Who Owns the City: Artist-Activist and Cultural Understandings of Housing and Creative Community

Thursday, April 5, 2025, 2-4 PM

A panel discussion between Cultural Planner and Artist Jan Derk Diekema (NL) and Urban Geographer, Artist, and UGA Alum Dr. Matthew Harris.

The conversation will be held on Thursday, April the 3rd from 2-4pm (EST), as an off-campus collaboration to bring artists, designers, and geographers together to address issues of gentrification and affordability. Diekema and Harris’ will share lessons of bottom-up and alternative development, in addition to work across international network collaborations and collective practices by engaging challenges facing concerns shared by the UGA’s Schools of Art and College of Environment + Design.

The session will be moderated by UGA’s Stephen Ramos, James Enos, and Jon Vogt.

Athens Institute of Contemporary Art (ATHICA), is an independent, non-profit gallery promoting and supporting innovative contemporary art and artists through exhibitions, education, and events. Likewise, the program is committed to bringing LDSOA and CED students in contact with the local arts community, and in turn engaging with national and international contemporary artists into conversations that expand imaginations surrounding what is achievable. This program has been made possible by support from the Willson Center.

Jan Derk Diekema is an Artist and City Maker from Groningen (NL), where he formerly served as a special housing project manager and planner at CareX, and now heads up the Art Indeed Foundation. His work exists in the fields of urban research and art activism through explorations in aesthetically grounded interdisciplinary notions of geography, infrastructure and culture. Jan Derk’s collaborations utilize ‘bottom up’ forms urban planning and implementation that lend vacant spaces temporary life. He has initiated and developed multiple cooperative living and artist housing projects stemming from the Dutch squatter movements of the late 1980’s.

Matthew Harris is a writer and researcher in the areas of urban geography and critical theory. Matthew holds a PhD in geography from the University of Georgia, where he wrote a dissertation on the housing crisis in Oakland, California. In a study of the Ghost Ship warehouse fire and the Moms 4 Housing movement, this research highlights the political consequences of the apolitical discourse of crisis. Prior to graduate school, Matthew worked with affordable housing nonprofits and community development organizations throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, where he also played bass and alto saxophone in punk/diy bands. Matthew is currently writing a book based on his dissertation research.