Business Improvement Districts - neues Instrument für Containment und Ausgrenzung?

Abstract

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

The co-production of purified space: hybrid policing in German Business Improvement Districts

“…The current urban forms of governance have become entrepreneurialized, ‘emphasizing economic efficiency, low taxes, individual responsibility, and user fees; the most important goal of urban policy has become to mobilize city space as an arena for market-oriented economic growth’ (Mayer, 2007: 91). According to Hamburg’s Chamber of Commerce (CoC), leading state and federal politicians and bureaucrats, BIDs are to be understood as an instrument to enhance (inner-city) competition and promote private–public partnerships, and, in the Hamburg case, as an expression of the ‘growing city’ model (DIHK, 2007; Gedaschko, 2008), while political stakeholders such as the Green Party, until recently governing Hamburg in a coalition with the Christian Democrats, perceive BIDs as ‘civil society in action’ (cited in Töpfer et al, 2007: 512).…”

“…Finally, they are intensifying uneven development in urban environs (Ward, 2007) as well as inner-city competition, the latter being seen as one of the decisive elements for urban growth in Hamburg (Gedaschko, 2008; DIHK, 2009). By the same token, and inasmuch as neoliberalism plays out differently at different times and in different places, BIDs differ in their construction, contestation, creativity and consequences (Töpfer et al, 2007; Pütz et al, 2008), as the Hamburg case below shows. The BID Neuer Wall, for instance, had already confirmed ‘accretions in property values’ (Binger and Büttner, 2008: 133) within its first three years, allowing for massively increased ‘rents now above €200 per square meter and month’ (Comfort, 2008: 3), thus leading local and international real-estate investors to take over property within BIDs and future BIDs in the inner-city (Comfort, 2008: 5), with ‘foreign investors accounting for close to 75%’ of all investors (Comfort, 2008: 6).…”

“…In February 2002, in order to put a stop to citizens and tourists making direct donations to the urban poor, collection boxes were put in 71 shops and banks in the inner city of Hamburg as part of a ‘Shelter for the Homeless’ programme. According to the city’s administration, the boxes were meant to ‘provide philanthropic citizens with an alternative to direct donations’ to the homeless (Töpfer et al, 2007: 526). This campaign came on the heels of a proposal by the faith-based ‘Round Table of St. Jacobi’, a non-profit charity.…”

“…. the area should be sanitized’ (BID Tibarg, 2010: 28); other BIDs such as Neuer Wall or St. Pauli also aim at defining who should have access to ‘their’ spaces (Töpfer et al, 2007).…”

Business Improvement Districts (BIDs): the internationalization and contextualization of a ‘travelling concept’

“…Among these studies, particular attention has been paid to governance arrangements regarding security and policing (Berg, 2004;Eick, 2007;Morange and Didier, 2008). Other studies have focused on the increased social control over public spaces generated by BIDs and, more particularly, on their sociospatial implications in terms of exclusion and discrimination (Mitchell, 2003;Coleman, 2003;Töpfer et al, 2007;Marquardt and Füller, 2008;Lippert, 2009). Finally, some scholars have analysed the processes and agents involved in the international circulation of the BID model, looking into the global circuits of knowledge and the ways in which the model was adopted and reshaped in different cities in a context of 'urban policy mobilities' (Hoyt, 2006;Ward, 2007;Cook, 2008;Peyroux, 2008;McCann andWard, 2010, 2011;.…”