Stadtgespräch. Metropolitan Perspectives #8

Wednesday, January 25, 2015, 7 pm
Let’s initiate!
A thought from Christoph Twickel (journalist, Hamburg).

In the age of participation, the figure of the resident gains a new political importance. On the one hand, there is scarcely an urban development project, in which investors, institutions and politicians are not intensively trying to affect the good will of the neighborhood. On the other hand, people have realized that a resident’s initiative can be an effective form of lobbying in municipality politics. A Hansaplatz cleaned up of alcoholics and sex workers, a cable car to the musical theaters, a green-covered bunker for St. Pauli: Increasingly, the initiators of regulatory or commercial urban developments are imitating strategies from neighboring grass-roots-initiatives. Vice-versa, they also have to let themselves be measured by the moral economics of the participatory procedure.

How to deal with the fact that the “from-the-bottom-up” is in truth a “from-the-top-down”? From time immemorial, this unmasking has belonged to the repertoire of the political left, which in turn persists in understanding itself in such a way that everything, which is non-parliamentary and left, has street credibility anyway. Indeed, right-to-city initiatives have been laid open to the criticism that they do not represent those affected (e.g. Essohäuser-Initiative) or that they redistribute the profit of distinction created by the protest pose to their cultural products (e.g. Not in our Name, Marke Hamburg).

Christoph Twickel, author of, inter alia, GENTRIFIDINGSBUMS oder Eine Stadt für alle (2010), as a journalist accompanied the Hamburg movement Recht-auf-Stadt (Right to City). He is a co-founder and speaker of the initiative Not In Our Name. Marke Hamburg, which opposes a forced eventization and segregation of city space through aggressive city marketing.