Staging a ‘Chinatown’ in Berlin: The role of city branding in the urban governance of ethnic diversity

Abstract

Migration is predominantly directed towards cities that have been facing a highly competitive global environment within the last 30 years of globalisation. Against the background of economic restructuring, cities are looking for new forms of city branding. In this process, ethno-cultural diversity is increasingly regarded as an asset, leading to the branding of migrant neighbourhoods, especially those characterised by migrant economies. These agglomerations of shops, cafés and restaurants provide places of leisure and consumption for cosmopolitan urbanites. This paper shows how Berlin’s municipal politicians failed in staging ‘Chinatowns’ and ‘Asiatowns’ as ethnically branded commercial districts and argues that the Vietnamese migrants who are primarily addressed by these projects are not readily marketable by a city-branding approach. The assumed common identity of Asian migrants in Berlin and the city’s top-down municipal approach contradict the structures of the heterogeneous group of Vietnamese residents. This paper traces Berlin’s transition from a reactive to a proactive approach in the marketing of ethno-cultural diversity. My approach is to embed the Dong Xuan Centre in Berlin-Lichtenberg, a Vietnamese-run wholesale centre that was founded through Vietnamese agency, in the local discourse on Asia- and Chinatowns. The study shows that the centre’s management appears to be an active agent in the branding process of the project, modelling itself after the global brand of ‘Chinatown’. However, the centre’s vision of a place of cultural life and trade contradicts German planning laws, a conflict that has led to ongoing negotiations between the centre’s management and the district government, thereby hindering its branding.

Ethnic Entrepreneurship and Placemaking in Toronto's Ethnic Retail Neighbourhoods

“…Lack of public engagement -Effective placemaking requires active public participation and engagement (Galanakis 2013;Karacor 2014;Schmiz 2016;Rath et al 2017;Schmiz & Kitzmann 2017). Ethnic entrepreneurs' experiences of a retail space largely depend on the extent to which they participated in the placemaking process.…”

Urban Politics On Ethnic Entrepreneurship

“…This argument highlights the need for a spatially sensitive approach in different urban settings. As research has shown, a relational perspective to space (Massey ) as applied by Glick Schiller and Çağlar () may help to conceptualise the scalar positioning of a city, its specific migration history and its embeddedness into broader financial and economic power structures as well as migrant transnational networks (Schmiz ; Räeuchle & Schmiz ). In drawing on this argument, Räuchle & Nuissl and Schmiz (this issue) show that the symbolic value of ethnic economies has led to this new field of political engagement in branding.…”

“…Within this literature, migrant entrepreneurs are addressed as placemakers with a high social value for the ethnic community (Wood 1997;Bergmann 2011;Haid 2013;Kaplan 2015;Ülker 2016). This has been demonstrated, for example, for retail in Parisian neighbourhoods (Kaplan 2015), a Vietnamese wholesale centre in Berlin (Schmiz 2017), themed Chinese shopping malls in Toronto (Zhuang 2008) and an informal Thai food market in Berlin's Preußenpark (Haid 2013). In terms of economic placemaking, Stock (2013) shows the creative practices of falafel snack bar owners and how their strategic reaction to changing customer tastes makes them symbolic markers in gentrification processes in Berlin.…”

From Passive to Active: A Multiplayer Economic Integration Process of Turkish Immigrants in Berlin

“…During the Cold War, the downtown district named Mitte (meaning "middle" in English) was converted into prohibited military zones filled with desolation and horror after the construction of the Berlin Wall ( Figure 1). After reunification in 1989, the formerly desolated Mitte was massively invested in and drastically reconstructed, generating great demand for manual labor [40]. Due to the previously signed recruitment agreement, most of the Turkish immigrants, especially the less educated and low skilled, agglomerated in Mitte for construction jobs [4].…”