Wohnhaft im Verborgenen

The municipalities in Germany are obliged to prevent homeless people from rough sleeping. They often meet this obligation by covering the costs of hostel beds. In this context, Berlin‘s hostel industry with homeless people represents a hidden form of homelessness that is neither visible in the city nor taken into account in the public debate. Most people do not even know about it. This project examines how the hostel industry works: Which actors are involved and how do they depend on each other? How is it spatially structured at different scales? Which codes and conventions form the basis of its organisation? The results confirm our assumption and show that the hiddenness is constitutive for the existence of the hostel industry – on the level of the city, the neighbourhood, the building, and the interior spaces.We understand these dynamics as a new spatial production of precarious housing in Berlin that takes place in the hidden, the spatial characteristics of which are recorded in a map that is part of the publication.