual representation. They will also have acquired a basic understanding of planning methods and political frameworks in the field of community living. This enables them to critically evaluate housing models, develop context-specific planning strategies and deal with the topics of housing affordability, social inclusion and sustainability in a well-founded manner.

Lecture / Carsten Keller and Moritz Merten / Details on HisPos

The aim is to introduce students to basic methods of qualitative and quantitative social research and to apply them to spatial research questions. Students should acquire the ability to develop a scientific question and implement it independently in a suitable empirical research design. In particular, the following content should be taught:

• Basic concepts of empirical social research as well as urban and regional research
• Conception of a research process: development of a research question, choice of methods, implementation and evaluation
• Qualitative and quantitative survey methods: qualitative interview, focus groups, (non-)participant observation, standardized survey
• Methods of (software-supported) qualitative and quantitative data analysis
• Use of existing quantitative and qualitative data sets

Seminar / Carsten Keller / Details on HisPos

Further information will follow.

Carsten Keller / Details on HisPos

The colloquium is intended to give students the opportunity to present their own theses and/or to gain an insight into the processes of academic work (e.g. by discussing texts). It is open to Bachelor's, Master's and doctoral students, provided that they are interested in academic work, discursive exchange and the reflection of research work with regard to its relevance to urban and regional sociology.