The housing question every day. On privatisation, refurbishment and protest

Frankfurt once stood for welfare-orientated construction: in 2025, the city will celebrate the centenary of the New Frankfurt and social housing estates were also built by the city in the post-war decades. However, since the abolition of municipal housing in 1989, the housing market has been characterised by a decline in municipal housing construction and privatisation. The housing crisis has been worsening for decades, the demand for affordable rental flats is increasing, while publicly subsidised housing is steadily declining. At the same time, necessary refurbishments show that the housing issue is now both social and ecological, as environmental aspects and displacement processes can no longer be considered separately.

The exhibition at Stadtlabor focuses on the past, present and future of the housing issue. It focusses on the voices of the residents and the social consequences. What stories do they have to tell about the buildings and their struggles for the affordability and quality of their flats? What structural and architectural changes are needed to enable socially and ecologically sustainable housing? Experts from science, urban planning and politics will explain the urban policy changes of the last 40 years.

The focus will be on three Frankfurt housing estates that exemplify the debate on this topic:
- Knorrstrasse in Gallus, former railway housing estate (1890s)
- Carl-von-Weinberg formerly Miquelstrasse housing estate (1930s, New Frankfurt)
- Henry-Dunant housing estate in Sossenheim (1960s, post-war modernism)

The housing estates embodied a new understanding of housing and living at the time. Ownership structures, architecture, forms of housing and the social demands on housing were rethought.
The housing crisis is not a regional problem. Privatisation processes in urban development affect many metropolises worldwide. An excursion to Tel Aviv, Frankfurt's twin city, will show this. The hopeless situation of many residents led to one of the largest political mobilisations in Israel in 2011.