Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) are territorial subdivisions of a city in which property owners or businesses decide to self-impose an additional tax meant for the promotion and development of the area through services such as garbage collection, street maintenance, and security patrols. They were created in North America since the late 1960s and, though they embody many of the powers and privileges of the state, bear none of the responsibilities and limitations of democratic government. Since the early 1990s BIDs found their way due to a fast policy transfer across the Atlantic: First to the UK and now finally to Germany. Here they are regarded either as an offer the local business community cannot afford to refuse (i.e. some Chambers of Commerce) or as "civil society in action" (parts of the Green Party). Others regard them as questionable under constitutional law and as an instrument to privatize cities (the civil rights movement) or as "the next step towards further exclusion" of disadvantaged groups (i.e. churches and homeless service providers). We analyze these claims and offer empirical evidence from North America and Britain and eventually assess the prospects for Germany.

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This article focuses on the transformation of peripheral spaces in Berlin and the stigmatization of collective living arrangements within this process. The marginalization of the Berlin inner-city laagers (Wagenburgen) and the strategies and tactics they employ to confront this hegemonic project shed a light upon the complex set of relations between spaces, identities and resistance in the process of urbanization. A second topic is the formation of NIMBYism in Berlin in the process of suburbanization. The tensions arising between the inner-city and suburbanites articulate a new set of conflicts in Berlin politics. Regulating inner-city contradictions on the suburban fringe is history. The conflict concerning the (relocation of) laagers serves as just one example - but the most advanced for the time being.

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