A concrete utopia emerges from a specific moment and examines conditions under which the future can become different, fairer. The crisis caused by global warming, the crisis of care work and the profit orientation in housing, exacerbated by the market-liberal policy of financialisation - all of this together forms a moment of changing conditions, openings and closures of opportunities.
However, a real possible change in society is always also related to historical conditions. Attention is also paid to militant movements of the past. What are the housing policy aspects of the New Frankfurt that still have an impact today or that need to be brought back to light? And what is the legacy of the housing and urban concepts of Red Vienna? Gabu Heindl approaches the social-democratic and at the same time revolutionary politics of the time in these cities (in the sense of Jacques Derrida) critically inheriting, filtering, actualising one rather than the other. In order to reflect today's gender, power and property relations.
Prof. Dr. Gabu Heindl is Professor and Head of the Department of Construction and Project Development | ARCHITEKTUR STADT ÖKONOMIE at the University of Kassel. Current research project: ‘A Room of Her* Own. Gender Wealth Gap and (residential) property’ (with Nina Manz). Gabu Heindl has worked as a professor of urban planning at the TH Nuremberg, at the AA London and as a visiting professor at Sheffield University with a research focus on urban commons. She is co-editor of Building Critique. Architecture and its Discontents, Leipzig 2019 and author of the multi-published book Stadtkonflikte. Radikale Demokratie in Architektur und Stadtplanung, Vienna 2020 (2022). Her office in Vienna GABU Heindl Architektur focuses on public space, public buildings, affordable housing and collaborations in the fields of historical politics, exhibition architecture and independent critical-artistic practice. Current book, together with Drehli Robnik: Nonsolution: Zur Politik der aktiven Nichtlösung im Planen und Bauen (2024).
