adda – Discourses
women power
or
black power
where do we stand
where do we go
where do we dwell
where do we build
what do we measure
let us be poetic
quoting
or
without quotations
...write down!
forum: spatial, temporal and notional openness of a place for and of equal people.
adda: a social space, as free as possible, for loose talks, debates, thoughts, even gossips among friends, as known and commonly practiced in the Bengali culture – and indeed it will be easy to find its world-wide correspondents, from the East-African baraza to the French coffeehouse, from the Latin-American tertulia to the majlis in Arabian countries.
Habitat Forum Berlin's adda make space for disputations, reflections and conceptions on habitat-related topics and shall encourage all-round discussions.
Paradigmising
Karail Bosti
Quotidian life and fear of eviction, intertwined with each other, shape structural outlook as well as social forms of Karail Bosti. Over more than 30 years, the squatter settlement has grown in the heart of a flourishing neighbourhood of Bangladesh's capital city Dhaka. What does make it a paradigm of current world-wide discussions and practices of urban development? The answer lies in today's contradictory interests conflating on the site: those of a government willing to "develop" the area within a private-public-partnership endeavour; those of the dwellers, increasingly intimidated, but at the same time determined to stay; as well as those of a segmented "civil society", expressing concern and commitment after moving TV reports, though without follow-ups. Today, the around 100,000 dwellers are threatened by ever more often eviction drives in the most exposed portions of the settlement. What is taking shape is a "soft" eviction protracted in time, eluding Bangladesh's various commitments to international agreements on human rights. More...
Differenz, Wiederholung, Maß
The question is not only philosophical, as it displays evident implications for practice: how is “development” to be faced nowadays? Is it possible to overcome the problem of the Western origin and capitalist value of concepts like “development” or “progress” by means of an “ethics of development”, based on postcolonial and subaltern studies (in other words, can these concepts be “rescued”; and, could such an “ethics of development” be shared by western and non-western, metropolitan and non-metropolitan subjects)? If, in the contrary, an “ethics of difference” that contains the different progresses, paces, views and value systems of our world and hence gets over the normative character of “development” by means of a process-oriented view of human society is preferred, it becomes necessary to re-conceptualise historical processes, ruptures, progresses and regressions. More...
