NEIL SMITH: GENTRIFICATION IN BERLIN AND THE REVANCHIST STATE

By: Neil Smith, Jens Sambale, Volker Eick

[MIETERECHO/POLICING CROWDS] What are the implications of an economic perspective on gentrification for neighborhood struggles? What are the central conflicts for anti-gentrification-initiatives and what kind of coalitions are possible and necessary?

[NEIL SMITH] To the extent that gentrification has itself become a global urban strategy, anti-gentrification struggles have to work within this context. Local strategies are vital and have to highlight displacement, eviction, and the loss of services and jobs in neighbourhoods leaving the existing working class stranded. But such struggles also need to have the global situation in their sights. Gentrification has become a strategy within globalization itself; the effort to create a global city is the effort to attract capital and tourists and gentrification is a central means for doing so. Some neighbourhood activists - in North America I am thinking about people inspired by Jane Jacobs - have tried to rally small-scale gentrifiers to fight large scale urban redevelopment, but this is itself a gentrification strategy aimed at providing neighbourhoods for the so-called creative class. The same can be said about 'regeneration strategies' endorsed as a central plank of urban policy by the European Union. In Britain especially, but elsewhere in the EU, 'regeneration' has become little more than a gentrified word for gentrification. A kinder, gentler eviction is still an eviction. Instead, I think we need to start to think in terms of tenant collectives and neighbourhood councils. These would both take over increasing responsibility for organizing neighbourhood housing and at the same time build the power locally to force state anti-gentrification legislation - rent control, anti-eviction legislation, increased public housing, and so forth. But in addition to such local organizing, anti-gentrification organizers should be working with global social justice movements. Housing is a question of social justice, and gentrification is part of a wider global capital accumulation. Many gentrification projects today are designed, built and financed by international capital that makes decisions at a planetary rather than local scale. The case of the Beijing Olympics is only the most obvious. There, in preparation for that sports event which is also a bonanza for Chinese capitalists and the state, several hundred thousand poor and working class people have been summarily displaced from older neighbourhoods in the city facing massive redevelopment. This connection between anti-gentrification struggles and world social justice movement activists can be extremely threatening. The recent desperate invocation of Section 129a of the German legal code, initiating 'terrorism' charges against seven people, including several gentrification researchers, demonstrates exactly how threatening these connections can be. Class politics is equated with terrorism. Our response should be to intensify the connections among activists at different scales while refusing the state's hysterical equation of class opposition with terrorism. Anti-gentrification struggles are part of that work.

Gentrification has transformed into a means of taking revenge on homeless people and the working class, the revanchist city exacts revenge against all who are victimized by neoliberal capitalism.