People/Associated Members

Erik Schmidt

  • TU Dresden, the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (IOER)

Short Bio

  • Since 2025: Doctoral researcher at TU Dresden and the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (IOER); doctoral scholarship holder at IOER and Fellow of the Dresden Leibniz Graduate School
  • Since 2024: Lecturer at the Institute of Geography, TU Dresden
  • 2020–2024: Studies in Political Science at Leipzig University
  • 2015–2020: Studies in Political Science and Philosophy at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU)

Research Interests

  • Political theory: Materialist theories of the state and law; spatial theory
  • Urban and housing studies: Housing policy; the political economy and ecology of housing; urban security production
  • Border regime studies: Human rights; asylum regimes

Current Projects

The Hegemonic Crisis of the German Housing Regime: Conflicts and Coalitions around the State, Nature, and Technology in Emerging Spaces of Transformation.

On the one hand, I examine how the social hegemony of fossil capital and neoliberal housing policy has become embedded in the spatial structures of the German housing regime, thereby obstructing a post-neoliberal and post-fossil transformation. On the other hand, I analyse how contested transformation processes are reshaping the spatial configuration of the German housing regime, as well as the political strategies, material interests, and power relations underlying these spatial reconfigurations.

A central premise of the research project is that the German housing regime is undergoing a crisis of hegemony. This crisis is creating new spaces of transformation in which the future of housing is being contested.