Neighbours: Book Launch: Ioanna Piniara, We Have Never Been Private / LAPIS, TPOD, THEMA, HITAM
Event details
| Date | 12.11.2025 |
| Hour | 12:30 › 14:00 |
| Speaker | Ioanna Piniara |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
| Event Language | English |
We Have Never Been Private
The Housing Project in Neoliberal Europe
Ioanna Piniara
ABSTRACT
The transformation of the concept of the private within the socioeconomic regime known as neoliberalism has severely impacted the management of domestic space. Housing privatization has emerged not merely as a policy in the 1980s to promote new contractual relationships, but as a post-war urban strategy to establish a change of ethos, culture and organization of housing. Ioanna Piniara posits the neoliberal housing project within a constitutive historicization of the private since antiquity which subverts the neoliberal idea of the term’s institutional and typological autonomy. She argues that the state has constantly partnered the market (‘private sector’) in the promotion of a certain pedagogy of domestic privacy and, therefore, the private has hardly existed ‘as such’ in the neoliberal era. Her typological study sheds light on the links between the private narrative and the construction of class subjectivity, the idea of home-ownership and the symbolic function of the urban form. Connecting to a rich literature on the commons, Piniara proposes a shift from the economy towards an ecology of the private as the possibility of achieving a quality of being private through practices of commoning.
BIOGRAPHY
Ioanna Piniara is an architect and researcher holding a PhD in Architectural Design from the Architectural Association (AA). Her research interests include the study of domesticity as a biopolitical device for the control of bodies and identities, the spatial implications of economy, institutional power and policy in the design of urban housing as well as narratives for the decolonization of housing typologies and urban forms. Ioanna has been a seminar tutor at the AA, a post-doctoral fellow of the ‘Architectures of Order’ research cluster at the Goethe University Frankfurt and is currently teaching design and theory seminars at the Architecture School of the National Technical University in Athens. She is also the author of “The Housing Question is a Feminist Question: Housing Commons for the New Woman of the German Werkbund” by M Books (2025).
The Housing Project in Neoliberal Europe
Ioanna Piniara
ABSTRACT
The transformation of the concept of the private within the socioeconomic regime known as neoliberalism has severely impacted the management of domestic space. Housing privatization has emerged not merely as a policy in the 1980s to promote new contractual relationships, but as a post-war urban strategy to establish a change of ethos, culture and organization of housing. Ioanna Piniara posits the neoliberal housing project within a constitutive historicization of the private since antiquity which subverts the neoliberal idea of the term’s institutional and typological autonomy. She argues that the state has constantly partnered the market (‘private sector’) in the promotion of a certain pedagogy of domestic privacy and, therefore, the private has hardly existed ‘as such’ in the neoliberal era. Her typological study sheds light on the links between the private narrative and the construction of class subjectivity, the idea of home-ownership and the symbolic function of the urban form. Connecting to a rich literature on the commons, Piniara proposes a shift from the economy towards an ecology of the private as the possibility of achieving a quality of being private through practices of commoning.
BIOGRAPHY
Ioanna Piniara is an architect and researcher holding a PhD in Architectural Design from the Architectural Association (AA). Her research interests include the study of domesticity as a biopolitical device for the control of bodies and identities, the spatial implications of economy, institutional power and policy in the design of urban housing as well as narratives for the decolonization of housing typologies and urban forms. Ioanna has been a seminar tutor at the AA, a post-doctoral fellow of the ‘Architectures of Order’ research cluster at the Goethe University Frankfurt and is currently teaching design and theory seminars at the Architecture School of the National Technical University in Athens. She is also the author of “The Housing Question is a Feminist Question: Housing Commons for the New Woman of the German Werkbund” by M Books (2025).
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Organizer
- LAPIS, TPOD, THEMA, HITAM
Contact
- Marson Korbi