Visiting professor: social geographer Ilse Helbrecht teaches at the renowned Dartmouth College

The Professor of Cultural and Social Geography at Humboldt-Universität will be teaching and researching in New Hampshire from 11 September to 15 November as Harris Honorary Visiting Professor.

Ilse Helbrecht has been invited to Dartmouth College (USA) from 11 September to 15 November. The Professor of Cultural and Social Geography at Humboldt-Universität will be teaching and researching there as Harris Honorary Visiting Professor. Alongside Harvard, Princeton and Yale University, Dartmouth College is one of the eight highly respected Ivy League universities in the USA and is therefore part of a group of the most prestigious universities in the world.

The professor will teach ’Urban Geography’ to undergraduate geography students and will also start her new research project ’Transformations in Housing and Intergenerational Contracts in Europe (THICE)’ from Dartmouth, which is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and deals with intergenerational (in)justice in European housing markets. She is also continuing her research on questions of ’Geographies of Uncertainty’ as part of the SFB 1265 ’Refiguration of Spaces’. This involves the question of how people in both cities and rural areas are currently dealing with the various uncertainties that we are currently experiencing due to multiple crises.

City dwellers and rural regions under pressure

’Local housing markets have become increasingly embedded in global financial structures in recent decades and have permanently changed the relationship of city dwellers to housing, property and everyday conflicts. This has a serious impact on residents’ subjective sense of (in)security in everyday urban life,’ reports Helbrecht. Her studies on the urban perspective are based on interviews in the major cities of Berlin, Vancouver and Singapore, among others. In her latest studies from the past two years in rural areas of Germany and Canada, the tight urban housing markets are also highly relevant as a problem. ’In all the rural areas studied, there are now significant influxes from the overcrowded metropolises - so that the pressure on the metropolitan housing markets is now shifting into the rural areas. Even in a structurally weak rural region of eastern Germany, such as the Seeland in Saxony-Anhalt, residents are reporting increasing influxes and rising prices.’

Generational conflict on the European housing market

In the THICE project, she now wants to investigate in more detail how the increasingly tight housing markets in Europe are affecting the issue of intergenerational justice: Is the struggle for housing also a social issue in the competition between different generations? For the most part, the older cohorts of baby boomers in Europe are now well supplied with housing, while the young find it difficult to gain access to housing under the conditions of tight markets. ’Our aim is to deepen the understanding of how housing wealth is reshaping intergenerational relations in Europe, but also to explore more socially equitable contractual solutions,’ explains Helbrecht. ’Our study looks at the current restructuring of intergenerational contracts, focussing on the interactions between housing systems, public policies and family practices.’ The research project is an international collaborative project involving both young and experienced researchers from Spain, Ireland and the Netherlands, with Ilse Helbrecht as spokesperson.

About the person

Ilse Helbrecht has been a professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since 2009. She is interested in questions of urban development, housing market research and the role of geographical imaginations in people’s sense of security. She was awarded the Caroline von Humboldt Professorship in 2018, in 2019 she was appointed as a fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles and in 2024 she was awarded the Harris Honorary Visiting Professorship at Dartmouth College in the USA.