Berliner Wagenburgen: Transformation peripherer Räume, Stigmatisierung sozialer Gruppen und die Abwehr von Marginalisierung

Abstract

<jats:p>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.</jats:p>

City Building and the Rhetoric of “Readability”: Architectural Debates in the New Berlin

“…But a debate about the architecture appropriate to the desired image of the city is in an important sense a debate about collective identity, about the “we” that is to be constituted and addressed by the built form of the city. Indeed, the narrowness of the “we” implied in the transformations of Berlin's public spaces is an important cause for concern (Cuper and Miessen, 2002; Eick, 1998; Sambale and Veith, 1998). Others criticize the extent to which East Berliners have been elided or diminished in this new “we” that is being architecturally constructed (Weizman, 2005; Hain, 2000, 1997; Flierl, 1998).…”

“…in a world that has seemingly done away with social scripts, the critical reconstructionist rhetoric of “readability,” with its dream of unambiguous interpretability and its attendant calls for an aesthetic of “solidity,”“clarity,”“simplicity,”“order,” etc., represents an attempt to provide long–lost bearings by means of architecture and the organization of urban space. Ultimately, the disappointments of the New Berlin 4 ought to make us wary of similar attempts taking place in cities around the world—for example, in the post–Katrina Storm Zone (Lewis, 2006; Ouroussoff, 2005; Elliot et al, 2004), Beirut (Ouroussoff, 2006a), and throughout Europe (Council for European Urbanism, 2005). 5…”

The Berlin Reader

“…Nine wild encampments with about 700 residents had settled at various sites in the internal periphery of the city, particularly where the wall used to be, but the Senate forced them out to the edge of the city, with massive police force, creating new islands of marginality that are stigmatized and often unwanted by the "indigenous" German residents (cf. Sambale and Veith 1998). (Rada 2000: 20;cf.…”