Squatters Take on the Creative Class

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

 01/07/2010 04:04 PM
Hier heeft Amsterdam ook last van ;)

Een groep van steden (Randstad dus, noorden hoort er absoluut niet bij),
die tezamen moeten optrekken.
Een trip naar New York met een fors aantal notabedeelden, waarbij creatief
door NYC werd getrokken, om maar (alsjeblieft, alsjeblieft) creatieve
ideeën op te doen.
Maar ja, reisbudget was toch nog niet op (hadden dus meer in China moeten
uitgeven?)

Groet / Cees

Squatters Take on the Creative Class
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,druck-670600,00.html
Who Has the Right to Shape the City?

By Philipp Oehmke

Hamburg has been trying to woo the much-coveted "creative class" for years
in a bid to secure its future. Now the city has become the front line in a
bitter conflict over gentrification, with artists squatting buildings in
protest against investment plans and members of the far-left scene
attacking private property -- and even police.

The three pages, printed from the Internet, are lying on Richard Florida's
desk in his Toronto office. He begins skimming the document, but by the
first sentence he has already had enough. It is, once again, an attack on
his theories.

The sentence in question reads: "A specter is haunting Europe, ever since
US economist Richard Florida came to the conclusion that only those cities
prosper in which the 'creative class' feels comfortable." The "creative
class" is a term coined by Florida. He puts away the pages and smiles
weakly.

The sentence he just read comes from halfway around the world, from the
northern German city of Hamburg, and it marks the beginning of a manifesto
that Hamburg artists, musicians and social activists published in October
2009. In recent weeks, this manifesto has attracted a great deal of
attention in Hamburg and throughout Germany. It is directed against an
urban development policy that is based on a theory that Florida has
developed over the past few years.

In his theory, Florida argues that cities must reinvent themselves. In
contrast to the 1990s, they should no longer attempt to attract companies,
but people. More specifically, the right people -- people who invent
things, who promote change and who shape a city's image. He has classified
these people as the "creative class." It's a theory that has had
unintentional consequences -- including bitter conflicts in places like
Hamburg.

Axiom of Urban Planning

The theory has also made Florida rich and famous. He is now one of the
most popular speakers in North America and says he received a thousand
requests for speaking engagements in 2009 alone. His books about the
"creative class," and about why it is crucial to the survival of every
city, are bestsellers, and his theory has been elevated to a virtually
unchallenged axiom of modern urban development. Richard Florida has become
a guru of sorts for city planners.

In Europe, hardly any other city has relied on Florida as heavily as the
traditional trading city of Hamburg. A few years ago, Jörg Dräger, at the
time Hamburg's science minister, showed up one day at the city-state's
administration, the Hamburg Senate, with Florida's books under his arm. It
was shortly before the summer recess, and Dräger distributed the books to
his fellow Senate members. He asked them to read the books over the
summer, saying that they offered a possible approach for the city's
future.

Soon afterwards, the city of Hamburg hired the management consulting firm
Roland Berger to examine how Florida's theory could be applied to Hamburg.
"We didn't simply want to follow him blindly, but his ideas were the basis
for the subsequent development of our strategy for the city," says Dräger
today.

The result was called "Hamburg, City of Talent," and Florida, in his role
as guru, even came to the city in person and gave presentations there.

And now all of this is coming back to haunt him? He is the one who
supposedly unleashed the specter that is haunting Europe? Why is there a
manifesto against him? What exactly is going on in Hamburg?

The Fight against Gentrification

Florida could have easily recognized that change on an evening a few weeks
ago, when an alliance of activists called "Right to the City," met at the
Jupi Bar, a scruffy alternative bar in the Gängeviertel neighborhood.
"Right to the City" is an alliance of about 20 citizens' initiatives with
widely divergent goals, and yet they are united in their fight against
gentrification: in other words, the deliberate and politically expedient
upgrading of poorer neighborhoods, which generally leads to the
replacement of the existing population with more affluent new residents.

On this evening, local activists have already been squatting buildings in
the Gängeviertel for about three months. The Gängeviertel was originally a
residential neighborhood for artisans, blue-collar workers and day
laborers that extended from the harbor deep into the downtown area. Its
buildings were among the oldest in Hamburg. Many have already been torn
down, but a few have remained standing in a particularly dead section of
Hamburg's opulent and lifeless downtown area, in the shadow of high-rise
buildings owned by the powerful Axel Springer publishing company.

The buildings, which belonged to the city, were mostly empty. The city had
allowed them to become run-down, and it was pleased to have finally found
a buyer a little over a year ago. Dutch investor Hanzevast, which acquired
the buildings, planned to demolish all but a few facades and replace the
buildings with glass-and-steel architecture, offices and luxury
condominiums. Developments of this nature are part of the business of a
company like Hanzevast, which is why the plan made sense for the Dutch
company. But Hanzevast, hard-hit by the economic crisis, delayed the
beginning of construction, and in August 2009 about 200 artists occupied
the Gängeviertel buildings.

Unease about the Future

"The city actually belongs to everyone" is supposed to be the topic of
discussion on this particular evening at the Jupi Bar. But the debate
cannot begin because too many people have turned up for the event. Most of
them don't know much about sociology or urban planning. Loudspeakers are
set up on the sidewalk outside, so that the large crowd of people waiting
to get in can at least hear the discussion.

The audience is surprisingly diverse. Young women with messy hair who look
like they just returned from a gap year volunteering in Southeast Asia
stand next to women in their 60s wearing beige jackets, their silver hair
cut fashionably short. Some look affluent while others clearly have no
money at all. Some come from the leftist subculture, while others are
solidly middle-class. But they all share a sense of unease about their
city, brought on by the fact that they have had no say in the changes in
its appearance in recent years, as old buildings have had to make way for
modern glass-and-steel office complexes, many of which are still empty
today.

One of them is the celebrated young German painter Daniel Richter, who
made himself and his high-profile media presence available as a sponsor of
the Gängeviertel and who helped the protest movement penetrate deep into
the heart of bourgeois Hamburg. Another is the bestselling German author,
musician and theatre director Rocko Schamoni, who has temporarily put his
career on hold to devote his time to the fight against the city's efforts
to gentrify the gritty St. Pauli neighborhood. And then there are the
young people who, until recently, lived in New York or South America, and
are now painting the walls at night in the Gängeviertel. All of these
people comprise a massive new protest movement, turning the city into a
kind of social laboratory.

Visible Fault Lines

"The city has long been a strategic site for the exploration of many major
subjects confronting society and sociology," writes US sociologist Saskia
Sassen. In this sense, Hamburg currently functions as a focal lens of
sorts, one in which the conflicts of the coming decades are already
recognizable. These conflicts will pit change against preservation,
private property against the community and, most of all, economic
interests against social considerations.

These contradictions are visible everywhere. Anyone who looks closely
enough will recognize the fault lines that run through the city. Billions
have been invested in a new neighborhood dubbed HafenCity (Harbor City), a
prestigious project that has gained worldwide attention. Construction is
currently underway there on the Elbphilharmonie building, which is
supposed to eventually be the world's most spectacular concert hall, but
which is already three times over budget.

In St. Pauli, buildings in Hafenstraße which were formerly home to squats
are now surrounded by new glass towers which stretch for several
kilometers along the banks of the Elbe River. The development, known as
the "Pearl Necklace," has been the focus of protests.

Stopping Ikea

The occupation of the Gängeviertel was followed by another effort by 130
artists, who squatted a run-down former department store in the city's
Altona neighborhood which was due to be replaced by an Ikea store.
Finally, there is the case of the Rote Flora, a cultural center that is
squatted by members of the far-left scene. It belongs to an investor who
has threatened to sell the building, which would lead to the forcible
eviction of the squatters -- something that could trigger violent street
fighting.

Cars are already being set on fire in Hamburg every week by anonymous
perpetrators. Recently a police station was attacked with Molotov
cocktails, a first in postwar German history, and even police cars were
set on fire.

Tensions have been high in the city for months. One of the sources of
conflict was an unexpected petition, signed by 184,500 Hamburg citizens,
against educational reforms. All of this is happening in a city-state
ruled by an unlikely coalition of conservative Christian Democratic Union
(CDU) and the Green Party, the first grouping of its kind in a German
state-level government. Oddly enough, in a city fighting over its
identity, it is the leftists who, in their struggle against
gentrification, find themselves defending the status quo.

At the beginning of the 2000s, it seemed as if the major political battles
would revolve around the global economy, with activists taking on
globalization, climate change and the over-indebtedness of African
countries. But, in Hamburg at least, this protest movement appears to have
been eclipsed by a movement focusing on the opposite of globalization. It
is not interested in the global perspective, in the question of how
Africans can live in Africa, but in questions like: How do we intend to
live in our smallest units, our cities and our neighborhoods?

'Not in Our Name!'

The people attending the meeting at the Jupi Bar in the Gängeviertel
neighborhood agree that this is a question that has been of little
interest to the city of Hamburg in the last few decades. Christoph Schäfer
is one of the leaders of the Right to the City group and the founder of
Park Fiction, a citizens' initiative against gentrification in St. Pauli.

Wearing a green tracksuit top under his corduroy sports jacket, he talks
about the German thinkers Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel who, at the
beginning of the 1900s, recognized that the city would serve as the
nucleus of the great social struggles of the century. Later in his talk,
he discusses the left-wing sociologist Henri Lefebvre, who in the 1960s
developed the notion of the "right to the city," based on his observations
of the Paris suburbs, and David Harvey, a Marxist geographer and social
theorist who attributes the causes of the financial crisis to neoliberal
urban planning.

It quickly becomes clear that Schäfer is repeatedly pointing to the same
source of conflict: The city is the capitalist, hungry for profit, while
the residents are the workers, exploited for the city's gain. According to
this analysis, artists are the city's unwilling puppets. As members of the
creative class, they move into poorer neighborhoods, inadvertently giving
them a trendy image which allow them to be marketed more effectively by
the city.

This is why the artists of Gängeviertel have penned their manifesto
against the branding of the city, called "Not in Our Name!" The weekly
newspaper Die Zeit and the daily Hamburger Abendblatt, owned by Axel
Springer, have both printed the artists' manifesto.

There is only one problem: The city did not react the way the squatters
had expected it to. This, in turn, has something to do with Richard
Florida. For years, city officials had racked their brains about how they
could attract the coveted creative class to Hamburg. And now members of
that very creative class have come to Hamburg of their own accord, in the
form of 200 artists right in the middle of the city. Rather than an
inconvenience, the mass squatting was a stroke of luck for city officials.

And so the city, on Aug. 22, the first day of the occupation, did not send
in the police to drive out the squatters, as it would have done in the
past. Instead, it dispatched Dirk Petrat to talk to the artists.

Sympathetic to Squatters' Concerns

Petrat, a lawyer by profession, heads Hamburg's office of media, tourism
and marketing. His children's drawings and paintings are taped to the
cabinets in his office, and his screensaver shows postcard views of
Hamburg. He has a penchant for colorful neckties. He also has very strong
principles.

Petrat went from his office in the Hanseviertel shopping arcade to the
Gängeviertel, a 10-minute walk. Standing in the courtyard of one of the
buildings there, he asked the squatters if anyone had anything they wanted
to talk about. He said that he was from the city administration and was
there to negotiate, and that he also wanted to bring in inspectors to
check the structures were safe. He didn't want anyone getting hurt, he
said.

The squatters were speechless. Some of them had already gone to former
radical squatters in the Hafenstrasse neighborhood for advice, and they
had told them to be prepared for bitter house-to-house fighting. As a
result, they were all the more surprised to be faced with a friendly man
from the city who seemed to be so sympathetic to their concerns.

Petrat proposed that the squatters sign tenancy agreements with the city.
He told them that they could stay where they were for the time being, but
that the arrangement had to be regulated somehow. The department manager
began to enjoy his new task. The city can depend on the squatters to
uphold their end of the agreement, he says, sounding like the father of
children who are sometimes somewhat boisterous but basically good-hearted.

Then Petrat and the Senate decided to buy back the buildings from the
Dutch investors. It cost the city €2.8 million more than the Dutch had
paid for the buildings in the first place. In a sense, the €2.8 million
represent the cost the city incurred for listening to Richard Florida.

Change without Unrest

In Toronto, Florida, who prefers to be called Rich, is wearing a pale
denim shirt and motorcycle boots. His face is still tanned from a recent
visit to Miami. He makes double espressos in the large, open kitchen at
the institute where he works, and gives a brief lecture on Karl Marx. The
large windows offer a view of Toronto in the snow.

Florida developed the institute, which is affiliated with the University
of Toronto, three years ago, calling it the Prosperity Institute. One of
its goals is to examine the issues that relate to how people live
together, questions like: "What can we do to enable cities to change
without triggering unrest?"

His staff of 20, which includes geologists, economists and social
scientists, study capitalism and how the conditions under which it exists
have changed at a time when the Western economy is no longer sustained by
physical labor in factories, but by intellectual and creative work.

Florida has devised a number of tools for cities, including the "three Ts
formula," which he insists cities should never forget: technology, talent
and tolerance. He has developed a "creativity index," a "gay index" and a
"Bohemian index," which he says should be used to evaluate cities.

"But the point is not to simulate these values," he says. "The point is to
have them. You can't put a T-shirt with a catchy slogan on a fat man and
suddenly claim that he's cool. I've never talked about marketing in any of
my books. And I don't want to provide any recipes for gentrification."

Blurred Distinctions

But it is precisely the fact that Florida does not provide precise
instructions on how to transform cities that troubled Björn Bloching, the
head of the Hamburg office of Roland Berger, from the start. These
concerns prompted him to sit down with his team of management consultants
and try to figure out how to make the Toronto guru's principles applicable
to Hamburg. In the end, not much came of their efforts.

In the meantime, Hamburg has given up its "City of Talent" slogan. Trends,
it seems, are quick to come and go in the city's administration. "That was
the last government's slogan," says one city official. The guiding
principle of the current CDU/Green coalition is "Growth with Foresight,"
with growth being the CDU's goal and foresight the Greens'.

Bloching was disappointed, because he had believed that he could help
Hamburg turn itself into a city of talent. But then he had another new
idea.

He meets SPIEGEL for an 8 a.m. breakfast in a hideous Hamburg designer
hotel. He parks his bike outside the hotel, and his casual black wool
sweater makes him look like someone who has just cycled over from the
Gängeviertel. He is living proof that the distinctions between members of
the protest movement and the establishment have become blurred, more than
40 years after the late 1960s, when the leftist protest culture first
became an identifiable presence in Germany.

Christine Ebeling, the spokeswoman of the Gängeviertel squatters, reveals
the same blurred distinctions between the groups. With her high heels,
black nylons and business skirt, she looks more like someone who might be
working for Roland Berger.

Bloching says that he met her recently at a spaghetti dinner that takes
place regularly and is an institution among Hamburg's cultural elite.
Bloching and Ebeling are officially adversaries: he, the management
consultant and turbo-capitalist, advising the city on how upgrade its
neighborhoods, she, the artist and squatter who helped force the city to
change its plans for the Gängeviertel.

High Horse

"But she seems completely reasonable," says Bloching, recalling the time
when he suggested to her that Roland Berger, the consulting firm, open an
office in the Gängeviertel. Now that would be something. It was nothing
but an idea, one which he has since discarded, but it shows how blurred
the boundaries have become between super-capitalism and squatting.

"It would have been brilliant in the Gängeviertel," says Bloching. "We
would have set up an open space, handed out grants to artists and had
artists-in-residence. Our clients would have served as a market for the
artists to sell their work, and they in turn would have inspired our
consultants." Besides, he adds, it's a short trip from the Gängeviertel to
the airport.

But somehow his proposal didn't quite hit the mark, not with the city
official in charge of cultural affairs, and certainly not with Christine
Ebeling -- something which is hardly surprising.

"Perhaps they don't find it worth discussing," says Bloching. "But morally
speaking they should come off their high horse."

Indeed, some might ask what exactly gives the artists the right to demand
studios more or less for free in a prime downtown location. After all,
those who care about social issues -- and that describes the core of the
anti-gentrification movement -- might also argue that the buildings could
be put to better use accommodating other, needier people than middle class
artists for whom squatting is little more than a lifestyle choice.

"At the dinner, I said: Why don't the artists go to Dulsberg, where it's
cheap?" Dulsberg is a gray neighborhood in the east of Hamburg that
sustained a lot of damage during World War II.

One of the squatters apparently replied that they couldn't be creative in
Dulsberg.

"That's naturally something of a problematic argument," says Bloching.

A Dangerous Copycat Effect

In reality, this has always been the way art works. Artists do go and live
in places like Dulsberg, just as artists in New York are now moving to
Queens, because the prospects of moving into a studio in SoHo are slim to
nonexistent today.

But Hamburg's artists aren't going to Dulsberg. They prefer the central
neighborhood of Altona. In that district's pedestrian zone, which looks
the way people in the 1970s imagined the modern age would like, complete
with all the concrete mania of that era, the next occupation has been
going on for several weeks. Artists there, inspired by the successes of
their comrades in the Gängeviertel, have occupied an old Karstadt
department store that has been vacant for six years.

This worries Dirk Petrat from the city's cultural affairs office. "The
Gängeviertel copycat effect is dangerous," he says. The city wants to
offer the Altona artists a former police barracks for a year, with a
bunker available to them after that, but the artists' reactions have been
reserved. Somehow these squatters are not as open to discussion as those
in the Gängeviertel, says Petrat, sounding a little disappointed.

Many people in the Altona district approve of plans to tear down the boxy
old Karstadt building and erect a blue-green Ikea cuboid in its place.
They have even presented a petition in favor of building the Ikea store.
As it happens, there is also a second petition, against Ikea, but it isn't
nearly as long as the pro-Ikea list: The pro-Ikea petition has 9,380
signatures, while the anti-Ikea list only has 1,800 so far, according to
the latest figure from the Ikea opponents. (The anti-Ikea camp can
continue to collect signatures until February, however.)

The district of Altona has its fair share of social problems, with high
unemployment and a large immigrant population, but gentrification has been
underway for some time in the picturesque streets of Altona's Ottensen
neighborhood.

The fronts are blurred in the battle of arguments. Nothing in the 1970s
pedestrian zone seems worth preserving, but local residents fear that
Ikea, despite bringing a few jobs to Altona, will cause an increase in car
traffic on the streets. Ironically, most of the people who attend these
discussion events have Ikea furniture at home.

Are the Squatters Too Nice?

On this evening, the topic of the discussion is: "Problems and prospects
for squatting in the past and today." A man named Frank is the moderator.
Frank, a former radical squatter from Hamburg's Hafenstrasse scene, is
wearing a charcoal-colored turtleneck sweater and a clean pair of jeans,
and there is a touch of gray in his hair.

Three women from the Gängeviertel have been invited, including spokeswoman
Christine Ebeling. The other two are significantly younger and seem
confused, more than anything. They are constantly correcting and
interrupting each other. They look exhausted. "Squatting is a fulltime
job," says one of the two women.

The groups have come together to share their experiences with squatting.
Perhaps the Gängeviertel representatives will be able to learn something
new. But they already seem to be doing pretty well by themselves: The
Gängeviertel squatters, who Frank dubs the "shooting stars" of the
squatting movement, managed to occupy 12 buildings and get permission to
stay there after just four months. To achieve the same results, it took
the Hafenstrasse squatters 10 years and countless street clashes in the
1980s and 1990s.

"Admittedly, things are a little easier for you," says Frank. "You don't
have to deal with people linked to (notorious far-left German terrorist
group) the RAF or with junkies."

He has hit the nail on the head. The problem with the Gängeviertel
squatters is that they are too well behaved.

Is it acceptable to cooperate so closely with the city authorities? Is it
ok to become part of the system? Shouldn't there at least be a police raid
at some point?

"If you are too nice, sooner or later people will take advantage of you,"
says Frank.

But times have changed. Nowadays, squatters look like management
consultants, and vice-versa. Conservative newspapers print manifestos from
the leftist subculture, while a guru from Toronto quotes Marx to deflect
suspicions that he is providing recipes for gentrification. The city's
negotiator talks about artists as if they were his children, while the
city unofficially aligns itself with the squatters. Its former ally, a
financial investor of the kind that cities would previously never have
turned away, has now become the enemy.

Urban Resistance

All of these contradictions suddenly become clear in a situation that
transpires one late afternoon in the Gängeviertel. Marc, an artist with a
studio there, is feeling stressed. Saga, one of the city's building
maintenance organizations, recently visited his building. The Saga team
threatened to block off the top floor of one building, arguing that there
was too much debris there, creating the risk of collapse. Marc quickly
calls up several people on his mobile phone and gets them to come over to
clear up. But then he has to go. He's supposed to be giving a tour to a
group from a community college. "They just keep coming," he says.

And so Marc ends up giving nine Hamburg women wearing colorful jackets a
tour of the squatted buildings. He shows them the studios, courtyards and
galleries. The women are enthusiastic. Some of them feel reminded of
Hamburg after the war, of the spirit of optimism that prevailed at the
time. "I have been living in Hamburg for 60 years," says another woman.
"This is the first time that resistance is forming against the kind of
city policy that was always the case here and where we were not given a
say."

The women receive a copy of the manifesto -- the same manifesto that
Richard Florida has on his desk in Toronto. They read it out loud. They
agree with everything it says.

Perhaps the city does have a problem, after all.

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