Читать книгу Housing in the Margins - Hanna Hilbrandt - Страница 12

As with other sensitive issues, researching informality is fraught with methodological, practical, and ethical challenges that require critical scrutiny (cf. Auerbach et al., 2018: 263). The methodological challenge lies in accounting for multiple perspectives and levels of investigation: urban order is enacted through the embodied and situated practices of all concerned, but it is also mediated through institutions, codes, laws, and regulations. My investigation starts from the former; I center this inquiry on the level of situated practices – i.e. place-specific, day-to-day interactions. Yet I explore these in relation to the frameworks of order in which they are embedded by adapting Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography to the context of urban studies (1990, 1999, 2005). This feminist approach is committed to focus social research on people’s everyday lives, and to ground this inquiry in the discursive, institutionalized, or legal relationships within which their practices are embedded. Through this perspective, Smith argues, the study of everyday life can account for the “ruling relations” – relations that enter into and organize social life through unobservable facts that are mediated through replicable texts, discourses, plans, laws, and the like (1990: 6; see Billo and Mountz, 2016 for a geographical perspective on institutional ethnography).

To hold these perspectives in tension requires a mix of approaches. The study combines three data sets: qualitative interviews with bureaucrats and allotment gardeners, ethnographic explorations of the research sites, and textual sources, including statutory texts, the documentation of legal cases, newspaper reports, and archival data. To collect the first set of data, I conducted interviews between July and November 2013 as well as between April and July 2014 and returned to the gardens to update, expand, and refocus this material in April and May 2019. My interviewees included city officials in the Senate Department for Urban Development, the so-called allotment garden administrators [Kleingarten Sachbearbeiter*innen], who are administrators at the district level, allotment holders with administrative responsibilities, and residents in the allotments. Across these four groups, I conducted a total of 41 “formal” interviews and an uncounted list of shorter spontaneous interviews “across the fence,” as it were.

Access to city officials or functionaries in the allotment association proved to be unproblematic once I had learned that most practitioners already possessed intimate knowledge of the dwelling practices in Berlin’s colonies. Not surprisingly, finding allotment holders who permanently lived in their huts was more complicated, and only a mix of strategies allowed me to recruit interview participants. I ended up searching for participants via postcards that I distributed on walks through the colonies; through the gardening associations, which established contact with gardeners they knew were living in the colonies; and while strolling through the gardens, talking about the topic in public, or mentioning my search to friends.

Second, I complemented the interview material with ethnographic observations in order to gain a better understanding of the lived experience of allotment holders. Within the framework of institutional ethnography, my use of ethnographic observations aimed at explicating how institutional frameworks are felt, produced, and contested within and beyond institutional spaces in the everyday (Diamond, 2006; Billo and Mountz, 2016: 7). I aimed to observe the spatialities and social patterns of interaction as well as the material solutions that gardeners find to adapt their huts in response to regulatory efforts. As it is difficult, if not impossible, to “hang out” in the rather private allotments, because the grid structure of the colonies does not tend to provide spaces for the sojourn of external visitors, a good way to enter into the intimacy of the gardens was to walk through the colonies. In practice, my ethnographic data collection thus took the form of observational strolls and a series of perpetual encounters that these walks facilitated. This part of my strategy is akin to what Streule (2018: 27–41, 2019) and others (Lee and Ingold, 2006) have described as a mobile ethnography – an approach that captures the materiality, geography, and symbolic representation of a field site through walking. These visits allowed me to establish an overview of the phenomena, facilitated a number of informal chats with the gardeners I encountered, and triggered questions for my interviews. They also provided a means to register the materiality of the buildings and the infrastructures in the colonies, as well as their spatial layout.

In order to further immerse myself in the colonies, I eventually decided to lease an allotment garden and became a member of an association. Although I never ended up living in an allotment, despite my original plan to do so, this strategy of membership still proved to be a fruitful way to gain access to information. Most importantly, the “hunt” for the right hut provided me with an opportunity to get in contact with gardeners, to learn necessary tricks for remaining under the radar, and to get an inside glimpse into the lived experience of allotment dwelling. In my quest for a garden, I struggled to combine the role of a fellow gardener with that of an investigator. Although I was initially worried that any reference to the study would prevent my gaining access to an allotment plot, I nevertheless decided to introduce my role as a researcher, as well as the theme of my project, whenever the opportunity arose. Mentioning my research not only seemed more ethical but also triggered further chats about dwelling practices in the colonies.

It may be difficult to get to the mechanisms through which regulations are understood and put to work “on the ground” through surveying documents, such as laws, contracts, or reports, but the question of urban order is not one that could be answered without these accounts. To understand how spatial order is shaped through these documents, they make up the third set of data in this study. As institutional ethnography is concerned with the ways in which sequences of text coordinate “relations of ruling” (Smith, 1990: 6), this method of investigation is particularly well placed to frame an analysis of documents. Broadly speaking, I concentrated this analysis on two more or less active modalities through which textual discourse shapes socio-spatial relations.⁶ On the one hand, I followed a linguistic approach (Dittmer, 2010) to grasp the ways in which documents influence spatial order through the understandings that are embedded in text. On the other hand, I pursued a more contextual approach in order to analyze documents with regard to the ways in which they enter into public life, circulate through different social spheres, and interact with local practices.

Geographically, the primary data collection focused on multiple allotment compounds in four Berlin districts: Pankow, Neukölln, Reinickendorf, and Treptow. I do not explicitly compare the colonies in these districts. The selection aimed to cover a wide variety of colonies across a range of regimes of regulation (with varying degrees of laxity) and locations in the city (across the different historical and legal contexts of the former East and West Berlin). Furthermore, the project is designed as a multi-sited study due to an ethical concern with anonymity, i.e. in order not to compromise specific colonies. To publish on the specificity of one colony or the colonies in one district would have allowed for identifying particular sites and calling individual gardeners or associations into account. When considering particular colonies, I refer to them anonymously. Similarly, I pseudonymized all personal data to ensure the anonymity of my participants.

This book continues across seven further chapters, structured as follows: Chapter 2 presents the book’s theoretical perspective. Chapter 3 discusses the shifting political and normative placement of allotment dwelling over a century of allotment governance from a historical perspective. To follow the tracing of these larger political shifts, Chapter 4 turns to the contemporary housing question to explore how and why gardeners take up residence within allotment huts. The subsequent empirical chapters then discuss small-scale negotiations and their wider effects from three perspectives. Chapter 5 considers the negotiation of allotment dwelling in its spatial and material dimensions. Chapter 6 analyses the gardens’ temporary or permanent occupancy as a question of governance. Chapter 7 focuses the discussion of negotiability on the legal work upon which practices of governance rely. Finally, Chapter 8 concludes by revisiting the book’s key themes.