Urban identity making in Germany: the case of Bamberg

Iuliia Eremenko

doi:10.19181/inter.2019.18.2

Abstract

Urban identity is one of the most important characteristics of the urban community and an understanding of the characteristics of its formation is necessary to determine urban development strategies. This paper seeks to examine the current situation concerning urban identity in Germany, a late capitalist society: has urban identity weaken or has it remained signifcant for people and can it even be used as a resource for new solidarities and intercultural dialogue? Within the framework of this article, the author identifes the main actors forming the urban identity in Bamberg and the factors that have had a major inﬂuence on this identity. Empirically, the study is based on a series of semi-structured interviews with experts in urban history, city development and placemaking from Bamberg: school teachers and supervisors involved in the adjustment of students, representatives of city administration, urban activists, and coordinators of UNESCO projects. The results of this work will help to contribute to the research feld about the phenomenon of preserving local identity in small cities. Thus, the scientifc relevance of this study is that the identifed factors can be further generalized onto other cases.

Highlights

It is often argued that under the pressures of globalization territorial identities weaken, as individuals grow increasingly mobile and cosmopolitan
This paper considers urban identity as a territory-based component of individual and collective identity that embraces both the feeling of belonging to a place and attachment to a place
T he core efforts aimed at urban identity-making are made by such actors as city administration, educational institutions, and local activists

Summary

Introduction

It is often argued that under the pressures of globalization territorial identities weaken, as individuals grow increasingly mobile and cosmopolitan. Identity production could be at the level of neighborhoods, districts, or whole towns, and sometimes overlaps with the existing territorial divisions In this analysis, a distinction is made between regional and urban identities, as the area of a region (land) in Germany is much larger than the local residential area which is the focus of this inquiry. This study adheres to the constructivist approach to identity, in which identity is considered not as a “natural” sense of belonging determined by a set of primordial attributes but rather as an outcome of how people and groups (re)interpret the boundaries between themselves and others This approach shows that urban identity might be a product of strategic efforts taken by various actors in the drive for certain economic or political resources. Urban identity can be interpreted as the internal binding of a person to the place of his or her life, as an emotional and at the same time social connection which is formed as a result of multiple interactions both with the urban environment and with society

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