#talktime

Change and the City

How to understand cities? Anna Steigemann, Professor for Sociological Dimensions of Space at the University of Regensburg, explores them by walking through streets, talking to passers-by, observing how migrants, queer communities, and people without housing live, how they create new spaces or change existing neighborhoods. Her approaches are actor and practice based. She also researches critically participation. "One of my strengths is that I feel social change and urban transformation very quickly," she says.

As a result, the scholar is no longer satisfied to simply observe cities. She prefers action research, combining basic and applied research in an intervening way. "I want my knowledge to find its way into city government and civil society. I want to change cities.” Berlin is the center of Anna Steigemann 's life; she has lived there for 22 years. The researcher feels at home in the German capital. Her Kiez? Kreuzberg, where she is also a regular at the feminist bookstore around the corner. Somehow, it's also a love-hate relationship that many people have with the cities they live in, says Anna Steigemann. "There is no other city that I know so much about, both personally and professionally.” Berlin also serves as the location of her EU research project Fairville. This project aims to address embedded urban inequalities and the challenges they pose to democracy in large cities and urban regions. ?

Urbanization and Globalization

Anna Steigemann studied social sciences, gender studies, geography and urban planning. Her research interests include urbanization, processes of inclusion and exclusion, and social and spatial transformations. She considers herself a spatial researcher and sociologist on the same time, with a lot of involvement in citizen science projects. Through her research, she wants people to be empowered and administrations to gain new perspectives. For instance, migration and people's efforts to migrate are becoming increasingly important in this. "Today, more people in the world are migrating than staying in one place. Even if political actors refuse to see this as a normality," says Anna Steigemann.

The scholar examines urban-rural relations, translocal practices, transformations toward sustainability, and diversification processes. This includes the massive migratory movements in the Global South in recent decades. They have received little research attention in social sciences, states Anna Steigemann. "Every city in Africa is growing at a rate that no European city could match. Accordingly, there is a great deal of knowledge, both among administrators and city dwellers, about how to plan or even govern such a self-made city that is reconfiguring itself every day".? UR's Department for? Interdisciplinary and Multiscalar Area Studies (DIMAS) is ideally