NEIL SMITH: GENTRIFICATION IN BERLIN AND THE REVANCHIST STATE

By: Neil Smith, Jens Sambale, Volker Eick

[MIETERECHO/POLICING CROWDS] We notice an increasing application of new urban strategies of small scaleinterventions in disadvantaged neighborhoods to recreate a 'social stability'there. One instrument of this strategies is supporting the settlement ofartists, designers, and other creative professions in the targeted areathrough the offering of temporary but favorable commercial space(Gewerberaum). How do such strategies fit in the context of gentrification?

[NEIL SMITH] Since the 1970s, gentrification has shifted from a marginal, fragmented process in the housing market to a large scale, systematic and deliberate urban development policy. Gentrification has deepened as a comprehensive city-building strategy encompassing not just the residential market but recreation, retail, employment, and the cultural economy. It has also spread geographically to Latin American and Asian cities with Shanghai and Beijing, for example, displacing hundreds of thousands of poor and working class residents. As a generalized urban strategy, gentrification weaves together the interests of city managers, developers and landlords, but also corporate employers and cultural and educational institutions which depend on a professional workforce. It is also the paradoxical but logical outcome of environmentalist demands for more dense living, pitting But these large scale strategies are also integrated with much more local initiatives, and city managers around the world have become enamoured of the idea of the 'creative city'. As a matter of citywide strategy, they attempt to attract a so-called creative class of artists, intellectuals, entertainers, designers, high-tech engineers to specific gentrifying neighbourhoods. This strategy was probably pioneered in New York's Lower East Side where in the early 1980s landlords who were unable to rent commercial properties offered them at cheap rents to artists, giving them 5-year leases. After 5 years, with no rent control on commercial properties and with the neighbourhood now gentrifying rapidly, landlords began to demand 400%, 600% even 1,000% rent increases to renew leases. The artists had done their work as the shock troops of gentrification and were themselves displaced. This more localized strategy is especially popular in places where perhaps there are more stringent rent controls or greater state regulation of the property market generally. The gentrification of Berlin has been more fragmented and slower than in London or New York, for example.

[MIETERECHO/POLICING CROWDS] In Nord-Neukölln we had noticed an increasing moving in of students, an enhancement of real estate deals and increasing rent prices. Nevertheless, in the debates about this dynamics gentrification alerts were dismissed by the argument of the bad image of the neighborhood (which were opposed to the lifestyles of pioneers and gentrifies). Did you know examples of social neighborhood structures which were 'too bad' for gentrification processes?

[NEIL SMITH] Students, whether close to universities or in more distant neighbourhods, are part of the process of  'cracking' neighbourhoods that many other professionals may be unwilling to colonize. The question whether a particular neighbourhood will or will not gentrify depends on the depth of the rent gap and the particulars of local policy, but it also depends on many other local issues, neighbourhood characteristics and so on. If the rent gap is deep enough, I don't think any neighbourhood is 'too bad' for gentrification, but at the same time there is no guarantee that a particular neighbourhood will in fact be gentrified. Consider Harlem in New York City. In the 1960s and 1970s, Harlem was an international symbol of urban decline, a 'bad neighbourhood'. Not least, this was the product of racism as Harlem in 1980 was 97% African American. More than 20 years ago I interviewed an African American state bureaucrat in charge of trying to gentrify Harlem and as he put it: 'If Harlem is going to be gentrified, whitey is really going to have to get his shit together'. Today, Harlem is gentrifying intensely, and has been after a hiatus in the late 1980s. African American professionals, students, lawyers, gays, white yuppies are all moving in, and property prices are sky rocketing; Columbia University is planning a huge university development in the area. If Harlem can be gentrified, I don't think any neighbourhood is immune. Or we could point to the early gentrification along the edges of Dharavi, the huge slum in Mumbai that is currently being dismantled. Neighbourhoods gentrify in different ways, however. Some are cataclysmic, especially when there is centralized state sponsorship or large scale institutional involvement, but others may gentrify slowly. Some become highly exclusive and exclusionary whereas others may remain more mixed hipster 'hoods for a comparatively long time. The different fortunes of these areas depend on many things such as patterns of building ownership, state regulations, class structure and cohesiveness, community opposition, entrepreneurial initiatives. What ties all of these experiences together is the class shift in the neighbourhood and the greater or lesser degree of displacement (direct or indirect) that ensues.