Helena Cermeño

• Governance
• Social and Cultural Change and Adaptation
• Growth, inequality and poverty
• Methods
• Development Politics
• Urbanisation

• Germany
• India
• Pakistan

ZEF- GCU (08/2011 – 12/2013): German-Pakistani Research Collaboration and Academic Capacity Building Programme

Since 10.2016 working as 'Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin' at the University of Kassel (Germany). Faculty: FB06 ASL Architektur - Stadtplanung - Landschaftsplanung Institut für urbane Entwicklungen FG Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie. Phone: +49 561 804-72

Architect & Urban Planner [Exp. Development Cooperation] (2010, Spain; eq. Dipl.-Ing.) M.Sc. Water Management (2013, Germany)

(in progress) Access to the city: urban assemblages and resulting processes of social inclusion and exclusion in Amritsar and Lahore

The research is focused in the Punjab area, at both sides of the India-Pakistan border, in the cities of Amritsar and Lahore. For their vicinity and common past, Amritsar and Lahore, provide a sort of ‘laboratory’ conditions for empirical comparative research and an occasion to compare data on urban and social change from both sides of the almost sealed border. Within the frame of urban governance this research looks specifically at housing and services. Housing has long been researched under a ‘rights’ perspective, and in so doing has often enough failed to provide a comprehensible approach to the practices that determine the ability of city inhabitants to ‘access’ (get, control, maintain and distribute) housing and services. Drawing on the conceptualization of ‘access’ by Ribot and Peluso (2003), which refers to it as: the ‘ability’ to derive benefits from things, including material objects, persons, institutions, and symbols, this research focus on ‘access’ to housing and services and the city at large, seeing ‘access’ as a ‘bundle of powers’ rather than a ‘bundle of rights’. The ‘access’ approach enables conceptualization of inequalities in terms of access to resources and guides the researcher into looking at practices by which actors gain, control and maintain these resources and the power relations underlying these practices. ‘Assemblage-thinking’, as an empirical and methodological orientation, facilitates the investigation of so far neglected dimensions of urban processes while posing questions regarding human/non-human interfaces, networked interdependencies and the production of socio-material infrastructures. Against this backdrop the research investigates through which practices and mechanisms of urban governance between different actors do residents ‘access’ housing and services in contemporary cities of Amritsar and Lahore, and what are the resulting processes of social inclusion /exclusion in Amritsar and Lahore.

AA via German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) La Caixa Foundation, (Spain)

Government College University (GCU), Lahore, Pakistan Guru Nanak Dev University (GNDU), Amritsar, India

First supervisor: Prof. Dr. Carsten Keller (Universität Kassel)

Second supervisor: Prof. Dr. Conrad Schetter

Dr. Katja Mielke (BICC)