Urban Inequality and Constitutional Law - How Constitutional Law Shapes Power and Participation in Urban Spaces

• Applicant: Anna-Katharina König
• Subject Area: Public Law
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 577862085

Hardly any other place exposes social inequality as clearly as the city – especially when it comes to access to adequate housing. Across the globe, low-income households struggle to compete for scarce urban housing and are displaced into areas marked by weak infrastructure, environmental burdens, and poor living conditions. Yet housing is more than a shelter. It serves as a gateway to education, health, cultural life, and other forms of social participation. Urban exclusions, therefore, reveal the spatial dimension of social inequality – urban inequality – and stand among the most pressing challenges of our time. This book explores urban inequality from a constitutional perspective. Constitutions not only guarantee fundamental rights; they also articulate the structural principles that govern the distribution of resources and shape our social order. As such, they play a decisive role in regulating access to housing and addressing housing-related inequalities. The study examines how constitutions influence both the persistence and reduction of urban inequality, and how constitutional courts adjudicate these deeply politicized distributional conflicts. To answer these questions, the book undertakes a comparative analysis of the German and South African constitutional systems. In both countries, constitutional law has become a central reference point in debates on housing crises, the specifically addressed constitutional norms, however, vary: In Germany, disputes on urban inequality concern the constitutional protection of property, whereas in South Africa they are framed through the lens of social rights. The study aims to compare these different approaches to distributional inequality and to examine the conditions under which constitutional law preserves or transforms the social status quo. The analysis reveals two divergent conceptions of fundamental rights. The German housing jurisprudence builds on a defensive rights conception of property, which tends to preserve established distributive arrangements. South Africa, by contrast, has developed a procedural understanding of rights: here, constitutional norms are interpreted and enforced through participatory processes that continuously politicize and renegotiate distributive relations. This procedural approach reconceives rights as an open framework for democratic deliberation, rather than as predetermined boundaries. The central contribution of this study is to demonstrate that such a procedural understanding – well established in the realm of social rights – can also enrich the constitutional interpretation of property rights. Building on this insight, the study develops a new theoretical and doctrinal account of the economic foundations of the German constitution and, more broadly, of constitutional law’s role in the distribution of resources. Through this approach, the study not only advances constitutional theory but also opens new legal pathways for transforming urban inequality.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants