Joanna Kusiak

Joanna Kusiak is a Research Fellow in Urban Studies at King’s College, Cambridge. Her work focuses on land, property and the role that legal technicalities play in shaping our cities.

Her current project follow urban legal activism in its attempts to reinvent urban property regimes on more egalitarian terms, including new forms of democratic expropriation and social ownership. She also investigates the feasibility of progressive, quasi-Machiavellian approaches to co-opting neoliberal urban systems. Ultimately, her work seeks to rebuild the constructive capacity of critical urban studies – a capacity that, since the failure of modernism, has been largely lost.

While her research is not confined to any region, Joanna is especially committed – as an activist and as an architecture/urban critic – to the cities of Warsaw and Berlin. She is currently finalizing a book titled The Orders of Chaos: Law, Land and Neoliberal Globalization in Warsaw.