ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the historical and geographical configurations of three key commodities involved in the renewed housing question – money, housing and labour power – in one of Berlin’s most impoverished and stigmatized boroughs: Neukolln. It discusses that the inter-scalar modes of monetized governance have played an integral yet contradictory role in facilitating a reality in which disposable workers and their families have been compelled to survive through a continuum of displaced survival. The chapter focuses on the first node of rental housing insecurity – exploitation – by elaborating on the complex nature of and intersections between the two sets of monetized power relations present in the rental social housing in Neukolln: landlords-tenants and creditors-debtors. It also focuses on two state-designated problem neighbourhoods of Neukolln situated on the social housing estates of Gropiusstadt and High-Deck-Siedlung.
