Pushing the Urban Frontier: Temporary Uses of Space, City Marketing, and the Creative City Discourse in 2000S Berlin

ABSTRACT:

In spite of the amount of urban development that followed the Fall of the Wall, Berlin’s urban landscape has remained filled with a large amount of “voids” and disused sites, which have gradually been occupied by various individuals, groups, or entrepreneurs for “temporary” or “interim” uses (such as urban beach bars). This paper analyzes how, and why, such temporary uses of space have been harnessed in recent economic and urban development policies and in the official city marketing discourse in Berlin post-2000, in the context of the discursive and policy shift toward the promotion of Berlin as a “creative city.” The gradual process of enlistment of new forms of cultural and social expression by policy-makers and real estate developers for urban development and place marketing purposes has put pressure on the very existence and experimental nature of “temporary uses” and “interim spaces.” These have consequently been going through various trajectories of displacement, transformation, commodification, resistance, or disappearance, and in particular cases have become the focus of intense local conflicts.

Notes

1 In the 1990s and 2000s, as Berlin became a popular case study in urban research, a debate unfolded between a number of (mainly) Anglophone researchers about the appropriateness of using an “Anglo-American meta-narrative of neo-liberal urban governance” for the analysis of Berlin’s post-1989 transformations (see Campbell, 1999; Cochrane, 2006; Häußermann, 1999; Latham, 2006a, 2006b; Marcuse, 1998). Some authors argued that since the Fall of the Wall, the city has been going through a process of “urban Euroconvergence” (Campbell, 1999, p. 179) or “normalization” characterized by trends witnessed in other North American and European metropolitan areas, such as gentrification or suburbanization (Brenner, 2002; Cochrane & Passmore, 2001). Others (Latham, 2006a, 2006b) have argued that “many of the more interesting and exceptional phenomena which are shaping Berlin” post-1989 are not grasped well by such analyses, which “fail to convey the distinctiveness of many of the debates around urban development, regulation (of all sorts), and how these debates are often structured through patterns of thinking which are quite alien to Anglo-American urban practice. And they miss – or in fact simply discount—the quite different intellectual and political traditions through which Berlin is shaped” (Latham, 2006a, p. 377).

2 Following German unification, the outer districts of East Berlin have experienced population decline — in the district of Marzahn-Hellersdorf, by 17% between 1995 and 2002, with rates nearing 30% in some parts of the district (SenStadt, 2007, p. 23). A federal program of urban renewal named Stadtumbau Ost was set up in 2002 to tackle this decline. The program included the demolition of “surplus housing” and disused public buildings: in 2007, 185 buildings covering a surface of 140 hectares were earmarked for demolition.

3 The discourse on “reurbanization” is part of a wider debate which was particularly intense in Berlin in the 1990s on what type of urban form and architectural norms should be used to guide the reconstruction of the reunified city. The promoters of “critical reconstruction” advocated a return to a “traditional” European city through the restoration of the historical block patterns, street alignments, and building heights of the late 19th century city, whilst prominent architects such as Rem Koolhaas or Daniel Liebeskind argued that this “neo-historicist design regime” would stifle opportunities for architectural expression (see Burg, 1994; Burg & Stimmann, 1995; Molnar, 2010; Murray, 2008, for an overview of the debates).

4 The project Urban catalysts. Strategies for temporary uses—Potential for development of urban residual areas in European metropolises (2001–2003) was funded by the European Union 5th Framework Program for Research under the specific strand “City of Tomorrow – Cultural Heritage.” The project, which involved a network of 12 partners from five European metropolises—Helsinki, Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna, and Naples—investigated the potential of temporary uses as a motor of urban change. Its findings are summarized in SUC (2003).

5 Social innovation refers here to forms of social mobilization focused on the “satisfaction of human needs (and empowerment, i.e., social economy) through innovation in the relations within neighborhood and community governance” (Moulaert, Martinelli, Gonzalez, & Swyngedouw, 2007, p. 196). Such forms of mobilization have the capacity to “elaborate alternative (counterhegemonic) discourses and actions in terms of resistance and/or creative alternatives” (p. 206).

6 There is no space here to analyze in detail the story and content of specific temporary uses and interim spaces in Berlin. For case studies in English, see Groth and Corjin (2005), SenStadt (2007), Shaw (2005), Stevens and Ambler (2010), and Till (2011).

7 The Berlin Senate’s definition of the cultural industries includes publishing and printed media, film and TV production, fashion, design, software and games development, telecommunications, music, advertising, architecture, and exhibition arts. This corresponds to only one segment of what Florida refers to as the “creative classes.” In this paper, I use the word “creative(s)” not as a rigorous analytical category, but as the term actually used by local policy-makers and place marketers in the policy and marketing discourses.

8 The process of pushing the visual and discursive “urban frontier” in Berlin’s place marketing imagery has not only included temporary uses and interim spaces, but also sites of historical memory previously left out of the city marketing discourse, as well as socially and ethnically mixed neighborhoods (such as Kreuzberg) and their alternative and counter-cultural urban life (see Colomb, 2011, Chapter 8; and Novy & Huning, 2008).

9 In Berlin the process of marketing temporary uses as tourist attractions has certainly increased their popularity and fuelled visitor numbers, although the initial success of particular sites predated official “creative city policies” or media publicity. The influx of tourists to entertainment-oriented temporary uses, in particular beach bars, has in some cases triggered a transformation of the activity at the expense of the small-scale, experimental, informal, and non-commercial nature of early uses. Some of Berlin’s beach bars have become highly commercial enterprises used by a rather high-income clientele.

10 This has sometimes happened with the support of the local state or of other local agencies. Berlin’s tourism promotion organization BTM has, for example, started to call for specific measures to protect Berlin’s beach bars and clubs, as these have become such an important tourist magnet in recent years.