– Design Practices Between Care, Allyship, and the Fight for the Right to the City
The neighborhood and tenants’ association Kotti & Co, founded in 2011, is shaped by its many members from migrant communities, and is considered the cradle of a new movement called “Stadt von unten” [city from below], which centers on tenants’ rights. Kotti & Co’s activist practice derives from the idea of caring for the urban environment and defending the right to housing for the inhabitants at Kottbusser Tor square (affectionately called “Kotti” by locals), in Berlin’s Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district, who often face multiple kinds of marginalization simultaneously. Today, Kotti & Co plays an important role in urban policy discourse and the struggle for the socially minded and democratic provisioning of housing and against displacement and racism in the city. Tashy Endres (an active member of Kotti & Co from 2012 to 2017) and Sandy Kaltenborn (cofounder of Kotti & Co) reflect on twelve years of activism and on the group’s protest strategies from a political, spatial, and design point of view. They also discuss the emancipatory potential of the underlying processes driving the formation of collectives and knowledge, while also critically addressing the role of institutions and professions in the project of comprehensive social transformation.
