Open Cities, Open Families: Re-conceiving the Nuclear Private Family across Class, Gender, Race and Space

The Home Hub warmly welcomes you to this interdisciplinary symposium. Organized by dr. Michela Borzaga and dr. Flore Janssen (UU Comparative Literature), the event is framed by the question of how the nuclear family has shaped urban space, social relations, and inequalities across class, gender and race.

At a time of growing housing precarity, social fragmentation, and ecological crisis, the event critically examines how the spatial design of cities has historically reinforced the bourgeois nuclear model of the family and its exclusions. Bringing together scholars with backgrounds including architecture, urban and cultural history, anthropology and cultural studies, the symposium seeks to foster dialogue between theory and lived practice.

It connects interdisciplinary critiques of the family with contemporary debates on urban diversity and alternative housing models. By highlighting experiments in alternative ways of living, the symposium explores how communal forms of care, co-housing and shared domestic spaces may contribute to more inclusive, open and socially just cities.

Programme

• 09:45 Welcome
• 10:00 Keynote: Dr Darinka Czischke 
  Architecture and Built Environment, Delft University
• 11:00 Coffee break
• 11:30 Expert panel
• 12:30 Lunch
• 13:30 RMA Masterclass
  Documentary: Memory, Postmemory & the Nuclear Bourgeois Family
• 14:45 Tea break
• 15:15 Roundtable discussion with Home Hub
• 16:15 Closing remarks
• 16:30 Home Hub Borrel