In this symposium, we explore how urban citizenship is about expressing, if not producing, difference, and how fragmentation of claims affects urban citizenship and right to the city movements with their universal, all‐inclusive ideals. Investigating social movements, political participation and conflicting diversities in public space in Tel Aviv and Berlin, we see a trend towards a diversification of interests, a weakening of movements, and even a competition over rights and resources rather than a development of mutual support and solidarities among various groups on the pathway to a livable city. This tension, we argue, deserves attention. Radical urban scholarship and politics need to better understand the historical and place‐specific contexts that structure the formation of citizenship claims and the courses that citizenship struggles take. Celebrations of urban citizenship as a more contextualized, community oriented, and bottom‐up framework (in comparison to national citizenship) should therefore be complemented by a careful investigation of their fragmented and fragmenting practices.
Squatting as a housing strategy and as a tool of urban social movements accompanies the development of capitalist cities worldwide. We argue that the dynamics of squatter movements are directly connected to strategies of urban renewal in that movement conjunctures occur when urban regimes are in crisis. An analysis of the history of Berlin squatter movements, their political context and their effects on urban policies since the 1970s, clearly shows how massive mobilizations at the beginning of the 1980s and in the early 1990s developed in a context of transition in regimes of urban renewal. The crisis of Fordist city planning at the end of the 1970s provoked a movement of "rehab squatting" ('Instandbesetzung'), which contributed to the institutionalization of "cautious urban renewal" ('behutsame Stadterneuerung') in an important way. The second rupture in Berlin's urban renewal became apparent in 1989 and 1990, when the necessity of restoring whole inner-city districts constituted a new, budget-straining challenge for urban policymaking. Whilst in the 1980s the squatter movement became a central condition for and a political factor of the transition to "cautious urban renewal," in the 1990s large-scale squatting — mainly in the eastern parts of the city — is better understood as an alien element in times of neoliberal urban restructuring.
This contribution focuses on the role of new-build gentrification in the socio-spatial re-differentiation of shrinking second-tier post-socialist cities in Germany and Poland, countries that differ in terms of the pace and character of post-socialist transition. Our main goal is to compare and contrast the unfolding of new-build gentrification in different post-socialist settings with the examples of new-build gentrification known from international studies that mostly cover “Western” cities. One of the main findings of our study is that the tempo and scale of new-build gentrification is sensitive to the pace of post-socialist transformations and to institutional contexts. Regarding the international debate on newbuild gentrification, our findings from Łódź and Leipzig highlight a rather distinctive mode of the process. Despite the undeniable similarities with the spatial patterns detected by previous studies illustrating the “Western” contexts, the new-build gentrification detected in our case cities points to different economic roots as well as specific social consequences. Irrespective of identified differences between Leipzig and Łódź, the new-build gentrification appears to be economically independent from the former (other) forms of gentrification and its dynamics.
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