Hamburg's Spaces of Danger: Race, Violence and Memory in a Contemporary Global City

Abstract

Germany today is experiencing the strongest upsurge of right‐wing populism since the second world war, most notably with the rise of Pegida and Alternative für Deutschland. Yet wealthy global cities like Hamburg continue to present themselves as the gatekeepers of liberal progress and cosmopolitan openness. This article argues that Hamburg's urban boosterism relies on, while simultaneously obscuring, the same structures of racial violence that embolden reactionary movements. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and Allan Pred, we present an archaeology of Hamburg's landscape, uncovering some of its ‘spaces of danger’—sites layered with histories of violence, many of which lie buried and forgotten. We find that these spaces, when they become visible, threaten to undermine Hamburg's cosmopolitan narrative. They must, as a result, be continually erased or downplayed in order to secure the city as an attractive site for capital investment. To illustrate this argument, we give three historical examples: Hamburg's role in the Hanseatic League during the medieval and early modern period; the city under the Nazi regime; and the recent treatment of Black African refugees. The article's main contribution is to better situate issues of historical landscape, collective memory and racialized violence within the political economy of today's global city.

The evolution and stability of multi‐ethnic residential neighbourhoods in England

“…We therefore concur with Simpson’s prediction that “the future of Britain is a greater variety of diverse areas” (2015, p. 49; see also Lomax et al, 2020 ). While there is no doubt that global cities are unequal and becoming more so, that inequality is racialised, and that segregation persists in certain locales, our findings do not support the “dual city” label attached to some areas (see MacFarlane & Mitchell, 2019 ). Indeed, the rise and stability of multi-ethnic neighbourhoods in London signals that such binaries ignore the complexity of neighbourhood experiences in large and ethnically diverse cities (e.g., Crul, 2016 ).…”

IDENTITARIAN MOVEMENTS IN THE TOURISTIC CITY: The Marketing of Hate in Verona

“…Scholarly attention has so far been directed at regional (Woods, 1995; Paasi, 2011; Lamour, 2022) and rural areas (Berlet and Sunshine, 2019; Corradi, 2022) as ‘reservoirs of populist anger’ (Rossi, 2018: 1425), in which urban contexts are usually considered privileged sites of cosmopolitan ethics and multicultural values (for a critique, see Weinstein, 2019 and Silver et al ., 2020). While previous studies have pointed out how dark historical periods and current xenophobia are played down to accentuate cosmopolitan values and a liberal outlook in the marketing of modern cities (Pred, 2000; Partridge, 2015; MacFarlane and Mitchell, 2019), there is also a growing field of research that focuses on the manifestations of far‐right and populist politics in the urban scenery regarding racialized others (Creţan and O'brien, 2019; Creţan et al ., 2022), immigrants (Papatzani, 2021; Toğral Koca, 2022), issues of housing and social inequalities (Rossi, 2018), other marginalized subjectivities (Saitta, 2022) or place‐based antagonisms in the metropolitan scene (Silver et al ., 2020). Hence, there is a growing academic curiosity regarding the urban question and the operations of these actors (Bradlow, 2019; Garrido, 2019; Shoshan, 2019; Bialasiewicz and Stallone, 2020; Silver et al ., 2020; Carta, 2022; Gawlewicz, 2022; Rivero et al ., 2022), with calls for greater academic scrutiny of city life: ‘we call for recognizing neo‐nationalism as a key driving force in the emergence of urban hostile environments.…”