Prof. Dr. Anne Kockelkorn
Anne Kockelkorn is Assistant Professor for the History and Theory of Housing and Urbanism at Ghent University. Her research focuses on the political economy of housing and its impact on social relations and social space. She conceptualises housing as urban infrastructure, utilising architectural knowledge to explore how this infrastructure affects people’s livelihoods, labour routines, and gender constructs, and how narratives of empowerment intersect with strategies of discipline and value extraction. She has worked on the histories of cooperative and social housing in Europe since the mid-19th century, on strategies of peripheralisation through mass housing urbanisation since the 1950s, and on the impact of financialisation on urban development since the 1990s.
Prior to her position in Ghent, Anne worked as a research assistant at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich (2009–2015), taught as guest professor at the University of Cyprus in Nicosia (2018), co-directed the post-graduate program for history and theory of architecture and the city (MAS ETH GTA, 2019–2020) and held a position as assistant professor at TU Delft thanks to a Delft Technology Fellowship (2021–2022). Between 2006 and 2012, Anne Kockelkorn worked as an architecture critic for the periodicals Bauwelt, Archplus, Baunetz, TEC21 and archithese. Between 2013–2015, she co-edited the theory journal Candide, with Susanne Schindler, Axel Sowa and Andres Lepik. She studied Architecture at École d’architecture de Paris-Belleville and Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee and graduated in 2003.
Anne Kockelkorn joined the Chair of Sociology at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich in 2010, to get support in urban theory and sociological methods for her PhD project at the ETH Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta). Her thesis that she submitted in 2017 analyses the changes in architectural discourse, housing policies, and urban development before and after the neoliberal turn in France in the 1970s; it was awarded an ETH Medal. In this context, she also joined the research project “Patterns and Pathways of Urbanisation in Comparative Perspective” of the Chair of Sociology and the Future Cities Laboratory Singapore,which was published in the edited volume “Vocabularies for an Urbanising Planet”.
Anne Kockelkorn: publications