I am a PhD Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology with a special interest in cities, architecture and design, and critical infrastructure and development studies. For my PhD, I primarily researched and worked with architects, housing activists, and other design practitioners and built environment professionals and NGOs in Cape Town, South Africa. In my dissertation project, I examine the ways people cope with, and react to, the rise of housing demands and new infrastructural requirements in an era of intersecting crises, scarce urban land, and continuous ecological challenges. I specifically look at how, and to what extent, participatory architecture initiatives and grassroots alliances attempt to respond to these crises and challenges by articulating and sustaining alternative visions, imaginaries, and self-organizing capacities that are concerned with spatial justice, housing security, and social transformation. I also continue participating in project initiatives that assist and benefit organisations which challenge the persistent social injustices and entrenched spatial inequalities in South Africa.

My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Wagoner Foreign Study and Expanding Horizons Fellowship as well as the Humanities Research Center at Rice University.

Before coming to Rice, I pursued graduate studies in Anthropology at the University of Florida and earned an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Leipzig University. In 2016, I was living in South Africa for a year to pursue field research and additional graduate studies at Stellenbosch University, for which I was awarded funding by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). I came to anthropology through my undergraduate training in Philosophy and African Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin. I grew up and lived for most of my life in Berlin where I am currently based again.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Baumgardt, Laurin and Steven Robins. (2023). Slow crises – South Africa’s governmental responses to COVID-19 in times of ‘crisis within crisis’ In: Fourie, Pieter and Guy Lamb (Eds.), The South African Response to COVID-19. The Early Years, 1st Edition, Routledge.

Baumgardt, Laurin. (2021). Urban Acupuncture Design Theory: Researching New Development Practices in South Africa. Platypus: The CASTAC Blog Online, http://blog.castac.org/2021/02/urban-acupuncture-design-theory-researching-new-development-practices-in-south-africa/

Baumgardt, Laurin. (2019). Broken Promises: Examining Berlin’s Material Histories in an Age of Rubbling. Berlin Journal of Critical Theory, 3(3): 89-115.

Baumgardt, Laurin. (2017). Unfinished Futures: Ethnographic Reflections on Infrastructure and Aspirations in an Informal Settlement in South Africa. Moment Journal, Journal of Cultural Studies, 4(1): 73-91.