Living gentrification: Rethinking displacement in urban redevelopment processes from the perspective of Berlin-Neukölln
Creators: name: Koch, Gertraud
name: Lutz, Samantha
name: Stumpf, Teresa
name: Tijerina García, Alejandra
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2019

description: In sociological urban research, gentrification is described as the process of economic redevelopment of urban areas and the processes of displacement that go along with it. Thus, gentrification appears to be a process that is influenced by a variety of political, cultural, social and economic factors, yet it nevertheless appears as a relatively schematic process which occurs in a certain sequence of steps along different paths (Lees, 2000; Holm, 2009) and which appears almost inevitable for the development of inner city areas (Smith, 1979). However, the concept of gentrification has recently been challenged. Critical voices point out that it is employed rather as a combat term in the critique of neo-liberalism, and that any urban redevelopment can be defamed by calling it gentrification (Smith, 1996). On the flipside, in the 2009 summer edition of “City”, Tom Slater criticized that many gentrification researchers seem to have lost their political and moral commitment to social justice and have lost sight of social inequalities (Slater, 2009), particularly when processes of urban revaluation are studied on behalf of the state and certain interest groups in a somewhat legitimatizing fashion. In his reply, Chris Hamnett, one of the researchers criticized by Slater, argues that on the one hand, class structures have changed and the share of the working class in the overall population has decreased. The increasing share of the middle class in inner city areas can thus not by default be explained by processes of displacement. Rather, other background factors must also be analysed from a scientific perspective. In this debate about the “right” stance of research on gentrification, Slater and Hamnett mainly discuss political arguments, which appear to be too schematic. Both disregard the everyday occurrences of people’s lifeworlds in the gentrified areas. In order to support either one or the other thesis, a detailed investigation within specific districts would have to be conducted. Therefore, this contribution suggests a different approach. Rather than adding another differentiation or argument about the social nature of this driver of change in urban environments, we suggest an empirical approach from the perspective of the people undergoing these processes. As cultural anthropologists, we are interested in how people in different social contexts organize their daily lives. In gentrification research, however, we have not found any lifeworld approaches that study people exposed to and involved in urban redevelopment processes in a comprehensive manner. Rather, the affected individuals are perceived roughly as displaced people who, to a degree, are pawns in the hands of the gentrifiers. Beyond the groups who articulate their opposition by means of demonstrations or political protests, there is a lack of knowledge about the ways of dealing with and the meanings gentrification has for the population of affected areas, including those who decide against moving out and develop other strategies such as more condensed living situations. We became aware of this missing perspective in gentrification research in connection with an exploratory ethnographic study in the Reuterkiez quarter, which is located in the Berlin district of Northern Neukölln. Our focus was on coexistence in this diverse area, and the gentrification process quickly caught our attention as an important characteristic of living together in the face of redevelopment processes under way in the neighbourhood. Much to our surprise – and against the grain of our clear empathy for those who are threatened by displacement – we found that many articulated a positive attitude towards processes of redevelopment in the quarter, even if at the same time concerns were raised about the ways in which rent increases and stronger population pressure would affect them. Inspired by Vertovec’s super-diversity approach (2007), which detects a differentiation of ethnic attributions and affiliations due to migration and residence legislation as well as an accompanying large variety of different framing conditions for the everyday life and work contexts of individual groups, we noticed more and more differentiations in how the “affected” dealt with gentrification. In the following, we therefore suggest a homologous perspective for researching the residents of areas affected by gentrification. The aim of this contribution is to initiate an empirically based and differentiated understanding for the effects of urban redevelopment processes on the people living in such areas beyond political and moral rhetoric. Alongside the different attitudes towards the urban revaluation processes among socially deprived groups in Berlin-Neukölln above-mentioned, current debates regarding the economic background of changes in urban and social processes do not take into account, or sufficient account, the different facets of symbolic displacement. In addition, urban revaluation in Berlin-Neukölln goes hand in hand with social stratification from below. Socio-economic indicators are thus of limited explanatory power in order to address the social dynamics that go along with gentrification as a driver of social change in the district. In this spirit, it is necessary to study the effects on coexistence, and thus – also from an academic perspective – to develop starting points for a potential socially responsible management. In this endeavour, our empirical exploration of Neukölln serves as a starting point. Our focus lies on the daily practices, the meanings, the attitudes and the coping strategies people employ in addressing the redevelopment of their neighbourhood. Meanings and practices emerge in social interaction. They are thus situated in the experience of lifeworlds and depend on the position an individual occupies within this lifeworld. In Neukölln, the majority of residents are of migrant background (Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg, 2012) and live in underprivileged social circumstances (TOPOS Stadtforschung, 2011). However, these categorisations are too broad to describe the situation of the inhabitants of Neukölln in this redevelopment process. People live a super-diverse life and it would appear that more coordinates exist which shape their experience of gentrification. The findings of our exploratory research suggest that the expediency of mobility is formative for the practices, meanings and attitudes towards gentrification in the Reuterkiez quarter of Neukölln. With this in mind, our approach shows once again that lifeworld-oriented research is necessary to better determine the social dynamics of urban revaluation processes. The debates about the “right” stance of research in gentrification ignore the fact that also deprived groups of inhabitants endorse or even actively expedite revaluation processes to respond to urban drawbacks. We outline our argument about living gentrification by first integrating the perspective suggested here into the current discourse on gentrification in the social sciences, and by working out the homologies, which we transfer to research on urban redevelopment processes based on the super-diversity approach. At the intersection of these two points of theoretical reference, the necessity of a differentiated perspective on the residents who are “affected” by processes of gentrification is established which takes its point of departure in the lifeworlds of the individuals undergoing it, and thus in the subjective interpretations of and the dealings with urban redevelopment processes. In a second step, we sketch our ethnographic approach to the field in Neukölln, where the data underlying this contribution was gathered and which gave rise to the occasion for the development of the approach here suggested to differentiate research on processes of gentrification regarding the interpretations and dealings undertaken by the populations threatened by displacement. In the succeeding fourth chapter, we establish the necessity of this differentiated approach to a perspective on “those affected” by urban redevelopment processes. We suggest achieving this by looking at the data guided by the research question of which decisions and appropriateness for or against mobility by individuals become visible in the suburb in connection with gentrification. In the conclusion, we sketch future questions for research on coexistence in processes of urban redevelopment.