Join us for the book launch of Radically Legal: Berlin Constitutes the Future, the Nine Dots Prize-winning book by Joanna Kusiak.

Right in the middle of the German constitution, a group of ordinary citizens discovers a forgotten clause that allows them to take 240,000 homes back from multi-billion corporations. In this work of creative non-fiction, scholar-activist and Nine Dots Prize winner Joanna Kusiak tells the story of a grassroots movement that convinced a million Berliners to pop the speculative housing bubble. She offers a vision of urban housing as democratically held commons, legally managed by a radically new institutional model that works through democratic conflicts.

Moving between interdisciplinary analysis and her own personal story, Kusiak connects the dots between the past and the present, the local and the global, and shows the potential of radically legal politics as a means of strengthening our democracies and reviving the rule of law. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Listen to the event recording. 

Meet our speakers and chair

Joanna Kusiak (@jkkusiak) is a scholar-activist who lives in Berlin and works at the University of Cambridge. Born in Poland, she has been equally shaped by the emancipatory tradition of the Solidarność (solidarity) movement and by the brutality of the neoliberal transformation. Her work focuses on urban land, housing crises, and the progressive potential of law. In 2021 she was one of the spokespeople of Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen, Berlin’s successful referendum campaign to expropriate stock-listed landlords. She also writes and performs poetry. She is the winner of the 2022-23 Nine Dots Prize. 

David Madden (@davidjmadden) is Associate Professor in Sociology and Director of the Cities Programme at LSE. He works on urban studies, housing studies, political sociology, and social theory. A new edition of his book In Defense of Housing, co-authored with Peter Marcuse, was published in September 2024.

Anna Minton (@AnnaMinton) is the author of Big Capital: Who is London for? (Penguin 2017) and Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st century city (Penguin 2009). She is Reader in Architecture at the University of East London and a frequent contributor to the Guardian and the Financial Times. She is currently working on her third book, about the global housing crisis and the sterilization of the city, which will be published by Penguin in 2026. More information about Anna is available at UEL or her personal website.

Hyun Bang Shin (@urbancommune) is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies and Head of Department at the Department of Geography and Environment, LSE. 

More about this event

The event will be followed by a reception open to all.

The Department of Geography and Environment (@LSEGeography) is a centre of international academic excellence in economic, urban and development geography, environmental social science and climate change.

This event is co-hosted with the Department of Sociology and The Urban Salon.

Podcast

A podcast of this event is available to download here.