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Ordinary justice in extraordinary times: Legal reasoning and the everyday geopolitics of urban displacement

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  • Sarah Klosterkamp

Abstract

This article explores the geopolitics of the everyday through eviction hearings in Germany’s lower district courts. Based on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how judges, through routinized legal reasoning, enact powerful spatial decisions in proceedings that often last under 15 minutes. Through three contrasting cases, the paper shows how assessments of responsibility and perceived deservingness shape judicial discretion and produce uneven vulnerabilities to displacement. Far from discrete legal events, these micro-judgments operate as forms of slow violence, incrementally reproducing the structural conditions of financialized housing and urban precarity. Bringing legal geography into conversation with feminist and urban geopolitical scholarship, the article conceptualizes the court as a state apparatus that normalizes and administers tenant–landlord disputes. Here, urban displacement is not only permitted—it is made ordinary. The paper contributes to debates on how legal infrastructures, procedural rhythms, and ordinary decision-making practices shape the political economy and lived geopolitics of urban space.

Suggested Citation

  • Sarah Klosterkamp, 2026. "Ordinary justice in extraordinary times: Legal reasoning and the everyday geopolitics of urban displacement," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 44(4), pages 714-731, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:envirc:v:44:y:2026:i:4:p:714-731
    DOI: 10.1177/23996544251412143
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Kholodilin, Konstantin A. & Michelsen, Claus & Ulbricht, Dirk, 2018. "Speculative price bubbles in urban housing markets," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 55(4), pages 1957-1983.
    2. Katherine Brickell, 2014. "“The Whole World Is Watching”: Intimate Geopolitics of Forced Eviction and Women's Activism in Cambodia," Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 104(6), pages 1256-1272, November.
    3. Tom Slater, 2006. "The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 30(4), pages 737-757, December.
    4. Caroline Faria & Sarah Klosterkamp & Rebecca Maria Torres & Jayme Walenta, 2020. "Embodied Exhibits: Toward a Feminist Geographic Courtroom Ethnography," Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 110(4), pages 1095-1113, July.
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