„Multi-culti“ vs. ”another cell phone store“ – Changing ethnic, social, and commercial diversities in Berlin-Neukölln.

Anna Steigemann

doi:10.5130/ccs.v12.i1.6872

Abstract

Based on an extensive ethnography of the economic and social life in Berlin-Neukölln, the paper asks how a changing demographic and social structure affects the social life but also the urban renewal on two iconic but contested streets - “the Arab street” Sonnenallee and adjacent Karl-Marx-Straße. The effects of migration - and particularly of the more recent refugee migration - to Berlin are explored through the reshaping and diversification processes of the physical and social spaces of the two streets and their businesses. In detail, the paper illuminates the changing ordinary everyday interactions and social and spatial practices in and around local shops and gastronomic facilities and argues that it is the interactions in and around certain shops and businesses that contribute to the everyday practice of urban diversity. The paper further reveals that regardless of the place-and community-making of the local store owners and staff therein, the local urban renewal and regeneration actors have a very different understanding of these spaces and their operators and also aim for a different kind of new “diversity”. The paper thus concludes by also showing how these actors frame and depict the increasingly ethnically diverse businesses on the two streets in the course of urban renewal, including a critical discussion of their perceptions and concrete practices as in contrast to the ethnically diverse business peoples’ perceptions and placemaking practices that often also represent homemaking practices.

Highlights

In line with Sharon Zukin, and based on my dissertation work from 2012 to 2016 about the social ‘more’ that store owners and their businesses contribute to neighborhood social life, this paper argues that everyday street-life on ordinary shopping streets, their markets, cafés, and stores, is the mainspring of a shared public social life
The retail and gastronomic businesses located on Sonnenallee and adjacent Karl-Marx-Straße as the places where community is practiced become all the more important in the 21st century, where migration is the defining norm and where increasingly more people are on the move and constantly generate and affect contemporary and future urban diversities
In the late 2000s, in the exploratory analysis for the urban renewal program Active Urban Centers9 (Aktive Stadtzentren), the authors argue that the street suffers primarily from heightened competition with nearby shopping locations and from a negative retail development characterized by high vacancy rates, low residential purchasing power, a disproportionate presence of discount stores, and a lack of so-called anchor businesses, upscale gastronomic facilities and independently owned businesses

Summary

Introduction

The retail and gastronomic businesses located on Sonnenallee and adjacent Karl-Marx-Straße as the places where community is practiced become all the more important in the 21st century, where migration is the defining norm and where increasingly more people are on the move (forcibly or voluntarily) and constantly generate and affect contemporary and future urban diversities. It seems that it is these conflicting motives and agendas of owners and urban renewal agents that result in a situation where the urban renewal programs challenge rather than support those businesses that made the place and character of Karl-Marx-Straße and Sonnenallee: Some details about the development plans of the district provide a context.

Results

Conclusion