Concept

The Research Training Group ‘Societal Transformation and Spatial Materialization of Housing’ offers 12 PhD fellows and up to 8 associated candidates a structured 3.5-year doctoral study program.

Over an initial period of five years (2024-2029), the fellows will be divided into two cohorts (from 2024 and 2027) and will participate in interdisciplinary research discourses on critical housing research at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/Main.

In addition, a postdoctoral researcher heads the transdisciplinary housing laboratory, which is based at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Conceived as a long-term research infrastructure, the housing laboratory aims to research and actively shape the social transformation and spatial materialization of housing through civil society interventions and political, economic or structural experiments.

The Research Training Group focuses on housing regimes of different types in Europe against the background of the questions raised, research trends and fields of work. It brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers who are interdisciplinary linked by their research-related examination of housing. At the same time, the 13 involved researchers look at housing from the perspective of social change or its spatial materialization, each from a different point of view.

The faculties of architecture, European urban planning history, geographic urban research, human geography, human-computer interaction, infrastructure economics and management, art history, landscape architecture and planning, sociology and urban planning are represented in the college.

At the same time, the members of the Research Training Group act as supervisors for the doctoral candidates of the Research Training Group.

The scientific coordination and administrative organization of the Research Training Group is the responsibility of the spokespersons and the scientific coordinator. Important decisions are made by the steering committee, which includes representatives of all status groups involved in the program.

A special feature of the Research Training Group is its networking with academic and practice-oriented cooperation partners in Germany and abroad. Two international Mercator Fellows are long-term members of the Centre. Through close cooperation with non-university partners, the Research Training Group enters into direct dialog with those who shape and reflect on housing provision in practice.