Since October 2020, I have been a Research Fellow at the working group on Globalization, Transformation, and Gender. My work has long investigated how housing is nested within structural social, economic, gender, and racial inequalities. I draw primarily on the methods of participant observation, policy analysis, and documentary filmmaking.  I am currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles.

My research compares housing politics in Los Angeles and Berlin, focusing on rental housing policy, social movements, and interest group lobbying. Therein I investigate the process by which tenants, landlords, and government officials influence rent control policymaking, and how, why, and to what end these agents employ particular strategies to influence policy outcomes.

In the past years I have worked as a teaching assistant on a number of community-university, scholar-activist research projects in Los Angeles: first, for Jan Breidenbach on the UCLA Labor Center’s Community Scholars’ “Do Bills Build Homes? An Assessment of California’s 2017 Housing Package on Addressing the Housing Crisis in Los Angeles County”; and recently for Sandra McNeill on the UCLA Department of Urban Planning’s Community Collaborative’s “De-Commodifying Housing During Covid-19.”

Between 2011-2012 I lived in Berlin, during which I researched Building Groups (Baugruppen), the Mietshäuser Syndikat, and Kotti & Co. I recently directed a film for the Antipode Foundation called “Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson.” 

Card, Kenton. “Contradictions of Housing Commons: Between Middle Class and Anarchist Models in Berlin.” In Commoning the City: Empirical Perspectives on Urban Ecology, Economics, and Ethics, edited by Derya Ozkan and Guldem Baykal. Routledge, 2020.

Card, Kenton. “Urban Commons.” In Urban Studies Inside-out: Theory, Method, Practice., edited by Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, and Eric Sheppard. Sage, 2019.

Card, Kenton, Andre Comandon, and Joseph A. Daniels. “Grounding the Housing Question in Land: On Anna Haila’s Urban Land Rent.” In Urban Studies Inside/Out: Theory, Method, Practice, edited by Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, and Eric Sheppard. SAGE Publications Inc, 2019.

Card, Kenton, and Jan Breidenbach. “Bernie Should Declare Housing a Human Right.” Jacobin Magazine, August 5, 2019.

Card, Kenton. “Thinking Across Tactics of Tenant Movements: Los Angeles and Berlin.” Progressive City, February 5, 2018.

Jones, Paul, and Kenton Card. “Constructing ‘Social Architecture’: The Politics of Representing Practice.” Architectural Theory Review 16, no. 3 (2011): 228–244.

Card, Kenton. “Democratic Social Architecture or Experimentation on the Poor?: Ethnographic Snapshots.” Design Philosophy Papers 9, no. 3 (2011): 217–234.