No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Berlin's waterfront site struggle
Abstract
In the summer of 2008, a local social movement in Berlin successfully challenged the city's currently largest harbor front development project 'Media Spree'. While the project, which aims to attract and develop creative industries, is a model of neo-liberal urbanism, the paper demonstrates that in a contested city, urban development cannot adequately be explained by 'top-down' approaches focusing on neo-structuralist arguments, but that it is rather the result of a complex negotiation process. The paper thus makes the case for the relevance of analyzing social movements for understanding urban development.
... The opportunity for autonomous formations to remake themselves is only presented by the state insofar as their refashioning suits its objectives. For instance, initiatives that are directly-artistic and musical initiatives whose productions can constitute commercial value (see Scharenberg and Bader 2009)-or indirectly-"craftivism" initiatives that add to an overall cool and edgy narrative (see Mould 2014)-valuable to the creative city agenda supersede those which are deemed not valuable or antithetical, such as formations which prioritize direct confrontation and violence (see Flesher Fominaya 2007). Given the inevitable differences in needs and wants of constituent actors in any autonomous formation, struggles between objectives for survival and the intent to be radical are not uncommon ( DeFilippis et al. 2006; Joseph 2002). ...
... Many subcultural initiatives have also shifted regularly to maintain their existence, in response to the arbitrary and ever-shifting planning fabric of the Berlin government. For example, the core of the music scene shifted from Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte in the early 1990s to Kreuzberg in the late 1990s ( Scharenberg and Bader 2009) as a response to heavy gentrification in the former. ...
... More recently in 2006, the Mercedes-Benz (formally O2) Arena, a massive concert and performance venue, followed suit. These enterprises were lured to the area by the city government, where the thriving club and music scene and the presence of subcultural enter- prises such as music labels, DJs and designers both established since the 1990s by temporary users in the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg areas on both sides of the Spree River was presented by the government as a promise for the successful develop- ment of a creative cluster ( Scharenberg and Bader 2009). The three corporations have become anchor tenants for one of Berlin's largest urban redevelopment projects, Media Spree. ...
What should autonomous formations work towards? How might they strategize to get there? This paper considers these what and how aspects in tandem-a necessary pursuit if clearer pathways to emancipation are to be realized. First, it conceptualizes the relationship between objectives of durability and progressiveness. I introduce "the durability trap", a situation whereby autonomous formations achieve durability at the expense of their progressiveness, as well as the principles to overcome this. Second, it evaluates how autonomous formations might act collectively and vis-à-vis the state to achieve, or not, both durability and progressiveness. I compare the strategies two autonomous formations adopt in response to the development of Media Spree, a redevelopment project in Berlin. I show how symbiotic strategy results in the durability trap and how an interstitial approach works to overcome this. I end by conceiving strategies of interstitiality, symbiosis and rupture as sequential steps to wider transformation.
... This drives the capital accumulation through the creation of spaces for consumption and production, including the financialisation of public assets and services, within a globalised context (Sairinen and Kumpulainen 2006). The neoliberalisation of waterfront development has been noted by, amongst others, Scharenberg and Bader (2009), Neill (2011), Oakley (2011, Moore-Cherry (2013), Muir (2013) and Shaw (2013); the uneven application of neoliberal principles and the continuing important role of the state is also acknowledged (Heeg, 2011;Rubin, 2011). ...
... Waterfront sites offer considerable development potential, with their large amounts of land in a potentially attractive setting, including space for prestigious and iconic projects to enhance city status (Hoyle, 1988;Chang and Huang, 2011;Scharenberg and Bader, 2009;Cowen and Bunce, 2006). Cities attempt to develop their waterfronts in ways that attract business, investment and professionals and convince their own residents and entrepreneurs to remain. ...
... Although the nature of partnerships and the objectives of waterfront regeneration can change over time (Brownill, 2011;Shaw, 2013), the fundamental reliance on the private sector remains. This has been accompanied by an integration of private real estate actors and their interests into urban planning (Heeg 2011) as developers within globalising cities have focused on dilapidated areas, such as redundant docklands, with the potential to be turned into prime real estate (Scharenberg and Bader, 2009). ...
Available on the RICS Research Trust web site: http://www.rics.org/us/knowledge/research/research-reports/the-new-waterfront/
... Some of these privatization tendencies have been challenged by social groups. For instance, a local social movement in Berlin "successfully challenged the city's currently largest harbor front development project Media Spree" [60]. Hamburg's port has been critical to Germany's economy for many centuries. ...
... This is a synthesis of that study's 10 most severe injustices: Evaluation studies claim that the exclusion from governance affairs is quite disconcerting; in fact, port-city governance relations can be quite complex and conflictual [24,75]. Usually, port authorities are interested in maintaining jurisdiction over their land and water domains, and city governments tend to seek benefits from redeveloping adjacent waterfront environments not only for real estate purposes but also for public access [60]. Even in various western countries, citizens at large and non-profit environmental organizations have traditionally been neglected or paid lip-service when they raise concerns over social and environmental issues likely to affect the economic bottom-line of maritime industries. ...
Written accounts of cultural festivals often deal with the various activities that comprise those types of events. There is a paucity of analyses that discuss how festivals encourage the status quo of consumption practices, while conjuring their hidden costs on society. This paper analyses how the Hamburg Cruise Days Festival attempted to perpetuate the status quo of the cruising industry. The research answers the following question: What would it take to help change the current “cobalt” color promoted by the organizers of the Hamburg’s Waterfront Cruise Days Festival to a “True Blue”, a symbol of the cleanest sky and harbor waters in Germany, and the best example of sustainable Green and Blue Infrastructure in Europe? The research methods comprised in loco fieldwork participant observation in the tradition of participatory action research. It is argued that, from a governance perspective, festival organizers ought to be required to disclaim, in the fashion of “truth in advertising”, the ecological impacts and sponsors’ progress toward reaching existing environmental standards to eradicate costly social and environmental injustices. Said practice will increase our individual and collective awareness of the invaluable richness of the world’s land- and water-based environment before it is irreplaceably exhausted. The article suggests extending events’ emphasis on sustainable tourism to also encompass three additional measures: (i) the socio-ecological performance of the cruise (and shipping) industry; (ii) in the fashion of a Solomonic approach to justice; and (iii) within a formalized Porto of Call Sister Cities Network.
... Moreover, there is clear evidence that careful design and social vision can pull people (and communities) together to encourage senses of shared citizen-ship (Roberts, 2009;Rogers and Power, 2000;Gehl, 2010;Knox, 2011;New Urbanism, 2014), and that the voice of the citizen is crucial to regenerating cities (Scharenberg and Bader, 2009;Gehl, 2010;Ferilli et al. 2016). ...
... There are many studies across the social sciences that report on the contestation, struggles and change making 'from below' by grassroots citizens groups. Examples in the urban regeneration and planning literature include citizen activism in Mediaspree, Berlin, (Scharenberg and Bader, 2009), in Dublin (Brudell and Attuyer, 2014;Attuyer, 2015) and Melbourne (Legacy, 2016). The social studies and community literature includes Mannarini and Talò (2013) and Antonini et al. (2015). ...
The critical current of urban regeneration scholarly research focusses on neoliberal urbanism. In concentrating on the neoliberal economic, business and financial dimensions as driving forces behind urban change and regeneration, the human dimension of city centres and city centre living is frequently overshadowed. This paper explores the human dimension through the example of Engage Liverpool, a citizen and neighbourhood organisation. This paper investigates citizen engagement with urban development in the setting of the city centre and central waterfront in Liverpool. The paper argues that despite the dominance of global neoliberal forces within regeneration, citizen and neighbourhood organisations such as Liverpool Engage may have the potential to facilitate citizens’ participation as change makers in urban (re)development.
... The case of Nord-Neukölln is distinct from Anglo-Saxon experiences because policy documents and policymakers do not avoid the term gentrification, but actively engage with it. This engagement is related to strong criticisms voiced by active left-wing groups aiming to contest (neoliberal) urban developments including gentrification (see Scharenberg & Bader 2009). In reaction to these criticisms, policymakers tend to downplay processes of gentrification and represent it as merely a perception of residents and visitors. ...
... Nord-Neukölln is also characterised by strong, local discourses that are highly critical of current developments. In Berlin in general, a broad range of left-wing social activists have proven able to organise themselves effectively against large-scale projects (Scharenberg & Bader 2009). This factor arguably enhances the necessity for local authorities to engage with accusations of gentrification. ...
Gentrification plays a key role in the class transformations many major cities are currently experiencing. Urban neighbourhoods are remade according to middle-class preferences, often at the cost of lower-income groups. This dissertation investigates the influence of gentrification processes on socialspatial inequalities in urban regions, focusing specifically on Amsterdam and Rotterdam. It shows that gentrification constitutes a forceful process of urban change, affecting many neighbourhoods in different ways. These urban processes ultimately produce growing disparities between booming central areas and struggling peripheries and suburbs. In doing so, gentrification amplifies inequality between poor and affluent groups, but also exacerbates increasingly pressing inequalities between and within generations.
... The case of Nord-Neukölln is distinct from Anglo-Saxon experiences because policy documents and policymakers do not avoid the term gentrification, but actively engage with it. This engagement is related to strong criticisms voiced by active left-wing groups aiming to contest (neoliberal) urban developments including gentrification (see Scharenberg & Bader, 2009 reality was a frequently recurring theme during interviews with local public-policy stakeholders as well: ...
... Nord-Neukölln is also characterised by strong, local discourses that are highly critical of current developments. In Berlin in general, a broad range of left-wing social activists have proven able to organise themselves effectively against large-scale projects (Scharenberg & Bader, 2009). This factor arguably enhances the necessity for local authorities to engage with accusations of gentrification. ...
In recent years, several studies have highlighted how gentrification strategies are imposed under the discursive umbrella of ‘social mixing’. However, most evidence is based on Anglo-Saxon experiences. This paper sets out to expand the geography of gentrification by looking at the representation of processes and policies of gentrification as put forward by key stakeholders in Nord-Neukölln (Berlin) and Indische Buurt (Amsterdam). It shows that in both contexts, stakeholders and policy documents engage with the concept of gentrification, rather than avoid it. Due to public-policy influence and local criticisms, this engagement differs between both cases. In Nord-Neukölln, the term is heavily contested and policy-makers attempt to refute accusations of gentrification, while in the Indische Buurt, the process is explicitly pursued as a positive policy instrument by policy-makers. Different representations within each case are shown to be influenced by the characteristics of in-moving and out-moving residents; the employed timeframe and the perceived influence of institutions on urban regeneration.
... However, genuine engagement with communities in decision-making processes is rare. When devolution of decision-making occurs it generally shifts to large corporations, leading to conflict between communities and government (Daamen and Louw 2016;Hesse 2017;Scharenberg and Bader 2010). Accountable community partnership agreements are increasingly being adopted within large urban developments. ...
Urban waterfronts around the world, once the location of industry and trade, have transitioned to new uses. This shift raises important questions for the city-regions they serve, particularly concerning the sustainability of alternative uses. The literature on postindustrial waterfront development shows that many aspiring global cities have claimed waterfronts as places of sustainable urban development by promoting sustainable environmental practices, cultural preservation, and public precincts, parks, and esplanades. Critiques of waterfront developments have raised concerns about green gentrification, local displacement, and capture by global elites, all at the expense of social equity and shared economic prosperity. In this paper, we review the literature to investigate approaches to planning sustainable urban waterfronts in a global political economy. We consider five dimensions of sustainability – ecological, cultural, social, economic, and political – to interrogate how redeveloped urban waterfront sites can “work” to better serve their local and regional populations and ecosystems.
... Initially, the city' s economic struggles after decades of separation and the loss of the Cold War subsidies in both the East and West hampered boosterist visions of 'global city' Berlin (Bernt, Grell, and Holm 2013;Beveridge 2011) and slowed the development of the city' s voids, vacant buildings and ruins, providing ample spaces for alternative urbanisms (squats, clubs, political projects) to flourish through the 1990s (e.g. Scharenberg and Bader 2009). Contemporary Berlin has become a more attractive site for multinational firms, creative industries and start-ups, as well as a major (pre-COVID 19) tourist destination. ...
In debates urban wastelands can appear caught between stigmatisation and romanticisation, viewed either as blight or obscure opportunity. How can we conceive of these spaces in a more productive, yet contingent, way? This article examines the political and conceptual meanings of urban voids and explores their significance to understandings of cities and urban development. To emphasise the ways in which voids are mobilised for particular agendas, the article shows how professional and political lenses on the ‘city’ become entangled with these spaces and generate exclusions and contradictions. This is illustrated through a discussion of emblematic voids in Berlin and the ways in which they are made legible in relation to wider socio-political objectives. Taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s notion of the wish image, voids are seen to become subject to utopian wishes for the city. Projecting desires onto these voids, city lenses mobilise support for broader wishes for the city, whilst never fully realising them. To usefully consider the relations between voids, cities and citizens, we draw on German debates to think of voids as Brachen, meaning fallow or waiting lands, where absences of urbanisation offer a moment of pause to reveal the diverse wish images involved in the making of cities. As waiting land, the void asks questions of urbanites: for what purpose is it waiting, how should it be (re-)related to the city and who should be responsible?
... Based on the widespread rejection of the undemocratic development plans for the Mediaspree area and the shared goal of defending the value of intermediate uses, socio-cultural free spaces and quality of life beyond economic criteria, a district-wide alliance between the creative and left wing milieu was created, which became manifest as a new kind of protest movement in terms of both its form and activism (cf. Colomb and Novy 2011; Scharenberg and Bader 2009). In addition to a visible presence in the district, this alliance also resulted in a variety of creative forms of protest in the run up to the referendum. ...
... Based on the widespread rejection of the undemocratic development plans for the Mediaspree area and the shared goal of defending the value of intermediate uses, socio-cultural free spaces and quality of life beyond economic criteria, a district-wide alliance between the creative and left wing milieu was created, which became manifest as a new kind of protest movement in terms of both its form and activism (cf. Colomb and Novy 2011; Scharenberg and Bader 2009). In addition to a visible presence in the district, this alliance also resulted in a variety of creative forms of protest in the run up to the referendum. ...
... However, it was not well received by local residents and a number of citizen initiatives were quickly formed to oppose it. Numerous protests and campaigns led to a referendum in July 2008 that resulted in victory for the citizen initiatives and an agreement to renegotiate the terms of the remaining development plans (Scharenberg and Bader 2010). ...
In December 2014 two of Berlin’s most famous street art murals were painted black. Fans of the murals responded by using social media to blame the owner of the ‘Cuvrybrache’ – the vacant plot in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg that the murals overlooked. Many assumed that a campaign to heritage-list the murals in response to the Cuvrybrache’s planned redevelopment had led the plot’s owners to take matters into their own hands. In fact, as this article details, it was more surprising who was responsible for the mural’s erasure: their creator, the street artist known as Blu. As some street art fans mourned their loss, the murals continued to be encountered by others, just as they always had, online. This article uses the case of the Cuvrybrache murals – replete with forces of ruination, processes of gentrification, and acts of iconoclasm – to explore the complexities of street art and heritage’s relationship with erasure and the manner by which this relationship is increasingly refracted through digital technologies and media. Drawing parallels between buffed urban walls and buffering digital screens, it argues that the pervasive digital preservation of street art encourages it and heritage in general to be further conceptualised as a societal performance.
... A decade later, in light of increasing rent and large-scale restructuring efforts by the city, many residents were organizing themselves again and new protests emerged. Scholars have paid particular attention to the aforementioned protest against the Media Spree project in 2008 which was located in Kreuzberg (Colomb, 2012;Dohnke, 2013;Novy, 2013;Scharenberg & Bader, 2009). Due to its size and significance for the district, it gained a lot of attention in the media as well. ...
This thesis explores how urban protest in the contemporary city is affected by processes of neoliberalization and de-politicization. For around one year, the Markthalle Neun in Berlin- Kreuzberg has been the focus of a protest group that is demanding a more open and inclusive market hall for everyone in the Kiez. The current protest takes place ten years after a different protest group was protesting the selling of the historic market hall and formulated similar demands. My focus will be on these two protests, to find out why there has formed new protest around the Markthalle Neun and how the current protest differs from the initial protest in 2010. In order to answer this question, I have conducted interviews with stakeholders and collected other sources. This data will be analyzed in a critical thematic analysis through González‘ (2019) framework for urban contestation and marketplaces. It will be argued that despite the differences of the two protest groups, both failed to build broad alliances and address the underlying structural causes of the issues negotiated in the conflict. This is due to the post-political character of politics and public discourse that has led to conflicts, such as the one about the Markthalle Neun forming around pseudo oppositions, instead of negotiating more fundamental issues.
... On a citywide level, club culture can serve as a desirable asset in global city marketing, but a successful economic development strategy also threatens the preconditions for vibrant creative or alternative culture: inexpensive space and cost of living, a critical mass of creative individuals (Colomb, 2012;Shaw, 2013) with space for diverse "outsider" perspectives (Hall, 2000). The MediaSpree project exemplified this tendency, with corporations such as MTV and Universal drawn by Berlin's vibrant youth and club culture displacing key spaces of that culture despite self-organization efforts of the local scene (Scharenberg & Bader, 2009;Hesse & Lange, 2012). This paradox is viewed with resignation: subcultural actors must either be institutionalized or displaced (Shaw, 2005), while Kuchar (2020) views this appropriation by city marketing as simply "the price clubs must pay to maintain their freedom" (translated Kuchar, 2020, p. 252). ...
This chapter addresses the rise of night-time economies in two major countries in the Global North (Germany and Japan) from a cultural policy perspective, focusing in particular on Berlin and Tokyo as major night-time hubs. Building on existing research, which has typically focused on major Western economic hubs like London and New York, the paper makes two main contributions by (1) comparing the development of cultural policy in two distinct global regions and (2) highlighting the role of culture and cultural histories, spaces and meanings in shaping relevant policies. The research draws on a range of different sources, including policy documents, interviews with policymakers, interviews with night-time workers in Berlin and Tokyo and relevant statistical data.The chapter reports several interesting findings. (1) Policy formation in both of these seemingly disparate countries is strongly influenced by the historical conflation of power and culture. (2) In both cases, the emergence of a flourishing night-time economy is driven by intermittent state policy supports that lack any clear or definitive power. (3) Linear and holistic models fail to account for inequities in the spatial distribution, success and downfall of night-time economies.The paper enhances existing understanding of policy cycles that account for these complex entanglements and resists any stereotypical account of cultural planning and distribution.
... Fourth, studies of who is included and benefits most from waterfront developments i.e. social and political elites and who is excluded and benefits least i.e. the less affluent. These include work conducted in Belfast (Boland et al., 2017), Berlin (Scharenberg & Bader, 2009) and Oslo (Bjerkeset & Aspen, 2017). ...
This paper explores the under-researched intersections between the trajectories of luxury waterfront property led development and changing contemporary tourism product supply and offer. A case study approach is used and positioned within the context of mediatised, financialised neoliberal capitalism and interpreted through the lens of critical theory. It focuses on prestige property developments in Malta and on how tourists are being given the opportunity of ‘buying into’ the lifestyles of the affluent elite. Qualitative bricolage methods are utilised. The study argues that the adaptive reuse of luxury property by tourists is stalling potential waterfront development decline. Through conspicuous consumption and the search for status symbolism by tourists, economic resilience is strengthened. The significance of this case study is that it introduces this particular tourism property relationship as a new area of research and opens up opportunities for further conceptualisation and theoretical contexts.
... This project aimed to improve conditions for cultural industries and attract large creative sector corporations to the area, while at the same time using the 'authenticity of the sub-culture' and the 'creative and alternative image of the neighbourhood' as a key asset for city marketing (Novy and Colomb, 2013). However, due to widespread concern surrounding gentrification and the displacement of the area's sub-cultural fabric, the project found itself facing huge protests, which in 2008 culminated in a referendum forcing developers to reconsider many of the existing plans (Scharenberg and Bader, 2009). Much of the opposition to 'Media Spree' was driven by Berlin: A Study of What Creative Entrepreneurs Value in Germany's Capital and the Role of its Unique History. ...
... In their opinion, culture constitutes the strength of Berlin, while the city's government was not acting accordingly. In particular, the ongoing sale of public land and properties in inner-city areas (see Bernt et al., 2013;Scharenberg & Bader, 2009) was regarded as the most counter-productive political decision for stimulating cultural production in Berlin. Interviewees, therefore, urged politicians "to not mess up Berlin's incredible potential." ...
... In their opinion, culture constitutes the strength of Berlin, while the city's government was not acting accordingly. In particular, the ongoing sale of public land and properties in inner-city areas (see Bernt et al., 2013;Scharenberg & Bader, 2009) was regarded as the most counter-productive political decision for stimulating cultural production in Berlin. Interviewees, therefore, urged politicians "to not mess up Berlin's incredible potential." ...
This chapter explores how political actors constitute themselves and how they intervene in existing urban governance arrangements to enact alternative visions of social and cultural urban development. It draws on empirical studies from Berlin where artists and independent cultural producers have been carving out a space for themselves in governance arrangements to shape alternative ideas of Berlin’s future. Identifying the actor constellations and the resources they mobilize through a lens of conflict and consensus reveals the mechanisms through which stakeholders contested and (re)appropriated the politicized rhetoric of the ‘Creative City.’ The chapter demonstrates how collectivization efforts of cultural workers have differently (re)shaped the political opportunity structures in place to influence and intervene in Berlin’s urban cultural and creative politics.
... A case in point is the redevelopment of Mediaspree -part of Berlin's waterfront regeneration in the early 2000s -which encountered massive resistance from the small-scale cultural enterprises and temporary users that had occupied the disused sites in the previous decade. The protest, led by a coalition of artists, cultural entrepreneurs, club owners and activists who initiated the temporary uses and were labelled "young creatives" by the Berlin Senate, finally succeeded in persuading investors and the local state to reconsider their redevelopment plans (Novy and Colomb, 2013;Scharenberg and Bader, 2009). Similar cases also can be found in the development of a creative/cultural economy in East Asia, including Seoul's Dongdaemun History and Culture Park, in which the regeneration project eventually incorporated some of the previously resisting street vendors into the matrix of the creative city development project that initially sought to exclude them (Bowen, 2015); Busan's Totatoga project, in which the informal creative class, who were previously ignored or even evicted by the local authorities, was eventually recognized as a valuable asset in the city's cultural development strategies (Park, 2015); and Osaka, where top-down creative city policies failed, but a lively and inclusive grassroots movement led by artists and creative workers emerged and transformed Osaka into a socially-inclusive and culturally vibrant creative city (Sasaki, 2010). ...
In East Asia, a top-down discourse of making creative/cultural cities, accompanied by widespread local state-led campaigns and their contestations, are now in full swing. ‘Creative/culture-oriented’ local governments equipped with various entrepreneurial strategies, as well as the grassroots creative class, have emerged as two distinct forces shaping new urban spaces that differ significantly from their Western counterparts. East Asian cities have thus gained value for the revisiting and interrogation of established academic debates regarding creative/cultural cities, which until recently were based primarily on Western experiences. This themed issue thus aims to present a fresh and enriched understanding of the making of creative/cultural cities in East Asia and the emerging contestations based on two sets of interrelated analyses: first, a multi-scalar analysis of the role of the state in the making of creative/cultural cities and various forms of creative and cultural clusters; and second, the discontent and resistance of the creative class and wider social groups against top-down strategies. We hope that this concerted effort can contribute to the unravelling of the complexity and peculiarity of the policies, practices, outcomes, and, especially, contestations of East Asia's creative/cultural city making efforts. More importantly, we expect this collective effort to be added to the growing body of work challenging Western urban theories, which can be of limited utility in understanding urbanism elsewhere.
... It is this revolutionary form of appropriation, which Lefebvre meant to discover in 1968 Paris and which contemporary movements are referring to. They include the occupations and campaigns that in late 2009 forced the city of Hamburg to buy back, at a hefty loss, the blocks of old trade buildings in the so-called Gängeviertel, which had already been handed over to investors for development (see the Manifesto "Not in Our Name" 18 ); similarly, a broad coalition against the Media Spree complex in Berlin (called Mega-Spree Coalition) comprising a host of different citizens initiatives, was able to mobilize for huge street protests in the summer of 2010 against the selling-off of the city to corporate investors (Schwarzbeck 2010;Scharenberg and Bader 2009); or the "Right to the City"-group in Zagreb which for three years prevented-with petitions, blockades, and broad support from the public-the implementation of an investor plan to develop the central Flower Square into an upscale, exclusive, traffic-rich plaza with underground parking, to jumpstart gentrification of the surrounding area (Caldarovic and Sarinic 2008). 19 In the US, the "right to the city" was even turned into a platform, when neighborhood, tenant, and labor-community organizations based in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and more than a dozen other cities not only networked with each other, but joined together in a nationwide Right to the City Alliance. ...
... Culture-led regeneration is effective if culture is enabled to function as a 'translation device' among different spheres of the urban realm that deploys new problem-solving strategies to key planning problems. Consequently, no culture-led regeneration project may reasonably succeed at this scale without a real attempt at mobilizing and involving the local community in order to generate substantial and permanent changes as to how urban issues are perceived, tackled and solved (Scharenberg & Bader, 2009). This is to a large extent a self-catalytic process, whereby the accumulation of the assets that are needed to support the needed change in attitudes, such as certain types of human and social capital, crucially depends in turn on a sustained mobilization capacity and so on (Sacco & Tavano Blessi, 2009;Tavano Blessi, Tremblay, Pilati, & Sandri, 2012). ...
This article focuses upon the relationship between culture, urban
regeneration schemes, and their impact on socio-cognitive
assets – namely, social and human capital. It examines three
major urban regeneration projects in the districts of Saint Michel
(Montreal, Canada), Auburn (Sydney, Australia) and Bicocca (Milan,
Italy), where culture has been invoked as a main transformational
driver at the economic and socio-environmental levels, but with
different approaches and results. Through comparative analysis,
we develop a more general reflection on the social impact of
culture-led urban transformation processes, questioning the actual
role of cultural initiatives – particularly those related to the
creation of new cultural facilities and the programming of big
cultural flagship events – and participation as a means to improve
the local social milieu. We find that a key role for social efficacy is
played by projects’ capacity to elicit the commitment of residents
through inclusive cultural participation, as opposed to
instrumental top-down initiatives mainly addressing city and
neighbourhood branding and real estate marketing purposes.
... Rodatz 2012). In many cities, formerly dilapidated neighbourhoods that have been spiffed up by squatters and today feature music scenes and hip clubs and beach bars, have become key to official city marketing discourses (eg Scharenberg and Bader, 2009 for Berlin). Such creative city policies benefit both empty city coffers and precarious creative workers or groups whose talents can be harnessed for cultural upgrades of the city, but who cannot afford the high costs of renting central city space. ...
It is instructive to look at Pahl's Whose City? from today's perspective, though urban development and governance, in fact the very definition of the urban, have fundamentally transformed over these last 50 years. Comparing and contrasting the meaning of Whose City? then and now allows for a critical reflection of the changes neoliberal restructuring has wrought on urban landscapes and various stakeholders struggling over (the definition of and access to) the city. Such comparison helps to shed light on the (changing) role of urban sociology and urban theory in these transformation processes in general and on the ways in which critical urbanism has changed in response to these processes in particular.
... Thus, all citizens ('the public at large') benefit as urban renewal breathes new life into previously dead economic zones; as such, the interests of the private sector lead to public benefit. However, this narrative distracts discussion away from the politics of distribution concerning those other publics who are excluded from the benefits that regeneration brings (Hagerman, 2007;Lennon, 2016;Scharenberg & Bader, 2009). Importantly, the construction of public benefit lies in the hands of powerful actors, i.e. private sector, developers, planners and other state agents, with a discernible neoliberal bent (Holden, Scerri, & Esfahani, 2015;Lehrer & Laidley, 2008;Raco, 2000;Sandercock & Dovey, 2002). ...
... Although it has its intellectual home in planning, this waterfront literature increasingly transcends disciplinary boundaries and has interrogated a wide range of issues bound up in the redevelopment of 'disused industrial land related to former port uses' (Dovey, 2005, p. 9). These issues range from planning procedures (Dovey 2005;Cowan and Bunce, 2006) to sustainable design and political-ecological consequences (Bunce and Desfor, 2007;Laidley 2007;Bunce, 2009), from land reclamation (Norcliffe et al., 1996) to governance and management (Bassett et al., 2002;Desfor and Jørgenson, 2004), from leisure and gentrified residential developments (Wakefield, 2007) to struggles and resistance over future development (Lehrer and Laidley 2009;Scharenberg and Bader, 2009 This work is clearly not without its insights. Nevertheless, a number of important theoretical questions are raised by the pursuing of waterfront redevelopment 9 strategies in so many different localities around the world over the last thirty-five years or so. ...
This study uses the ongoing attempts to redevelop Cleveland's waterfront to reveal the relational comparative geographies that are present in a number of contemporary urban revalorization strategies. It draws on archival documents, semi-structured interviews, and the local gray literature to make three contributions to the existing urban-global studies literature. First, the article argues that many contemporary waterfront and other similar redevelopment schemes are inherently comparative, with a significant proportion of seemingly territorial politics and urban policy-making characterized by actors' engagements with places elsewhere. Second, it shows that the framing of urban policy through relational comparisons is an established practice in many cities, and that current redevelopment plans should be understood as informed by previous rounds of relational and territorial policy-making. And third, it points to the importance of consultants in the current era—as examples of actors of transference—in shaping not only redevelopment plans but also the framing of the city in relation to other cities.
... Many of the emblematic projects needed substantial government subsidies to get started (Gordon, 1997). Even so, largescale urban regeneration on the waterfront is often associated with neo-liberal policy (Brownill, 2013;Desfor and Jørgensen, 2004;Lehrer and Laidley, 2008;Murphy, 2008;Oakley, 2011;O'Callaghan and Linehan, 2007;Scharenberg and Bader, 2009;Swyngedouw et al., 2002). When selecting the waterfront regeneration area of Nedre Elvehavn for closer study, the idea was that if neo-liberal economic interests are not shown to dominate planning there, they are even less likely to be hegemonic in other kinds of large-scale urban development projects in Norway. ...
The aim is to study how ideologies come through in urban regeneration plans. Neo-liberalism, participatory democracy and environmentalism are systems of ideas competing for the minds of citizens in large parts of the world. Typical urban policies linked to each ideology are listed to provide a basis for identifying features of development plans that reflect aspirations for an entrepreneurial, green or open and inclusive society. A case study from Trondheim, Norway, maps ideological traces in waterfront development plans. The central question to be addressed is whether the internationally widespread allegations of neo-liberal hegemony over urban plans are reasonable. In light of the case data, it can be questioned whether neo-liberal ideology, although influential, is hegemonic in the plans. This doubt lingers, even if the chosen case Nedre Elvehavn is the kind of large-scale transformation of former dockyards close to the central business district that is often regarded as prototypical neo-liberal development in academic planning literature.
... They analysed waterfronts from various perspectives such as the symbolic value of waterfronts regarding the planning or the marketing of the city (Short, J.R. et al. 1993). The confl icting nature of waterfront regeneration and the role of various stakeholders were evaluated in the case of Berlin by Scharenberg, A. and Bader, I. (2009). Perceptions of citizens and the socio-economic impact of fl agship projects were investigated by Doucet, B. et al. (2010). ...
Waterfront areas are undergoing rapid transformation in many post-socialist cities. This
paper focuses on the uneven access to the waterfront in post-socialist Bratislava. We use the
bluefi eld concept of Pinch, P. and Munt, I. (2002). The goal of the paper is to investigate the
mechanisms and key forces of waterfront transformation in post-socialist Bratislava in the
context of institutional practices, where the role of individual stakeholders and planning are
critically evaluated. The limited capacity of post-socialist institutions to mediate and respond
to the dynamically increasing demand to waterfronts is highlighted. In the paper two case
study areas are investigated with sharply diff erent conditions. In the case of Karlova Ves
cove contradictions between the use value and exchange value is demonstrated, leading
to a sharp struggle among potential users. The transformation of the second chosen area,
Jarovce river branch, demonstrates a power invasion in the area and the illegal privatisation
of public areas by ‘bett er off ’ people. The comparison of transformations of these two
localities in a relatively similar time frame, provides a picture about the uneven struggle
for access. Both discussed examples draw att ention to persisting institutional adaptation
and the fragile de facto position of the municipality in urban development.
In the past 40 years, alternative cultural institutions have been established in many Western welfare states to respond locally to the social and urban crises that have arisen in the post-war era. Community centres and workshops for local history and youth offer new opportunities for cultural and social participation and complement the offerings at more traditional cultural infrastructures such as art museums, theatres, and opera houses. Initially borne of grassroots movements that struggled for political recognition and necessary resources in protracted disputes with municipal authorities, these facilities now play important roles in the cultural landscape of many cities. In response to calls for a “democratisation of culture” and social development programmes targeting urban geographical inequalities, these institutions provide accessible and persistent spaces for socialisation, cultural empowerment, and negotiating community concerns. These facilities are often located on brownfields and are material manifestations of socioeconomic change and urban regeneration. Using the relocation of an established socio-cultural centre to a new neighbourhood in the city of Heidelberg, Germany, as an example, we seek to understand the evolving ways political and social relations are formed, negotiated, and challenged through cultural infrastructures. By analysing newspaper coverage, policy documents, and interviews with stakeholders from urban planning, city administration, community work, and resident populations, we map and evaluate shifting planning discourses and forms of embeddedness in the processes of de- and re-localisation. We end by reflecting on more open and nuanced understandings of cultural infrastructures that could generate multiple and diverse outcomes interacting and possibly outbalancing each other.
This article explores the competing visions of urban planning that influenced newly reunified Berlin's highly contested bid, undertaken between 1990 and 1993, to host the 2000 Olympic Games. The governing city parliament coalition, mainstream media, and private corporations embraced the Games as the key to Berlin's future. The Olympics would draw investors, reunify infrastructure, foster a common “Berlin” identity among newly reunited Berlin's residents, upgrade borderland spaces and eastern neighborhoods, and boost Berlin's prominence as a global city. Alternatively, numerous protesters from both East and West, proclaiming their right to provide meaningful input into the uses of urban space, staged creative protest actions highlighting the negative social, political, and environmental effects of the proposed Games on Berlin and its neighborhoods. Ultimately, supporters and opponents diverged on the matter of who had the right to determine the use of urban space: the city government and private corporations or city residents who believed they knew best what benefited their own neighborhoods. In the end, Berlin lost its bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. Nonetheless, creative resistance efforts designed to offer democratic alternatives to growth- and investment-oriented urban planning and to protect residents’ rights to codetermine urban space, often emerging in response to planned mega-events and large development projects, persist more than two decades later, not only in Berlin but in other major metropolises around the globe.
Comparative Approaches to Development Politics and the Quest for a More Robust Theory: New Institutions of Governance in Chicago and Berlin - Volume 53 Issue 1 - Annika Marlen Hinze, James M. Smith
This article examines how affective atmospheres are constituted and used to sustain regeneration megaprojects. I argue that certain affective atmospheres engendered in particular urban contexts are essential to facilitating transformation in contemporary urban areas. Through the convergence of affective encounters, spatial imaginations and common goals in performative ways, affective atmospheres are forged and circulated to legitimise political decisions and urban policies. Moving beyond the conventional approach to examining waterfront regeneration, this paper attempts to capture the inherent relationship between affective dynamics and spatial practices that characterises megaprojects and dominates public opinion.
The key claim of this article is that regeneration projects are emotionally mediated and sustained on the foundations of affective atmospheres in which myriad affects underlying everyday life are assembled to enhance municipal power and direct pubic concerns. The presented case study shows that the Asia New Bay Area (ANBA) project activated an affective atmosphere in a context-specific way, in which affective sensations situated in place experiences are assembled to challenge the physical and political landscape. It demonstrates that unfolding the city's affective, emotional and atmospheric resonances is critical to grasping how the megaproject can be justified and, furthermore, the orientation and rationale of spatial practices. Finally it outlines pragmatic suggestions for policy reform that address regeneration megaprojects in socially meaningful ways.
In January 2014, residents and activists in Hamburg protested against the declaration of a so-called danger zone (Gefahrengebiet). The police created the zone after violent attacks on police stations had taken place. Inside this danger zone, the police were authorized to search and restrict the mobility of pedestrians. The protest attracted a high level of media coverage due to its creativity. My article discusses a form of protest, which activists and residents invented during the ongoing protest called "Danger Zone - The Real Life Game." By utilizing playful practices, as well as narratives, activists contested the measures of the police throughout the protest and also, therefore, its interpretation by the media and by the police. Furthermore, they managed to link online to offline practices.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the academic debate on participatory urban development in two ways: first, by proposing a methodological framework though which urban policies can be assessed; and second, through a case study that applies the framework, delivering an analysis of the policy intentions of the current Berlin administration.
Design/methodology/approach
The first section of this paper introduces the case study, placing it in the political context in Berlin and suggesting an initial reading of the relevant documents that frame policy in participatory urban development today. The second section includes an attempt at disambiguation, a conceptual and an analytical framework, followed by a preliminary assessment of the Berlin participatory policy. The final part of this paper draws conclusions and sets a possible future research agenda.
Findings
Participation is present in several passages of the Contract and refers to different possible readings of the term: participation as institutional framework, participation as rights, participation in the public sphere and participation as practice.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the disambiguation of the concept of “citizen participation”, proposes a framework through which to assess policy and offers an initial analysis of the policy intentions of the current Berlin administration.
Markets, Politics and the Environment answers three groups of question:•What is planning?' and as part of this ‘What are its key features as a style of social practice and action?’ and ‘How does planning as a style of social practice relate to social and economic change?•How, as part of the justification for planning, might claims of valid technical knowledge be constructed? What is meant by ‘rational’? What is the contribution of pragmatism as a supplement or replacement to rationalism? How might rationality and pragmatism be adapted to postmodernism and the requirements of diversity?•Finally, how may concepts of planning be reoriented towards sustainable development as a collective duty? How might sustainable development be reworked in relation to planning as a means of managing and stimulating change? Each group of question is discussed in a separate chapter and is associated with different theories, debates and examples of practice. Markets, Politics and the Environment concludes that the full implications of sustainable development and climate change point in the direction of a different type of state- a green state whose future functioning can draw on planning theory but at present can only be conceived as a sketchy outline.
The chapter outlines the explosion of ‘temporary uses’ of vacant urban spaces in Berlin since the 1990s and reviews how such uses have been mobilized in local economic development and place marketing strategies, a process which has generated tensions and dilemmas for temporary users. It discusses the various trajectories of Berlin's ‘interim spaces’ since the early 2000s (survival and/or transformation in situ, displacement or disappearance), and the conflicts and forms of resistance which have occurred when temporary uses are threatened. Finally, it analyses the public debates and protests which have occurred post 2010 about the future use of the Tempelhof airfield site, in which the potential displacement or transformation of temporary uses played an important role. The chapter analyses the implications of such protests for the city government's urban development approach, and the emerging conundrum for planners and landowners about the future acceptance of temporary uses on vacant urban spaces.
In contrast to the overwhelming rural and coastal/regional bias in the lifestyle migration literature we are interested in the imaginative pull and attraction of one contemporary global city, Berlin. Since unification Berlin has become a magnet for an increasingly diverse European migrant middle class, fostered — as in other parts of Europe — by intra EU freedom of movement and the creation of a distinctive European migration space (Scott 2006; Verwiebe 2004). In keeping with the broader research on intra EU migration (Recchi 2008), it appears that a significant part of middle-class movement to Berlin is due to the cultural and lifestyle attractions of the city rather than the pull of employment (Verwiebe 2011: 14–15). Lifestyle migration to Berlin is nevertheless relatively unexplored in the literature, despite the increase in overall migrant numbers and the growth in tourism which the city has experienced in recent years.
During my recent transition (in 2010) from the heritage sector to higher education, with an attendant shift of focus from heritage practice to an emphasis more on its theoretical foundations, I have had the opportunity to rethink earlier work, and examine — often se If-critically — how practice measures up to social needs and expectations: to what extent are ‘heritage communities’ (defined recently under Faro (Council of Europe 2005, Article 2) as consisting of ‘people who value specific aspects of cultural heritage which they wish, within the framework of public action, to sustain and transmit to future generations’) effectively represented by and in the heritage sector? My conclusion is that they are, but only to a certain degree. The heritage sector does represent the public interest through promoting understanding and awareness of the past, and protecting some key resources for the benefit of this and future generations. But heritage suffers (as it has always suffered, arguably) from representing only specific versions of the past: those that refer, simply, to the great and the good, the special and the iconic, the nationally important and the outstanding. This means that heritage may only seem relevant to a subset of the population. This selective approach has been effectively and comprehensively critiqued by Laurajane Smith — in her various assaults on the ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (e.g., 2006) and in the Faro Convention (Council of Europe, 2005), which recognizes the need to put ‘all people and human values at the centre of an enlarged and cross-disciplinary concept of cultural heritage’, and is convinced of the need to involve ‘everyone in society in the ongoing process of defining and managing cultural heritage’.
Despite decades of debate, participatory planning continues to be contested. More recently, research has revealed a relationship between participation and neoliberalism, in which participation works as a post-political tool—a means to depoliticize planning and legitimize neoliberal policy-making. This article argues that such accounts lack attention to the opportunities for opposing neoliberal planning that may be inherent within participatory processes. In order to further an understanding of the workings of resistance within planning, it suggests the notion of insurgent participation—a mode of contentious intervention in participatory approaches. It develops this concept through the analysis of various participatory approaches launched to regenerate the former airport Berlin-Tempelhof. A critical reading of participation in Tempelhof reveals a contradictory process. Although participatory methods worked to mobilize support for predefined agendas, their insurgent participation also allowed participants to criticize and shape the possibilities of engagement, challenge planning approaches and envision alternatives to capitalist imperatives.
Purpose
– This research aims to provide an insight into large-scale real estate projects in Europe and how they are using a more innovative blend of finance.
Design/methodology/approach
– The methodology involved a mix of desk-based study, interviews and case studies. Interviews were held with financiers, policymakers, developers, investors, fund managers and academics. The specific case projects were Battersea Power Station Development in London; Leipziger Platz site in Berlin; and the Lammenschans site in the city of Leiden, The Netherlands.
Findings
– The research found that there is growth in the blend of financial products used in real estate development within large-scale mixed-use projects. This new blend is set with greater equity financing, often from domestic and foreign consortiums generating institutional funds – alongside private debt financing – that utilise a mix of large-scale multi-bank finance.
Practical implications
– The scale of the challenge in financing real estate development allied with capital budget constraints has meant that the appetite for innovative finance mechanisms has gained considerable momentum in practice and policy. This research investigates current examples in development finance and provides a discussion of the opinion of key multi-stakeholder participants in the individual cases, and trends more strategically at a broader level.
Originality/value
– This detailed study of three major development sites and at a more broader strategic level is significant, in that it provides a better understanding of the differing blends of finance that are being used.
Berlin is changing, arguably more and faster than ever before. The city is striving to overcome political and social divisions of the Cold War, divisions that continue to shape development deep into the twenty-first century. From the rubble of the Cold War and Second World War, a new ultra-modern capital city is emerging. This is good. But it also creates a dilemma: Berlin has long attracted people who pursue alternative lifestyles, thus creating complex networks of alternative scenes that have come to characterize the city, specifically in “cool” or “hip” neighborhoods like Kreuzberg. These alternative scenes form an important part of the city’s heritage, and one that is directly threatened by this re-emergence. Berlin Techno exemplifies this dilemma. Its clubs typically exist in historic (often former industrial) buildings and mark explicit reference to heritage both by retaining architectural elements that characterize the buildings and the sounds and scenes created there and by recalling iconic “historic” performances. Their distribution shifts in advance of gentrification, creating a distinctive and fast moving landscape that is itself characteristic of the contemporary city, and often of alternative or “underground” scenes in general. These “temporary autonomous zones” are important areas for cultural engagement and production. The music too has its heritage, as old (late 1980s) samples are included in contemporary compositions in much the same as older phases of a building are incorporated into new design. We argue that this “underground” heritage is essential to social and cultural sustainability. To deny that here, in Berlin of all places, is to deny the city its capacity to attract and sustain alternative lifestyles, thus compromising its very identity.
Artistic Lives challenges recent policy discourses that celebrate the ability of cultural producers to create something from nothing, and, more generally, the myth of creativity as an individual phenomenon, divorced from social context. Presenting rich interview material with artists and arts professionals in London and Berlin, together with ethnographic descriptions, Artistic Lives engages with debates surrounding Post-Fordism, gentrification and the nature of authorship, to raise challenging questions about the function of culture and the role of artists within contemporary capitalism.
Over the past two decades community activists in distressed urban neighborhoods have been organizing to improve environmental quality and livability for residents through parks, playgrounds, gardens, farms, or sports facilities, and this across political systems and contexts of urbanization. To date, however, limited research has been conducted on the development and intricacies of neighborhood activism for long-term environmental justice in marginalized neighborhoods, and little work has been done in a comparative manner and through a place-based approach. Through three historically marginalized neighborhoods in Boston, Barcelona, and Havana, I analyze how internal dynamics and external contexts shape community organization towards improved environmental quality and livability, and how mobilization unfolds over time and space. Findings reveal that activists tend to resort to similar tactical choices to achieve their objectives, including broad and flexible coalitions, and what I call bottom-to-bottom networks encompassing three forms of activism: street activism, technical activism, and funder activism.
This book challenges the new urban growth concepts of the creative class and creative industries from a critical urban theory perspective. • Critiques Richard Florida's popular books about cities and the creative class • Presents an alternative approach based on analyses of empirical research data concerning the German urban system and the case study regions, Hanover and Berlin • Underscores that the culture industry takes a leading role in conforming with neoliberal conceptions of labor markets.
The paper applies a Schumpeterian analysis of entrepreneurial cities to Hong Kong. It argues that the concept of entrepreneurship can be applied to cities as strategic actors, identifies various objects of urban entrepreneurship, and refers to the important role of entrepreneurial discourses, narratives and self-images. Despite its laissez-faire reputation, Hong Kong has a long history of urban entrepreneurship, but its strategies have been adapted to changing circumstances-most recently with its key role in an emerging cross-border region (Greater China) and its favourable insertion into the global economy. This has prompted a debate over the most appropriate strategies for Hong Kong, notably regarding the respective futures of manufacturing, services and the virtual economy. The concept of 'glurbanisation' as one form of the more general phenomenon of 'glocalisation' is introduced to illuminate these issues. The paper concludes by noting the increased importance of 'Siliconisation' as an accumulation strategy in east Asia.
O ver two decades ago, the term “restructuring” became a popular label for describing the tumultuous political-economic and spatial transformations that were unfolding across the global urban system. As Edward Soja (1987: 178; italics in original) indicated in a classic formulation: Restructuring is meant to convey a break in secular trends and a shift towards a significantly different order and configuration of social, economic and political life. It thus evokes a sequence of breaking down and building up again, deconstruction and attempted reconstitution , arising from certain incapacities or weaknesses in the established order which preclude conventional adaptations and demand significant structural change instead […] Restructuring implies flux and transition, offensive and defensive postures, a complex mix of continuity and change. In the 1980s and early 1990s, scholars mobilized a variety of categories—including, among others, deindustrialization, reindustrialization, post-Fordism, internationalization, global city formation, urban entrepreneurialism, informalization, gentrification and sociospatial polarization—in order to describe and theorize the ongoing deconstruction and attempted reconstitution of urban social space. These concepts provided key intellectual tools through which a generation of urbanists could elaborate detailed empirical studies of ongoing urban transformations both in North America and beyond. In the early 2000s, such concepts remain central to urban political economy, but they are now being complemented by references to “neoliberalism,” which is increasingly seen as an essential descriptor of the contemporary urban condition. This widening and deepening interest in the problematic of neoliberalism among urban scholars is evident in the papers presented in this special issue of CITY : all deploy variations on this terminology—“neoliberalism,” “neoliberal,” “neoliberalized,” “neoliberalization,” and so forth—in order to interpret major aspects of contemporary urban restructuring in North American cities. At the same time, like earlier analysts of urban restructuring, the contributors to this special issue reject linear models of urban transition, emphasizing instead its uneven, contentious, volatile and uncertain character. Indeed, each of the contributions included here suggestively illustrates Soja's conception of restructuring: whether implicitly or explicitly, each postulates a systemic breakdown of established forms of urban life (generally associated with postwar, Fordist-Keynesian capitalism) and the subsequent proliferation of social, political, discursive, and representational struggles to create a transformed, “neoliberalized” urban order.
The mega‐project is experiencing revived interest as a tool for urban renewal. The current mode of large‐scale urban development is, however, different from its predecessor in so far as its focus is flexible and diverse rather than singular and monolithic. However, the diversity that the new approach offers, we argue, forecloses upon a wide variety of social practices, reproducing rather than resolving urban inequality and disenfranchisement. Further, we suggest that the diversity of forms and land uses employed in these mega‐projects inhibits the growth of oppositional and contestational practices. The new mega‐project also demonstrates a shift from collective benefits to a more individualized form of public benefit. The article is based on Toronto's recent waterfront development proposals, which we identify as an example of a new paradigm of mega‐project development within the framework of the competitive city. Its stated but paradoxical goal is to specialize in everything, allowing for the pretence that all interests are being served while simultaneously re‐inscribing and reinforcing socioeconomic divisions. Our findings are centred on four areas: institutional change; the importance of mega‐projects to global interurban competition; the exclusive nature of public participation processes; and the increasing commodification and circumscription of urban public space.
Résumé
Le mégaprojet connaît un regain d'intérêt en tant qu'outil de rénovation urbaine. Le mode actuel d'aménagement urbain à grande échelle diffère toutefois de son prédécesseur dans la mesure où son orientation est souple et diverse, au lieu d'être unique et monolithique. Cependant, à notre avis, la diversité qu'offre la nouvelle approche exclut une grande variété de pratiques sociales, puisqu'elle reproduit, plutôt qu'elle ne résout, l'inégalité urbaine et la privation de droits. De plus, la diversité dans les formes et les utilisations de l'espace de ces mégaprojets empêche le développement de pratiques d'opposition ou de contestation. En outre, le mégaprojet révèle un décalage des bénéfices collectifs vers une forme plus individualisée de bénéfice public. Les propositions récentes d'aménagement du front de mer de Toronto sont identifiées comme typiques d'un nouveau paradigme du mégaprojet d'aménagement dans le cadre de la ville compétitive. Son objectif affiché, quoique paradoxal, est d'être spécialisé en tout, ce qui permet de prétendre que tous les intérêts sont pris en compte, tout en réimplantant et en renforçant les divisions socio‐économiques. Nos résultats portent sur quatre aspects: la transformation des institutions, l'importance des mégaprojets dans la concurrence interurbaine mondiale, la nature exclusive des processus de participation publics, ainsi que l'accentuation de la marchandisation et des délimitations de l'espace public urbain.
This paper summarizes the theoretical insights drawn from a study of thirteen large–scale urban development projects (UDPs) in twelve European Union countries. The project focused on the way in which globalization and liberalization articulate with the emergence of new forms of governance, on the formation of a new scalar gestalt of governing and on the relationship between large–scale urban development and political, social and economic power relations in the city. Among the most important conclusions, we found that:
•Large–scale UDPs have increasingly been used as a vehicle to establish exceptionality measures in planning and policy procedures. This is part of a neoliberal “New Urban Policy” approach and its selective “middle — and upper–class” democracy. It is associated with new forms of “governing” urban interventions, characterized by less democratic and more elite–driven priorities.
•Local democratic participation mechanisms are not respected or are applied in a very “formalist” way, resulting in a new choreography of elite power. However, grassroots movements occasionally manage to turn the course of events in favor of local participation and of modest social returns for deprived social groups.
•The UDPs are poorly integrated at best into the wider urban process and planning system. As a consequence, their impact on a city as a whole and on the areas where the projects are located remains ambiguous.
•Most UDPs accentuate socioeconomic polarization through the working of real–estate markets (price rises and displacement of social or low–income housing), changes in the priorities of public budgets that are increasingly redirected from social objectives to investments in the built environment and the restructuring of the labor market.
•The UDPs reflect and embody a series of processes that are associated with changing spatial scales of governance; these changes, in turn, reflect a shifting geometry of power in the governing of urbanization.
Stadterneuerung ist immer politisch. Seit ca. 1990 haben sich wesentliche Koordinaten der Stadtpolitik verschoben: Im Dreieck von Raum, Macht und Sanierungspolitik vollzieht sich der Übergang von einer sozialstaatlichen zu einer postfordistischen Sanierungspolitik. Kennzeichnend dafür sind: die Ökonomisierung der Investition, die Flexibilisierung der administrativen Steuerung und die Individualisierung der Beteiligung. Am Beispiel der Ostberliner Sanierungsgebiete werden Wirkungsweise und Effekte einer neoliberalen Sanierungspolitik vor dem Hintergrund der Gentrification-Theorie detailliert beschrieben.
The desire of governments for a 'renaissance' of their cities is a defining feature of contemporary urban policy. From Melbourne and Toronto to Johannesburg and Istanbul, government policies are successfully attracting investment and middle-class populations to their inner areas. Regeneration - or gentrification as it can often become - produces winners and losers. There is a substantial literature on the causes and unequal effects of gentrification, and on the global and local conditions driving processes of dis- and re-investment. But there is little examination of the actual strategies used to achieve urban regeneration - what were their intents, did they 'succeed' (and if not why not) and what were the specific consequences? Whose Urban Renaissance? asks who benefits from these urban transformations. The book contains beautifully written and accessible stories from researchers and activists in 21 cities across Europe, North and South America, Asia, South Africa, the Middle East and Australia, each exploring a specific case of urban regeneration. Some chapters focus on government or market strategies driving the regeneration process, and look closely at the effects. Others look at the local contingencies that influence the way these strategies work. Still others look at instances of opposition and struggle, and at policy interventions that were used in some places to ameliorate the inequities of gentrification. Working from these stories, the editors develop a comparative analysis of regeneration strategies, with nuanced assessments of local constraints and counteracting policy responses. The concluding chapters provide a critical comparison of existing strategies, and open new directions for more equitable policy approaches in the future. © 2009 Selection and editorial matter, Libby Porter and Kate Shaw. All rights reserved.