Crit­i­cal Map­ping for Mu­nic­i­pal­ist Mo­bi­liza­tion

CMMM is a pro­ject that ac­com­pa­nied and was ori­ented by the pri­or­i­ties of mu­nic­i­pal­ist ac­tivists in Bel­grade, Berlin, and Barcelona. Span­ning over 3.5 years from 2019 to 2023, it cap­tured and sup­ported the ef­forts of the Min­istry of Space col­lec­tive, AKS Gemein­wohl, Häuser Be­we­gen GIMA eG., Kollek­tiv Raum­sta­tion, and Ob­ser­va­tori DESC to change the po­lit­i­cal par­a­digms shap­ing the con­tem­po­rary hous­ing emer­gency in the three cities. 

Co­or­di­nated by K LAB (TU Berlin) and sup­ported by the Robert Bosch Stiftung, the CMMM team em­ployed var­i­ous for­mats of crit­i­cal map­ping to dis­play the leg­is­la­tions, poli­cies, events, hi­er­ar­chies, as well as the main ac­tors and fac­tors that are shap­ing the hous­ing cri­sis. Next to se­lected ex­am­ples of how crit­i­cal map­ping has been ap­plied by peers and artists in the three cities, this book scripts the process through which our team cre­ated three in­ter­ac­tive maps “How (un)af­ford­able is hous­ing in Bel­grade?”, “Who buys Berlin?”, and “Stop Evic­tions!” for Barcelona, which can be ex­plored on the pro­ject’s web­site: cmmm.​eu. 

CMMM‘s out­puts in­tend to sup­port ex­ist­ing and fu­ture mu­nic­i­pal­ist ac­tivists and col­lec­tives push­ing to cre­ate pol­icy al­ter­na­tives that in­te­grate the “hous­ing as a right” prin­ci­ple. We hope that our work in­spires ac­tivists and en­gaged pro­fes­sion­als to em­ploy crit­i­cal map­ping in their en­deav­ors to in­form and nudge pub­lic opin­ion, to­wards ad­vanc­ing de­mands for jus­tice in the urban and be­yond.