Historical urban and spatial research

The Research Group is positioned at the intersection of general contemporary history as well as urban, planning and architectural history. It focuses on maps in various forms as tools of analysis and visualisation. Projects in the field of urban and urbanisation history, which were started under the leadership of Christoph Bernhardt, are currently being continued. These include the integrated analysis of social and planning history processes in both German states in their Western and East Central European contexts as well as the history of interdependence during the global Cold War.

The temporal extension to the transformation period and the inclusion of digital history and participatory, co-creative citizen science approaches form a point of overlap with new topics of the research group headed by Kerstin Brückweh and at the same time a connection with the research infrastructure group "Digital History/Scientific Collections". A new focus for the Research Group is the history of housing and land ownership, which places land as a contested, scarce resource at the centre of attention. In addition, various living spaces and forms of housing form the centre of interest. The main focus here is on the detached house in the suburbs, the villa neighbourhood in the long 20th century, but also the history of the large housing estate. In this way, different social spaces and their effects on the inequality of society are analysed. Further projects are currently being developed under the heading "Work on existing buildings: care/repair and scarce resources relating to building and housing in the past and present".