Leah Aaron

Research subject

Landlord, Tenant, Subtenant, Visa: Investigating the Role of Rental Housing Platforms in Facilitating More Insecure Forms of Tenancy for Working-Age Migrants in Berlin, Germany. 

Primary supervisor: Dr Susan Moore
Secondary supervisor: Dr Andrew Harris
Sponsor: ESRC UBEL Doctoral Training Partnership
Starting date: September 2022
Projected completion date: September 2025

In the years since the Great Financial Crisis, the housing trajectory of normative adulthood has stuttered and stalled. The fact that more and more people, especially those under 45, are living in rented and shared accommodation has become a key bone of contention in debates around ‘intergenerational fairness,’ here in the UK. 

However, our understanding of the impact of this ongoing turn toward shared living and the technologies and infrastructures which make it bearable remain underdeveloped. Moreover, the bureaucratic processes which make the urban landscape accessible, such as bank accounts or mobile phone contracts, are still largely structured around the possession of a long-term residential address, even as short-term tenancies become increasingly normalised in cities like London. 

My research seeks to investigate these issues by looking at the way digital rental services are transforming the housing sector in a city where only a minority of homes are owner-occupied: Berlin. I want to understand the ways the emergence of these digital tools at once make the rental sector more accessible, through increased invisibility, and more exclusionary, through the algorithmic management of risk. I am especially interested in the ways these technologies potentially foreclose possibilities of urban participation and citizenship by incentivising short-term, temporary housing solutions, and the way this is exacerbating the German government’s ongoing struggle to bolster its working-age population through skilled in-migration.    

I hope to explore this through ethnographic fieldwork combined with a detailed analysis of Berlin’s digital housing platform ecosystem, which I will commence with in January 2024. 

Biography

Leah worked in a range of fields before commencing her doctoral studies, notably in customer service as well as teaching English as a Foreign Language. As well as her PhD, Leah is a postgraduate teaching assistant in the Geography Department and a Tutor with the Academic Communication Centre, helping students to finesse their academic English.

Publications

Aaron,L. (2023) ‘Who Invented the Manchester Bee?,’ The Manchester Mill, 4th February 2023. Available at: https://manchestermill.co.uk/p/who-invented-the-manchester-bee, accessed 18.09.2023 

Conference Papers and Presentations

Aaron, L. (2023),’Vitamin B Deficiency: Social Capital, Housing Platforms and Digital Labour in the New Berlin,’ Revisiting Urban Housing Affordability in the Digital Age, The University of Manchester, 27^th April 2023

Teaching

PGTA, Geography in the Field I: Barcelona, Term 1, 2022

PGTA, Geography in the Field I: Barcelona, Term 1, 2023

PGTA, Academic Communication Centre, Terms 2 & 3, 2024