Inclusion and Segregation in Berlin, the “Social City”

Abstract

The idea of the German city as an inclusive “Social City” (soziale Stadt)—that is, a city that actively seeks to solve social problems through a wide range of policies—has had a considerable influence on the “spatial image” and “urban meaning” of cities in Germany, both during the twentieth and now the twenty-first century.1 The concept of the “Social City” was shaped to a great degree by its delineation as a contrast to the American city, the regulatory model of which was based mostly on market mechanisms and community self-help models, and gained the reputation of an “unsocial” counter-concept to the German version. With regard to Berlin, certain socio-technical strategies designed to ensure a balanced mix of the social classes in urban space can already be discerned in the urban development plans that were drafted as early as the mid-nineteenth century to manage the growth explosion of the belated industrial metropolis. When the Social Democrats became the city’s governing party at the beginning of the Weimar Republic, the goal of making the metropolis into a balanced social space gained a political significance that it has retained to this day. Since the early 1990s, and in response to intensifying socio-spatial polarization and segregation processes, the normative model of the “Social City” has once again become one of the key elements of government programs and urban intervention strategies in reunified Berlin.

Full text

Chapter Three
Inclusion and Segregation in Berlin,
the “Social City”
Stephan Lanz
The idea of the German city as an inclusive “Social City” (soziale Stadt)—that is, a
city that actively seeks to solve social problems through a wide range of policies—
has had a considerable influence on the “spatial image” and “urban meaning” of
cities in Germany, both during the twentieth and now the twenty-first century.1
The concept of the “Social City” was shaped to a great degree by its delineation as
a contrast to the American city, the regulatory model of which was based mostly on
market mechanisms and community self-help models, and gained the reputation
of an “unsocial” counter-concept to the German version. With regard to Berlin,
certain socio-technical strategies designed to ensure a balanced mix of the social
classes in urban space can already be discerned in the urban development plans that
were drafted as early as the mid-nineteenth century to manage the growth explosion
of the belated industrial metropolis. When the Social Democrats became the city’s
governing party at the beginning of the Weimar Republic, the goal of making the
metropolis into a balanced social space gained a political significance that it has
retained to this day. Since the early 1990s, and in response to intensifying socio-
spatial polarization and segregation processes, the normative model of the “Social
City” has once again become one of the key elements of government programs and
urban intervention strategies in reunified Berlin.
Using the example of Berlin, this chapter discusses the history of the German
city as a “Social City,” focusing in particular on the relationships that form as a
result between class, ethnic group, and urban social policy, and the degree to which
transnational practices in the city are assisted or stymied by practices of residential
placement and displacement. Specifically, we can trace historical continuities and
changes with regard to discourses, characteristics, and modes of implementation of
the “Social City” both in politics and in urban planning, and thus better understand
and define the agenda of the “Social City” Berlin.
Class Antagonisms in the Expanding Industrial Metropolis
With the establishment of industrial production and the emergence of the proletar-
ian masses in the mid-nineteenth century, the face of Berlin became definitively

56 / stephan lanz
changed. Within just a few decades, the city’s population grew tenfold. But Berlin’s
flourishing industry was accompanied by a great deal of social misery. Living condi-
tions in the tenement blocks, the so-called rental barracks [Mietskasernen] of Berlin’s
working-class quarters, were often inhumane. Even basement and attic flats were
overcrowded; one-tenth of working-class households took in lodgers and night lodg-
ers. The National Liberals, who governed the city for decades and ensured the conti-
nuity of homeowners’ privileges codified in the three-class franchise system, favored
social policies of private welfare and of a traditional state as “provider.” These poli-
cies were based on “ideas of individualism and individual responsibility, a belief in
society’s ability to heal itself, and the notion of poverty as a personal fault.”2
Poverty in modern Berlin was not regarded as a social problem; instead, it was
seen as an expression of moral degeneracy. In the imaginary battle between order and
chaos, those excluded by society became the “dangerous classes” that were beyond
state control.3 The example of Berlin’s Scheunenviertel quarter, now part of Berlin-
Mitte but formerly outside the city walls where poor East European immigrants,
many of them Jewish, had settled, illustrates how (sub-)proletarian quarters were
systematically depicted as suspicious by newspapers and academic publications and
branded as a world beyond the bourgeois order. Notwithstanding their integration
into the labor market as laborers or domestic servants, their inhabitants were stigma-
tized as “revolutionaries, vagabonds, criminals” who willfully refused civilization.4
Against this background, one of the central debates in city politics of the era dealt
with the question of whether different classes should be kept separate or whether the
social strata should be mingled in mixed residential areas. The Berlin Land Use Plan
of 1863 (the Hobrecht Plan) codified the street lay-out and regulated the city’s ensu-
ing rapid growth. The Plan’s main editor, James Hobrecht, head of the “Planning
Commission of the Royal Police Headquarters,” naively defended the tenement
structure’s social mix within individual neighborhoods, and even within front and
rear buildings and attic, basement, and belle-étage apartments. He relied on the sup-
posedly civilizing effect of neighborly coexistence:
Out of moral, and hence governmental, considerations, it seems to me that not “seclu-
sion” but “diffusion” is called for . . . In the tenement blocks, the children from the
basement flats use the same hallway on their way to the free school as the coun-
cilman’s or the merchant’s children on their way to grammar school. A nourishing
bowl of soup in case of illness here, a piece of clothing there, effective assistance in
obtaining free schooling or the like—and everything that develops as a result of the
comfortable relationship between the residents, equal in nature, however different in
situation, is a help that exerts its ennobling influence on the giver.5
Hobrecht’s idea of a quasi-natural solidarity between the upper and the lower classes
was rooted in social romanticism; he also took it as a given that the latter needed to
be civilized and educated by the example given by the former. He was blind both to
the sharply conflicting interests between the social classes and to the power dispar-
ity between them. Although his idea of social mixing informed the urban expansion
plan, Berlin’s socio-spatial segregation became more pronounced as the city’s large-
scale industries grew. Nonetheless, the spatial image of a residential mixing of social
classes strongly influences the social policies of German cities to this day. It is fed,

inclusion and segregation in berlin / 57
still in keeping with Hobrecht’s projection, by a middle-class sense of superiority
vis-à-vis both the working class and (to use Marx’s term) the lumpenproletariat. This
has given rise to social techniques designed to “civilize” the poor and distribute these
populations across urban space.
The Beginnings of the “Social City” in Weimar-Era Berlin
Both in Prussia and in Berlin itself, the first free and equal elections, held in 1919,
were won by the Social Democrats, who had aspirations for a socialist modernization
of “Red Berlin,” as they dubbed the proletarian capital. In a sweeping reform of local
administration, they created, from 7 towns and 59 rural communities, the new entity
of Greater Berlin. In the 1920s, the city’s Magistrate (council) undertook to modern-
ize Berlin from the ground up by way of systematic urban planning and an effective
infrastructure and to turn this “giant cluster of a city” into a social space.6 And Berlin
did indeed become internationally renowned for its public transportation, waste dis-
posal, electricity and gas supply systems. But the city council’s biggest project was its
state-sponsored mass housing scheme. More than 130,000 apartments were built in
the new Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) style. Along with statutory rent control,
public housing was intended to further the social integration of urban society by sev-
ering the link between poverty and poor housing and living conditions.7
In 1925, a new building code put an end to the building of the Mietskasernen,
which had been sharply criticized for decades for the horrible living conditions they
had created. But even the building of mass housing could not keep up with the
demand for living space in the still-growing city. The continued existence, at the
end of the 1920s, of more than 40,000 shacks bore witness to the ongoing housing
shortage. Eventually, after the Great Crash of 1929, “Berlin’s economic, political
and cultural structure” collapsed, and the city’s socio-spatial polarization became
once again more pronounced.8 A quarter of its population was now dependent on
welfare; many people who had sunk into poverty were dwelling in dilapidated new
buildings, and national emergency relief schemes increasingly constricted the scope
of local self-government. It was no longer just the conservative side that considered
the modern social city a failed model.
Even this Social Democrat–run modern city, which today is considered an exem-
plary model of social integration, had structural exclusion mechanisms built into it.
Its welfare policy operated on a concept of society as a social “body” in the physi-
cal sense, with the proletariat as a health risk that endangered the nation through
epidemics or “degeneracy.” Influential sociopolitically motivated discourses on
urban development—such as those propagated by the Berlin economist Werner
Hegemann—became blended with the theory of eugenics, producing the argu-
ment that bad housing conditions and high urban density were harmful to German
genetic material. This view facilitated the propagation of lines of argument about
racial hygiene that were later taken up by the Nazis. In turn, the “New Building”
style (Neues Bauen) functioned as a “socio-aesthetic educational dictatorship.” Its
aim was to create, through education of “the broad masses of the population,” a
domestic culture based on hygiene, cleanliness, and order that would produce the
“New Man.” Everything that did not fit these parameters was rigorously excluded.9

58 / stephan lanz
Berlin’s Urban Renewal Agenda from the Wilhelmine
Era to the National Socialists
Urban renewal projects implemented at this time were based on similar ideology.
From the days of the monarchy through the Weimar Republic to the National
Socialists, the goal was to “cure”—to use the nomenclature of the day—the working-
class quarters that were the focal point of the public discourse on slums. A de facto
part of the rationale behind the wholesale razing of existing housing structures was
the physical dispersal of undesirable poor and immigrant communities.
This motivation is particularly well illustrated by the example of the previously
mentioned Scheunenviertel district, a site of projection for fears of a perceived dan-
gerous “agglomeration of the poor,” especially of Eastern European Jews who were
the primary targets of racist discourse. Many of them had fled pogroms in Eastern
Europe. Located adjacent to the Jewish-bourgeois neighborhood of Spandauer
Vorstadt with its new synagogue, the Scheunenviertel offered cheap housing and
was characterized by poverty and petty crime. One contemporaneous commentator
on urban renewal, Otto Schilling, compared its social conditions with those of the
slums of London.10
In 1906, Berlin’s magistrate began with the implementation of an urban renewal
project for the Scheunenviertel that entailed large-scale demolition and redevelop-
ment. Its aim was the destruction of the social structure of what was commonly
regarded as a ghetto without walls. The city council had a large number of buildings
demolished without providing alternative accommodation for the occupants, who
were thus forced to move on to other poor neighborhoods. The Social Democratic
Magistrate of the 1920s continued with the program: twenty years after the first
wave of large-scale demolition and redevelopment, another comprehensive, yet only
partially realized construction project was put into action to effect the “eviction of
the undesirable long-time residents.”11 Beginning in 1933, the Nazis stepped up the
program: shortly after they came to power, a police raid on the Scheunenviertel,
presented to the public as a conquest of enemy territory, marked the beginning of
the quarter’s takeover, destruction, and reinterpretation by the Nazis, whose pro-
paganda made use of the neighborhood’s bad reputation and of the public’s racist
prejudices against Eastern European Jews.12
In spite of its racist agenda, the renewed partial demolition and redevelopment
of Berlin’s Scheunenviertel neighborhood—wrongly depicted by the Nazis as exclu-
sively Jewish for years—was hailed as a model of center-city redevelopment at an
international conference in 1935. Around this time, redevelopment experts and
Berlin’s mayor began to investigate whether it might not be possible to unceremo-
niously expel Jewish tenants without German citizenship who had been displaced
by the large-scale demolition of housing as “troublesome foreigners,” or at least to
resettle them into temporary barrack camps.
In addition to the renewal of the city center, Berlin’s social policy was likewise ini-
tia ll y ma rk ed by co nti nuit y a fter the Naz is had c ome to p ower: t enan ts’ righ ts, b uild-
ing maintenance policies, and the building of subsidized housing continued to exist
and were even extended in some areas. But their benefits were increasingly reserved
for members of the Aryan Volksgemeinschaft (literally “people’s community”). From

inclusion and segregation in berlin / 59
the end of the 1930s onward, planning included the eviction of Jews from rental
apartments and the eventual “de-Judaization” [Entjudung] of the city.
The Postwar “Social City”: West and East Berlin
After the collapse of the Third Reich and the division of Berlin into eastern and
western sectors, urban development policy was once again decisively influenced
by the 1920s concept of urban space. Wartime destruction had been both vast
and uneven across the city (some suburbs suffered relatively little, and even some
inner-city housing blocks could be rapidly repaired). During the Cold War, West
Berlin’s special case brought an atypical population mix, based on both subsi-
dized industry and special privileges for university students. Until the end of the
1970s, West Berlin’s social policy consisted primarily of the building of state-
subsidized mass housing estates “for the broad masses of the population.” The
overall rationale behind the postwar project of providing subsidized housing was
not welfare for the poorest but the social integration of urban society.13 Until
the Social Democrats were voted out of office in 1981, they pursued an urban
development policy that sought to create standardized living conditions and a
homogeneous urban space divided into different functional zones, a goal they
sought to achieve by way of centralized urban planning. The public housing sector
produced a coalition of interests that consisted of nonprofit housing companies,
the building industry, banks, construction workers’ unions, architects, and pri-
vate companies established for tax write-off purposes.14 Until the late 1970s, this
conglomeration developed large-scale housing estates along the city’s periphery,
the most important of which—Gropiusstadt in Neukölln, the Märkisches Viertel
in Reinickendorf, and the Falkenhagener Feld in Spandau—today have around
35,000 residents each. In addition, from the early 1960s onward, large-scale urban
redevelopment projects were implemented in the city’s Wilhelmine-era quarters,
especially in Wedding and Kreuzberg, where historical buildings were demolished
wholesale through large-scale blasting.
By and large, similar developments took place in the capital of the German
Democratic Republic, but with a specific, nation-building emphasis. East Berlin
made the rebuilding and expansion of that part of the city the top priority for the
GDR. The socialist city of the postwar decades was characterized by centralization,
land nationalization, and the construction of nationally owned housing. Urban space
was supposed to represent the achievements of socialism, to serve as a “stage for the
display of the new People’s Democracy.”15 Since the organizing rationale behind the
spatial order was the creation of a class-transcending social commonality, the urban
center was considered a “place of communicative centrality,” and one of its functions
was that of a residential quarter.16 Large-scale demolition and redevelopment took
place on the East side of the Wall, as well: for example, on the Fischerinsel (part
of Berlin’s medieval city core) and at the Alexanderplatz. These projects combined
the large-scale demolition of historical buildings with the kind of industrialized
building of mass housing that also came to dominate the city’s peripheries. In East
Berlin’s outlying areas, the building of large suburban housing estates took place on
a much larger scale than in the West: in the three East Berlin districts of Marzahn,

60 / stephan lanz
Lichtenberg, and Hellersdorf alone, about 150,000 apartments went up between the
1970s and the end of the GDR.
In addition to subsidized housing, West Berlin also expanded the right to finan-
cial support for people in need by way of bureaucratically managed social transfers.
But the established discursive and political patterns on social hygiene continued
to exert their influence on the city’s social policy: the foreign Gastarbeiter (“guest
workers”), for example, who had been recruited mainly as industrial workers since
the late 1960s, were systematically barred from access to subsidized housing.
Generally speaking, the “authoritarian, socially educative element of state hous-
ing policy” lived on.17 Restrictions on and redesigns of transnationally developing
processes were thus effectively put in place in Cold-War West Berlin.
Worse yet, housing applicants were classified according to their ethnic origin.
While so-called Aussiedler, “resettlers” from Eastern Europe who could prove
their German ethnicity, were considered German and qualified for access to rent-
controlled housing, the mostly Turkish “guest workers” were subject to a quota
system based on an arbitrarily set “tolerance” cut-off point that was set far below
actual demand levels. An example of this occurred in the newly built Gropiusstadt,
where the state-owned housing association rented only two percent of its subsidized
apartments to non-Germans. Not until the 1980s were the municipal public hous-
ing companies instructed to elevate the so-called foreigners’ quota to 15 percent,
but the directive was not enforced due to a lack of political will. Statistics from the
1987 census show that even at that time, hardly any subsidized apartments were
occupied by non-Germans.18
Still, the urban planning goal of distributing “foreigners” evenly across the city
was still in effect. The political argument used to justify this strategy was that a
“concentration” of foreigners would pose a danger to domestic security and national
identity. Racist and biologist ghetto discourses pointed to the existence of immi-
grant neighborhoods as proof that immigrants deliberately kept their distance
from German society. But this argument reverses cause and effect. For example,
Kreuzberg, a working-class neighborhood adjacent to the Wall and thus dislocated
both spatially and infrastructurally, was branded a West Berlin “ghetto.” It provides
an object lesson in a neighborhood’s quick transformation into an immigrant area
through the combined workings of its proximity to the Wall, state policy, a profit-
driven real estate industry, and institutionalized racism. For one, the unwelcome
foreigners were only rented run-down apartments that Germans had no interest in
because they were slated for destruction as part of demolition and renewal projects.
Landlords were even known to charge a discriminatory surcharge of up to 30 per-
cent of the rent.19 Secondly, West Berlin’s social policy makers made a point of
refusing to adapt schools and social services to the needs of the city’s new residents
in order to discourage them from “crowding” into Berlin and its “conurbations,”
as the mayor put it.20 In other words, the city’s policy makers tacitly accepted the
development of so-called trouble hotspots with poor infrastructure in order to deter
further immigration.
To dispose of these politically undesirable immigrant neighborhoods, which were
a frequent target of media sensationalism, West Berlin’s Senate imposed a so-called
Zuzugssperre (“settlement ban”) in 1975 that prohibited foreigners from moving into

inclusion and segregation in berlin / 61
the major immigrant boroughs of Kreuzberg, Wedding, and Tiergarten. Until 1989,
foreign nationals moving to Berlin had a note to this effect entered into their pass-
port and could be expelled from Germany if they were found in contravention of
this regulation. In many cases, this drastic curtailing of the right to choose one’s
place of residence led to the separation of children from their parents and of hus-
bands and wives from their spouses. Constitutionally, it was extremely problematic,
and it was declared unlawful by the Higher Administrative Court in a number of
cases. The following quote is taken from a statement by the Senate of the Interior
explaining the withdrawal of the residence permit of a Turkish woman who had left
Turkey to join her husband in Berlin-Wedding and in so doing had contravened
the settlement ban. It demonstrates how the regulation was justified politically in
spite of its disputed constitutional validity: the regulation, it said, was necessary to
“counter the excessive concentration of foreigners in certain residential areas, and to
prevent the development of foreign ghettos and areas of social tension.”21 But it was
the settlement ban that produced a particular ghetto characteristic—and one that
was ignored in public discourse—in the first place: namely, the state’s limiting of
the freedom of certain social groups to choose their place of residence. The regula-
tion did not apply to citizens of EC countries or to US citizens. It was not directed at
foreigners per se, but at a specific Muslim “other” socially constructed on the basis of
racist discourses. The same cannot be said about the social structure of West Berlin’s
outer boroughs, where the unemployed and deprived were mostly white Germans.
In socialist East Berlin, in turn, a demographic control system had been established
that lasted until the end of the GDR: the foreign “contract workers” recruited from
socialist brother countries like Vietnam or Mozambique were completely segregated
from Germans and housed in guarded hostels.
From Standardization to Enterprise City: West Berlin in the 1980s
In the late 1970s, the Social Democrats’ Fordist-style urban development poli-
cies of extensive planning and regulation entered a crisis. Their “system of social
democratic socialization” became undermined by fundamental social restructuring
processes.22 The model of the modern “Social City” ran aground due to weakening
state control mechanisms, declining finances, and broad opposition from the local
population. In 1981, with the coming to power of the Christian Democrats, the
era of Social Democratic dominance in Berlin came to an end. The CDU would,
with a brief interlude, dominate Berlin’s politics until just after the millennium,
forging a neoliberal version of the spatial control of social and ethnic classes across
West Berlin.
In Kreuzberg, in particular, the “cartel of housing companies and state planning”
was derailed by local citizens’ resistance.23 In 1981, squatters took over numerous
buildings in the borough—many of them slated for demolition—and kept resist-
ing eviction, in some cases violently. In an effort to meet the crisis of the Fordist
city with appropriate urban renewal strategies, Berlin’s parliament set up the so-
called Internationale Bauausstellung (International Building Exhibition), a plan-
ning instrument that developed strategies for a “sensitive” or “careful” renewal, and
included social education and spatial and architectural concepts as well as support

62 / stephan lanz
for self-help initiatives. The objective of this approach was to preserve old buildings
wherever possible and to cater to residents’ needs and include them in the imple-
mentation stages.
These new urban renewal programs were designed to simultaneously act as pre-
ventive social policies. “Sensitive” renewal practices were designed to encompass
the entire living environment of a given local area, and just like the new market
mechanisms at play in urban development, they advanced the city’s division into
subspaces. In their turn away from the “management of social benefits and ready-
made socialization opportunities,” they now acted as preventive social policies
whose decentralized and informal intervention practices targeted “attitudes, lean-
ings and needs.”24 State apparatuses were supplemented by soft modes of regula-
tion tied to the para-governmental Internationale Bauausstellung. This approach not
only made it possible to legalize those squatters who were willing to cooperate with
the municipal authorities and to redevelop the buildings they occupied through
resident-run redevelopment agencies, it also succeeded in neutralizing the broad
resistance against the city’s urban development policy. The Christian Democratic
Senate complemented this sensitive renewal policy with a repressive strategy that
entailed the eviction of militant squatters by the police.
In this way, a trend emerged toward “semi-autonomous/semi-governmental
‘para-apparatuses’” that were independent of the local parliamentary institutions
and were often operated privately.25 Its buzzwords were increased flexibility, decen-
tralization, self-help, participation, and “endogenous development.” This approach
was appealing not only to neoconservative forces within the CDU that wanted to
see the welfare state curbed in favor of local communities, individual responsibility,
and regulation close to the market. It also appealed to a countercultural scene whose
young members were mostly from a white middle-class background and hence
much better equipped than other segments of the population to assert their interests
in these new participatory processes, which required a high degree of cultural capi-
tal. With the new state intervention techniques responding to the counterculture
developed by the new social movements and deriving their content from clients’
sociocultural needs, West Berlin’s urban cultural policy thus became a key instru-
ment of social governance.
Due to the competition between the two political systems, the term “cultural
metropolis” had become, with an eye to the respective other across the Wall, “strik-
ingly common” in both parts of the divided city in the 1970s.26 In 1980s West
Berlin, however, it came to denote a model of internal social order. The recycling of
urban space and structures and the increasing number of mass spectacles (anniver-
sary celebrations, the Internationale Bauausstellung, the European Capital of Culture
award), in combination with funding for a wide range of sociocultural initiatives,
coalesced into an identity politics that integrated, at least symbolically, the city’s
social classes and sociocultural strata, which were increasingly drifting apart as a
result of socioeconomic transformation processes that brought with them decreas-
ing industrial production, the dismantling of social security mechanisms, and the
declining prestige of traditional occupations.
The CDU Senate was also intent on rolling back the Social Democrats’ “quanti-
tative social policy” (dubbed a “management and service company with unlimited

inclusion and segregation in berlin / 63
liability” by Berlin’s mayor) in favor of a “responsible partnership between the active
and capable and those in need.”27 Berlin’s Senate Administration for Social Affairs
initiated a funding program for self-help initiatives that was aimed at refashioning
as many social services as possible. In 1987, for example, almost 50 groups that
worked in the area of foreigners’ issues received support based on the rationale of
“helping people to help themselves.” Up till then, state assistance for immigrants
had been exclusively paternalistic and had been delivered in the form of social assis-
tance through large charity organizations. Now the focus was shifting to social
problems such as the lack of apprenticeships for young people or the rapidly rising
unemployment rate among immigrants, most of whom had been employed in the
industrial sector and were now, in the 1980s, hit hard by the rapidly accelerating
deindustrialization of West Berlin’s economy. This social policy paradigm produced
a slew of new initiatives, with “ethnic organizations” often being considered “eligible
for funding on the basis of their mere existence.”28 Self-help initiatives and indepen-
dent sponsoring organizations increasingly employed formerly unemployed people
in jobs that were financed by the state through “work creation schemes.”
Another measure introduced by the West Berlin Senate was the tying of welfare
benefits to certain compulsory measures, an instrument whose effectiveness was
first tested on foreign refugees. The authorities began to sign up asylum seekers for
compulsory community work, later extending the measure to welfare recipients in
general.29 This marked the beginning of a social policy shift from welfare to work-
fare, a first in West Germany. At the time, critical voices argued that the state was
exploiting volunteer community help in an attempt to shirk its sociopolitical respon-
sibilities. They claimed that the funding schemes had excluded critical groups and
were essentially producing self-exploiting organizations that had “degenerated into
outposts of the established professional system.”30
Reunified City: The End of Subsidized Housing
The post-1989 reunification of the city meant status as a “Land” (“state”) and the
loss of all kinds of subsidies from the federal government, even as the latter prepared
to move the capital from Bonn back to Berlin. The housing supply became increas-
ingly dictated by market mechanisms, and during Germany’s initial post-Wall
decade of the 1990s, the construction of subsidized housing effectively ground to a
halt. The federal government had already pulled out of funding for new subsidized
housing in 1986 and eventually revoked the nonprofit status of West Berlin’s hous-
ing associations (which up to then had been legally nonprofit) on the grounds that it
distorted competition, in effect pulling the rug out from under them.31
The neoliberal 1990s and 2000s thus saw a turn away from the “guiding prin-
ciple of socio-spatial cohesion” in housing policy.32 Based on a staggeringly opti-
mistic projection that predicted a possible population increase from 3.5 to 6 million
for Berlin within a few years, another 75,000 rental units were built using public
funding during the first decade after reunification—but here the rationale behind
the funding model was no longer explicitly social. The Eigentumsstrategie 2000
[“Property Strategy 2000”] marked the beginning of a radical turn in post-Wall
Berlin’s housing policy. In an effort to counter the ongoing exodus of the city’s

64 / stephan lanz
middle classes to the surrounding areas and the resulting loss in revenue, it was
planned to double the number of apartment owners in Berlin within 15 years. This
project did not just entail the funding of private housing with public means; it also
included the conversion of a large number of publicly owned rental units into con-
dominiums. Entire federal state–owned housing companies were sold lock, stock,
and barrel. In 2002, the new Social Democrat-Socialist Senate finally ended pub-
licly subsidized housing. The number of subsidized apartments in post-Wall Berlin
declined from 375,000 in 1991 to 200,000 in 2006.33
The free-marketization of Berlin’s housing supply had its effect on urban renewal
as well. Since large parts of post-Communist East Berlin were in an advanced state of
dilapidation, West Berlin’s “sensitive” urban renewal strategy was extended to large
areas of the city’s eastern center, primarily Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg, and Friedrichshain.
But the circumstances were entirely different now. The local state—increasingly less
willing to regard urban renewal as a responsibility of the welfare state and to fund it
with public money—simply employed agencies as intermediaries to coordinate what
were now market-driven processes, engaged in by private investors.34
The post-Wall cessation of public housing construction, the expiration of fixed-
term rent-controlled leases, and the adoption of market mechanisms in urban
renewal practices led, first of all, to a significant increase in housing costs, particu-
larly in the core of East Berlin. The result was the displacement of a large number
of former (East German, poor) residents. In the 2000s, this gentrification process
be gan to spre ad t o Wes t Be rli n’s immig rant a rea of Kreuzberg a s well .35 Even parts of
multicultural Neukölln, generally regarded as one of Germany’s worst “problematic
districts,” are in a stage of “gentrification waiting to happen”—a process indicated
by rapidly rising rents and an increasingly tight housing market. The situation has
been exacerbated since 2005 by a reform of the social benefit system. This reform
measure, known as Hartz IV, was implemented by the outgoing coalition federal
government of the Social Democrats and the Greens, and drastically tightened the
requirements for access to social benefits. To give just one example: the Hartz IV
laws, which in Berlin affect almost half a million people, closely tie the right to
housing benefits—a social transfer mechanism—to “adequate” rent amount and
apartment size, both set at very low levels. Urban sociologist Andrej Holm, who has
conducted studies in Berlin’s rental housing stock in relation to these issues, sums
up his findings: “Especially in East Berlin, the apartments available to Hartz IV
recipients are limited mainly to inner-city substandard housing and large subur-
ban housing estates. From this perspective, Hartz IV is also an instrument that
furthers the city’s spatial restructuring and the marginalization of those considered
dispensable.”36
The Post-Wall Transformation of the “Social City” Concept
In fact, the socio-spatial polarization of Berlin had already become more pro-
nounced over the course of the 1990s. This was the result of two combined fac-
tors: the forced gentrification of inner-city, Wilhelmine-era neighborhoods and the
increasing impoverishment of working-class people hit by—often permanent—
unemployment as a result of post-Wall Berlin’s deindustrialization. In 1998, the

inclusion and segregation in berlin / 65
Berlin Senate published a study titled “Urban Development with a Social Focus,”
which noted a “cumulative exacerbation of socio-spatial problems” in certain dis-
tricts and called for a “strategy of urban integration” to stop the “process of mar-
ginalization and exclusion.”37
The increasing socio-spatial polarization also brought with it a return of tradi-
tional constructions of the socially and ethnically “other” in political and media
discourse. In poor inner-city areas, to quote the urban studies researcher Hartmut
Häußermann, the close proximity of “losers in the modernization process, the
socially maladjusted and the socially discriminated against” has left its imprint on
the inhabitants’ “ways of acting and thinking” to the point of creating a “culture
of deviation.”38 The equation of marginalized spaces deviating from the norms of
majority society with “breeding grounds of lawlessness, deviation and anomie”
that is implied here in the connection between poverty, moral decline, and crime
is unpleasantly reminiscent of those bourgeois depictions of peripheral neighbor-
hoods like the Scheunenviertel in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.39
Over the course of the twentieth century, as we have seen, such class-ridden and
racist constructions of the urban “other” were gradually superseded by the model
of the European “Social City.” But as these notions of socially regulating, welfare-
based equality lost ground to neoliberalism, the earlier prejudices appear to have
returned with renewed force. The growing contradiction between increasing social
conflicts and problems on the one hand and the retreat of the social policy models of
the welfare state on the other has led to increasingly forceful attempts to solve crises
with law-and-order policies. Further, the welfare-to-workfare trend continued in the
1990s, with the moniker of an “activating” (as opposed to “providing”) welfare state
now focusing on mobilizing the entrepreneurial subject who was deemed ultimately
responsible for his or her own needs and thus to blame for any deficiencies.40
With regard to urban policy, the “imperative of mobilization” applies to the socio-
spatial dimension as well. In 1999, the Berlin Senate implemented a political inter-
vention program against increasing socio-spatial polarization and impoverishment
especially among immigrant groups whose members had permanently lost their jobs
due to the deindustrialization of the city’s economy. The program is co-financed by
a joint federal and state initiative entitled “The Social City.”41 Initiated by the coali-
tion government of the Social Democrats and the Greens, the “Social City” program
consists of a so-called neighborhood management scheme initially established by
the Senate in 15 “areas particularly in need of development.” The main problems
identified by the Senate were—in keeping with the Jamesonian ideologeme of the
desirability of social mixing—a spatial over-“concentration of problem groups”
caused by selective migration processes, social descent, and cultural communication
barriers.42 The program’s objective was to stimulate “sustainable social, economic,
urban, and ecological development through integrated action and interconnected
measures.” It made vague promises of “creating living environments without exclu-
sion” and “maintaining the social mix.”43
Local state agencies hired privately operating “neighborhood managers” to
connect, in cooperation with the authorities, local actors and to develop proj-
ects designed to help “local residents . . . change their circumstances and use their
skills and potential to become more independent.”44 The rationale, according to

66 / stephan lanz
the Senate, was not so much for the state to provide a “framework of action” but
to “strengthen people’s engagement and their capacity to help themselves through
local networks and information.”45 Essentially, the goal of the program—which has
been extended to 34 urban areas since the coming to power of a Social Democrat-
Socialist coalition in 2002—is the creation of self-regulating local communities by
means of producing active local citizenries, which are said to no longer exist in these
disadvantaged neighborhoods. Thus, marginalized inhabitants are to get access to
“help to help themselves.” “Empowerment” is the big buzzword.
One important component of Berlin’s neighborhood management program is the
creation of local employment opportunities to make up for jobs lost in the regular
economy due to deindustrialization—a development that has driven a large number
of inhabitants of disadvantaged neighborhoods into dependence on employment
agencies and social welfare programs. No activity that can be fashioned into a job,
no matter how precarious and badly paid, escapes consideration: groundskeeping,
neighborhood patrol, social and cultural services of any kind, temporary stores
offering or teaching various handicrafts (sewing shops, galleries, puppet theaters),
courses (homework assistance, yoga, etc.), and many others. Such projects aside, the
bulk of individual measures implemented under the umbrella of the neighborhood
management program look like updated versions of the social and sociocultural
projects run by the alternative movement that the Senate had already funded in
the 1980s. They include, for example, public space upgrading projects, continuing
education programs, drug and violence prevention programs, “integration courses,”
social work in schools, funding for artists, and block parties.46 What is new here is
that the local state now initiates these kinds of projects itself, indirectly pressuring
citizens to become proactive. Once again, the poor are being divided by discourse:
While the state sees it as its mandate to increase its support for “worthy” groups, it
tends to give up on or increase control over what it perceives to be the less worthy
sections of society.47
All this rhetoric about the “social investment” necessary to maintain the “Social
City” obscures the fact that the primacy of budget consolidation actually results in
a “decrease of welfare state expenditures on continuing education, job training, and
social integration programs for the unemployed.” In Berlin, the coalition is con-
tributing to this trend with its strategy of rolling back the budget deficit “through
massive cuts to local infrastructure and the abolition of benefits.”48 Especially in
Berlin’s immigrant groups, hit particularly hard by unemployment, there are now
growing numbers of people who are excluded from society, permanently cut off
from the labor market, suffering stigmatization, and see no chance of improving
their situation.
The outcomes of the neighborhood management scheme, the central element
of the current discourses and political agendas connected with the “Social City,”
are, in other words, highly ambivalent. Thus the impact of the “Social City” on
Berlin’s urban transnational processes is equally ambivalent. On the one hand, the
scheme allows for the participation of its target groups, and it does a better job than
Fordist bureaucratic procedures of fitting urban social policy to local needs and
environments. On the other hand, it does nothing to eliminate either the causes
of poverty or poverty itself, which is actually increasing as a result of a consistently

inclusion and segregation in berlin / 67
enterprise- and marketing-oriented urban policy. Socioeconomic and ethnicity-
based forms of polarization in Berlin have not been reduced by the program, now in
its second decade—they have actually become more pronounced.49 The think-tank
Monitoring Soziale Stadt notes this ongoing tendency toward socio-spatial polariza-
tion, yet chalks up as a modest success the fact that aspects of the social data of
particularly difficult areas have leveled out, albeit at an extremely low level. Yet
there are also social studies on individual neighborhood management projects that
indicate that rents are rising dramatically even while income levels are at best being
maintained.50
Adding to all this is the fact that the neighborhood management model tends to
put the most marginalized residents at a disadvantage because they lack the means
and agency to participate in these state-supported self-help structures. Finally, we
should ask whether the strong emphasis on social inclusion and local community in
Berlin is not just a veiled attempt to compensate for the dismantling of social rights
and the state’s gradual abdication of its responsibility for citizens’ material welfare.
Conclusion: The Covert Americanization of
the German “Social City” Model
This chapter’s overview of the German “Social City” model as exemplified by Berlin
illustrates, first, that the model has undergone a number of significant transfor-
mations over the course of the past century. Second, it shows that it has, in all
its historical incarnations, maintained various social exclusion patterns that work
against transnational mobility and keep certain urban groups from socially integrat-
ing beyond the lines of class and ethnic origin. In other words, the idea and agenda
of social justice have only ever manifested themselves selectively.
A quote from the study “Urban Development with a Social Focus” by the Berlin
Senate succinctly sums up the position of many current critics of the neoliberal
city: “Whether the difference of the European vis-à-vis the American city can and
should be maintained is one of the most important urban policy questions of the
21st century.”51 The “Social City” / neighborhood management model is consid-
ered a key instrument in ensuring that this difference can in fact be maintained.
But the notion implied here of a simple dichotomy between the “good,” socially
inclusive European city and the “bad,” anti-integration American one is misleading,
especially in terms of how one regards the degree to which urban transnational pro-
cesses are encouraged or damaged. Useful reassessments are offered in such recent
transatlantic, comparative studies of urban social equity such as Susan C. Fainstein’s
The Just City.52 Current urban social policy agendas no longer have much in com-
mon with the state-directed social policies of European cities. Rather, the “Social
City” program, touted as a panacea for all kinds of ills in today’s metropolises, now
appears to be in formed more by the A merican idea of a loc al c ommunity. In contr ast
to urban policy in twentieth-century Germany, the objective of which has been
the equalizing of living conditions and the elimination of socio-spatial disparities,
these ideals are considered gratuitous in the United States, if not “fundamentally
un-American, since they run counter to the American idea of democracy, i.e., the
notion of self-rule and administrative autonomy.”53

68 / stephan lanz
Essentially, the new local social programs signify a turn away from the con-
cept of spatial homogenization in social policy. In another area, this process had
already taken place in the 1980s, when endogenous potential and local diversity
were discovered as useful resources in the area of locational competition, then an
emerging phenomenon. These days, the main rationale is not the equal distribution
of infrastructure across urban space but an emphasis on neighborhood develop-
ment programs, the identification of different needs, and local civic activities. The
normative ideal of subcommunal territorial units that the “Social City” program
aspires to is that of an “autonomous community” with a citizen-run administration
that requires as little state intervention and expenditure as possible.54 It is conspicu-
ous how much the program emphasizes the importance of local communities and
its intention of activating local self-help resources: It seems that non-governmental
modes of solidarity are replacing what Alain Lipietz terms the Fordist “solidarities
of the administrative type” that characterized the municipal policy of German cities
and were fiercely attacked, especially by the Left, for their repressive, educational
components.55 It is not least the broad range of strategies the “Social City” program
employs—from the privatization of subsidized housing to encouraging disadvan-
taged citizens to use their own self-help resources—that illustrates how much this
model is at odds with the system of state-guaranteed welfare for the “broad masses
of the population” that characterized the “Social City” model for most of the twen-
tieth century.
The ambivalent nature of such programs, which, after all, were devised to save a
model of the “German city” that is considered socially inclusive, appears to arise from
the very fact that they are tacitly informed by American models. On the one hand,
these programs are based on the neoliberal pillars of deregulation and privatization and
constitute an attempt to establish a socially “sustainable neo-liberalism” of sorts, one
that replaces provision by the state with empowering citizens to help themselves—an
approach that often has a repressive rather than a supportive character.56 On the other
hand, their emphasis on local needs, self-regulating communities, and neighborhood
solidarity—all of which are closer to the American notion of what constitutes a local
community—also opens the way for emancipatory modes of local social policy that
the paternalistic model of social integration employed by the modern German social
democratic city, which originated in the 1920s and is regarded as exemplary to this
day, had repressed.
Notes
1. See Detlev Ipsen, Raumbilder. Kultur und Ökonomie räumlicher Entwicklung
(Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1997); and Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots:
A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley / Los Angeles, CA: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1983).
2. Ralf Stremmel, Modell und Moloch. Berlin in der Wahrnehmung deutscher Politiker vom
Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum 2. Weltkrieg (Bonn: Bouvier, 1992), 49. All transla-
tions are my own unless otherwise noted.
3. Joachim Schlör, Nachts in der großen Stadt. Paris, Berlin, London 1840–1930 (Munich:
Artemis & Winkler, 1991), 53.
4. Michael Zinganel, Real Crime. Architektur, Stadt und Verbrechen (Vienna: Edition
Selene, 2003), 87.

inclusion and segregation in berlin / 69
5. James Hobrecht, cited by Andrej Holm, “Soziale Mischung. Zur Entstehung und
Funktion eines Mythos,“ Forum Wissenschaft 1, no. 9 (2009): 23–26. See also Hartmut
Häußermann and Andreas Kapphan, Berlin. Von der geteilten zur gespaltenen Stadt
(Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 2000), 34.
6. Stremmel, Modell und Moloch, 14 2.
7. See Häußermann and Kapphan, Berlin, 11.
8. Stremmel, Modell und Moloch, 146. See also Wolfgang Ribbe and Jürgen Schmädeke,
Kleine Berlin-Geschichte (Berlin: Wolfgang Stapp Verlag, 1994).
9. Harald Bodenschatz, Platz frei für das Neue Berlin! Geschichte der Stadterneuerung in der
»größten Mietskasernenstadt der Welt« seit 1871 (Berlin: Transit, 1987). See also Klaus
Ronneberger, “Biomacht u nd Hygiene. Normali sierung im fordis tischen Wohnungsbau,”
in Ernst Neufert. Normierte Baukultur, ed. Walter Prigge (Frankfurt am Main and New
York: Campus Verlag, 1999), 432–64.
10. Otto Schilling, Innere Stadterweiterung (Berlin: Der Zirkel, 1921).
11. Bodenschatz, Platz frei für das Neue Berlin! 49. See also Mischket Liebermann,
“Im Berliner Ghetto,” in Juden in Berlin 1671–1945. Ein Lesebuch, ed. Nicolaische
Verlagsbuchhandlung Beuermann (Berlin: Nicolai, 1988), 192–194.
12. See Horst Helas, “Altstadtsanierung 1934/35” and “Die Razzia am 4. April 1933,” in
Das Scheunenviertel. Spuren eines verlorenen Berlins, ed. Verein Stiftung Scheunenviertel
(Berlin: Haude & Spener, 1999), 128–134 and 135–136.
13. See Häußermann and Kapphan, Berlin, 11.
14. See Bodenschatz, Platz frei für das Neue Berlin! 9.
15. Häußermann and Kapphan, Berlin, 62.
16. Bruno Flierl, “Stadtgestaltung in der ehemaligen DDR als Staatspolitik,” in Wohnen
und Stadtpolitik im Umbruch. Perspektiven der Stadterneuerung nach 40 Jahren DDR,
ed. Peter Marcuse and Fred Staufenbiel (Berlin: Wiley-VCH Verlag, 1991), 49–65.
17. Bodenschatz, Platz frei für das Neue Berlin! 100.
18. See Jürgen Hoffmeyer-Zlotnick, Gastarbeiter im Sanierungsgebiet. Das Beispiel
Berlin-Kreuzberg (Hamburg: Christians, 1977; and Stephan Lanz, Berlin aufgemis-
cht: abendländisch—multikulturell–kosmopolitisch? Die politische Konstruktion einer
Einwanderungsstadt (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007).
19. Yvo Diric kx and Ayse K udat, Ghettos: Individual or Systemic Choice (Berlin: Internat ionales
Institut für vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung, 1975; 29, no.75).
20. Planungsteam Eingliederung ausländischer Arbeitnehmer und ihrer Familien, ed.,
Eingliederung der ausländischen Arbeitnehmer und ihrer Familien. Abschlußbericht
(Berlin: Der Regierende Bürgermeister von Berlin, 1972), 28.
21. Ausländerkomitee Berlin (West) e.V., Gleiches Wohnrecht für alle! Dokumentation
zur Zuzugssperre für ausländische Arbeiter (Berlin: Ausländerkomitee Berlin (West),
1978), 22.
22. Karl Homuth, “Identität und soziale Ordnung. Zum Verhältnis städtischer Kultur und
gesellschaftlicher Hegemonie,” Prokla 68 17, no. 3 (1987): 90–112, 101.
23. Stefan Krätke and Fritz Schmoll, “Der lokale Staat—‘Ausführungsorgan’ oder
‘Gegenmacht’,” Prokla 68 17, no.3 (1987): 30–72, 53.
24. Karl Homuth, “Identität und soziale Ordnung,” 93; and Homuth, “Pädagogisierung
des Stadtteils. Über die Bedeutung von ‘behutsamer Stadterneuerung’ als präventive
Sozialpolitik,” Ästhetik und Kommunikation 16, no. 59 (1985): 78–86, 80.
25. Krätke and Schmoll, “Der lokale Staat,” 61.
26. Boris Grésillon, Kulturmetropole Berlin (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschaft Verlag, 2004),
105.
27. Presse- und Informationsamt des Landes Berlin, ed., Berliner Forum 6/85. Stadt der
Chancen. Die Regierungserklärung vom 25. April 1985 des Regierenden Bürgermeisters
von Berlin Eberhard Diepgen (Berlin: Presse-und Informationsamt des Landes Berlin,
1985), 35.

70 / stephan lanz
28. Thomas Schwarz, Zuwanderer im Netz des Wohlfahrtsstaates. Türkische Jugendliche und
die Berliner Kommunalpolitik (Berlin: Edition Parabolis, 1992), 146.
29. See Peter Grottia n, Friedrich Krot z, Günter Lütke, and M ichael Wolf, “Die Entzauberung
der Berliner Sozialpolitik,” Ästhetik und Kommunikation 16, no. 59 (1985): 45–53, 49.
30. Friedrich Krotz, “Die Instrumentalisierung der Selbsthilfe. Erfahrungen mit dem
‘Berliner Modell’,” in Die Wohlfahrtswende. Der Zauber konservativer Sozialpolitik,
ed. Peter Grottian et al. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1988), 82–111, 107.
31. “From that point on, the federal government has been focusing on specific aspects of
urban development funding.” Florian Wukovitsch, “Verteilungs- und demokratiepoli-
tische Aspekte der Stadtentwicklung—Umbrüche der Wohnungspolitik in Berlin und
Wien, unpublished paper at Verteilung und Demokratie conference, November 14–15,
2008, Vienna, 2.
32. Andrej Holm, “Hartz IV und die Konturen einer neoliberalen Wohnungspolitik,” in
Sozialer Wohnungsbau, Arbeitsmarkt(re)integration und der neoliberale Wohlfahrtsstaat in
der Bundesrepublik und Nordamerika, ed. Jens Sambale and Volker Eick (Berlin: John
F. Kennedy Institute, Free University Berlin, 2005), 135–146, 145.
33. See Wukovitsch, “Verteilungs-und demokratiepolitische Aspekte,” 4.
34. “These days, urban redevelopment is primarily geared to the needs of investors writ-
ing off their taxes, and the residents have to accommodate them.” Matthias Bernt,
Rübergeklappt. Die »Behutsame Stadterneuerung« im Berlin der 90er Jahre (Berlin:
Schelzky & Jeep, 2003), 258.
35. See Matthias Bernt and Andrej Holm, “Is it, or is it not? The Conceptualization of
Gentrification and Displacement and its Political Implications in the Case of Berlin-
Prenzlauer Berg,” City 13, no.2–3 (2009): 312–324.
36. Holm, “Hartz IV,” 135.
37. IfS / S.T.E.R.N., Sozialorientierte Stadtentwicklung. Gutachten im Auftrag der Senats-
verwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, Umweltschutz und Technologie (Berlin: Kultur-Buch
Verlag, 1998), 79.
38. Hartmut Häußermann, “Sozialräumliche Struktur und der Prozeß der Ausgrenzung:
Quartierseffekte,” Nachrichtenblatt zur Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie 14, no.1 (1999):
7–18, 11.
39. Loic Wacquant, “Drei irreführende Prämissen bei der Untersuchung der amerikanis-
chen Ghettos,” in Die Krise der Städte, ed. Wilhelm Heitmeyer, Rainer Dollase, and
Otto Backes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 194–210, 201.
40. See Stephan Lanz, “In unternehmerische Subjekte investieren. Integrationspolitik im
Workfare-State. Das Beispiel Berlin,” in No integration?! Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge
zur Integrationsdebatte in Europa, ed. Sabine Hess, Jana Binder, and Johannes Moser
(Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009), 105–22.
41. For more on the “Social City” program at the federal and Berlin levels, see Hilary Silver,
“Social Integration in the ‘New’ Berlin,” German Politics and Society 24, no. 4 (2004):
1–48.
42. Abgeordnetenhaus von Berlin, “Dr. 13/4001: Bericht zur Entwicklung einer gesa-
mtstädtischen Strategie zur Entschärfung sozialer Konflikte besonders belasteter
Stadtquartiere, Aktionsprogramm ›Urbane Integration—1. Stufe‹ und zur Sozial-
orientierten Stadtentwicklung: Einrichtung von integrierten Stadtteilverfahren—
Quartiersmanagement—in Gebieten mit besonderem Entwicklungsbedarf. Vorlage zur
Kenntnisnahme vom 02.08.1999,” 6.
43. Ibid., 2.
44. Ibid., 10.
45. Abgeordnetenhaus von Berlin, “Dr. 13/3273: Innenstadtkonferenz—Ergebnisse und
Folgerungen. Vorlage zur Kenntnisnahme vom 17.11.1998,” 1.
46. Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, Das Berliner Quartiersmanagement:
Informationen zum Programm “Soziale Stadt” (Berlin: Senatsverwaltung für Stadtent-
wicklung, 2010).

inclusion and segregation in berlin / 71
47. See Stephan Lanz, “Powered by Quartiersmanagement: Füreinander Leben im
‚Problemkiez’,“ Dérive—Zeitschrift für Stadtforschung 31 (2008): 28–31.
48. Volker Eick, Britta Grell, Margit Mayer, and Jens Sambale, Non Profit-Organisationen
und die Transformation lokale r Beschäftigungspolitik (Münster: Westfäl isches Dampfboot,
2004), 14.
49. In 2008, a Senate speaker presented the latest edition of Berlin’s Sozialstrukturatlas
(“social structure atlas”) with the words: “Unfortunately, it must be noted that the more
aff luent areas are becoming better and the poorer ones worse.” Berliner Morgenpost (May
4, 2009); Meinlschmidt, Sozialstrukturatlas Berlin 2008—Ein Instrument der quanti-
tativen, interregionalen und intertemporalen Sozialraumanalyse und –planung (Berlin:
Senatsverwaltung für Gesundheit, Umwelt und Verbraucherschutz, 2010).
50. See Hartmut Häußermann, Axel Werwatz, Daniel Förster, and Patrick Hausmann,
Monitoring Soziale Stadtentwicklung im Auftrag der Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung
(Berlin, Topos, 2010), 26; and Sigmar Gude, Sozialstudie Richardplatz Süd. Topos
Stadtforschung Berlin (Berlin: Topos, 2010).
51. IfS / S.T.E.R.N., Sozialorientierte Stadtentwicklung, 27.
52. Susan C. Fainstein, The Just City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010).
53. Rita Schneider-Sliwa, Kernstadt und Modelle der Erneuerung in den USA: Privatism,
Public-Private Partnerships, Revitalisierungspolitik und sozialräumliche Prozesse in Atlanta ,
Boston und Washington D.C. (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1996), 30.
54. ARGEBAU, Leitfaden zur Ausgestaltung der Gemeinschaftsinitiative “Soziale Stadt”
(Berlin: Difu, 2000).
55. Alain Lipietz, Towards a New Economic Order: Postfordism, Ecology, and Democracy
(Oxford, UK, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
56. See Joachim Hirsch, “Tote leben manchmal länger. Auf dem Weg zu einem nachhalti-
gen Neoliberalismus,” in Das Ende des Neoliberalismus?, ed. Joachim Bischoff et al.
(Hamburg: VSA, 1998), 216–24.