Claims to the City

I suppose property professors¹⁾ are always on the lookout for unconventional uses of land – those whose ingenuity challenges notions of formality and legitimacy.²⁾ Whether brief or enduring, such transgressions may become accepted and even legalised. I had not realised some part of me was keeping an eye open for these manifestations and improvisations, until a first few weeks into my time in Berlin, I got lost in the swirl of the pro-Palestine graffiti in the area between the Berlin districts of Kreuzberg and Neukölln, including handwritten dispatches of protest times and locations; a pop-up thrift shop in a nearby basement; the ever-operational Gecekondu off of Kottbusser Tor; Turkish immigrants selling household goods and clothing on blankets on Kottbusser Brücke; Kiez flea markets, evening drummers at Admiralbrücke; the shared spaces along the canal: the biweekly Turkish market at Maybachufer,³⁾ and, once it warmed up, the Newkölln Flohmarkt, and eventually the fray of May Day.

My work examines the transformation of various cities – Delhi and Gurgaon in India; New York City in the United States; London in the United Kingdom; and Toronto and Montreal in Canada – under financial capitalism. Financial capitalism can be thought of as the shift from a goods and services-based global economic order to one driven by financial markets and profit. It has brought changes well beyond the sphere of the financial and has profoundly altered political, social, and cultural spheres as people internalise financialised cultures and responsibilities.⁴⁾ I have traced how real estate investment has become the engine of financial capitalism in large part through the adoption of city governance rationalities informed by finance, notably the prioritization of wealth-producing uses of land (rather than communal ones) and various calculations of risk and reward. In short, city governments regulate land to attract real estate investors just as they make governance decisions as if they were financial actors and not representatives of the public.

Investors range from large asset management firms such as Blackstone and private equity funds to public pension funds to private housing companies. I’ve argued that these investors and their partner real estate developers exercise agency in the city through their power to shape the built environment, determine which activities occur in which spaces, facilitate certain forms of public life, and enable certain classes and races to enjoy urban spaces. Through their expanding real estate footprints, these developers and investors increasingly govern cities. This power has manifested in many cities through the closing off of public spaces, the upscale of retail and restaurants, the raising of rents, and the construction of high-rise residential towers (some of which are largely empty). It has left cities increasingly digitised and datafied, and less prone to the spontaneous, messy, and unscripted encounters which fuel popular energy and imagination.

Berlin’s Squats, Art, and Music

Berlin defies much of the typical unfolding of these late-20^th/early-21^st-century processes. (Berliners, forgive my admittedly romantic take here.) Yes, it is being fast-financialised, and yes, much of the commodification, closing off, and submission to financial rationalities is present. And yet, its post-wall history of squatting and investment is unlike that of other places.⁵⁾ In Berlin, these two activities – occupation and investment – seem to co-exist simultaneously, sometimes with one in ascendancy, sometimes the other. This is quite different than many other cities that have a relatively clear trajectory from the informal (pre- and postwar) to state-led development and social housing (postwar) to clearance and redevelopment (1980s) to today’s public support for private investment in housing (2000s-). In those places, a strong spirit of popular claims to the city has been all but hollowed out. In Berlin, though, that spirit sometimes still triumphs, as the ebbs and flows of the popular and the investor since the 1980s and post- Wall housing transformations reveal.

In West Berlin in the 1980s, squatting prevented the state from demolishing deteriorated historic buildings. A decade later, after the wall came down, blocks of social housing were sold off in large portfolios in the 1990s and 2000s.⁶⁾ At the same time as that massive initial sell-off, waves of people occupied housing in neighbourhoods across the unified city. These squatters famously protected early-20th-century architecture, wrote graffiti, made art from Cold War scrap metal, played punk music in underground clubs, and even regularised their tenancies through Berlin’s reconfigured unified urban bureaucracy.

These acts of squatting should be understood in opposition to the over-commodification and financialisation of housing.⁷⁾ As Andrej Holm and Armin Kuhn have explained,

“From the perspective of the squatter movement, the act of squatting and the refusal to pay rent are considered a disruption of the chain of real estate valorisation. Some squatters understand themselves as part of an urban political protest movement and as practical ‘alternatives to capitalism’.”⁸⁾

This political and embodied statement of squatting contrasts with a more cynical view of squatting as a precursor to gentrification in places such as Williamsburg, Brooklyn in New York City.

What fascinates me in Berlin is the apparent endurance of a claim of the people to the city and the place of that claim in a public imagination. Practices that are considered radical in many other cities, particularly in the Global North – the informality, the overlapping shared use of space, the shaping of everyday life by the people who live there – seem deeply embedded in the city itself, sometimes obscured or overpowered but never disappeared. Despite Berlin’s massive transformation – not just (typical) gentrification but the selling off of social housing, the consolidation of ownership, and the entrance of both foreign and domestic investors – the spectre of a true popular claim on the city still inhabits its layers, sometimes manifesting with a clear materiality in loud resistance to the (attempted) supplanting of it by financial rationalities and real estate grabs.

Kotti & Co.’s Gecekondu and Ongoing Public Education Campaigns

In 2011, Turkish immigrants and other community members near Kottbusser Tor in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg formed Kotti & Co. in opposition to rising rents, the commodification of housing, and the takeover of their communal spaces. Overnight, they built the Gecekondu protest hut (gecekondu means “built overnight” in Turkish). They occupied, marched noisily, issued newsletters, and informed their community about the links between housing, racism, immigration, and labour conditions. Their view of occupation, as described by Sandy Kaltenborn, one of the founders of Kotti & Co., reflects a different imaginary of urban space:

“The feeling of the occupation […] isn’t as much like appropriating someone else’s property or even public property, but rather stepping out of their homes onto their outdoor space.”⁹⁾

That space in which they are living, protesting, and “stepping out” into is not the highly commodified and clearly delineated real-estate-determined map of the city, but rather perhaps a shared and messier cartography of community, use, and change.

In 2014, Kotti & Co. proposed a referendum on rent and housing access. The ensuing political pressure (the referendum itself was eventually withdrawn) led the Berlin government to work with activists from across the city to formulate the Wohnraumversorgungsgesetz, a 2016 law which imposed rent caps for social housing tenants, ensured social housing allocations, introduced new subsidies, and strengthened democratic accountability and participation in governance of the public housing companies.

DWE and the Financialisation – and Socialisation – of Housing in Berlin

The Wohnraumversorgungsgesetz, while successful in its own right, was directed at government-controlled social housing, not private market housing. Several years later, the movement Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen (Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co, DWE) coalesced in protest to the single largest housing company in Berlin with around 140,000 rental units. As Joanna Kusiak has explained, Deutsche Wohnen is “a paradigmatic example of Berlin’s new type of landlord: the stock-listed corporation.”¹⁰⁾ Like other financialised landlords, it is not responsive to tenant needs and necessary repairs, even heat failures in January, is partial to rent increases, and is known to replace building caretakers with automated telephone numbers. ¹¹⁾

According to researcher Christoph Trautvetter, over a quarter of Berlin’s two million flats are owned by private companies.¹²⁾ Identifying the specific holdings of companies, however, is nearly impossible as the real estate register is organised by the numerous subsidiaries of companies. Deutsche Wohnen itself has over 100 such companies, rendering their holdings opaque. This research resonates with a 2014 investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that traced the ownership of middle-class flats in Berlin, purchased by a financialised landlord unresponsive to tenants’ needs.¹³⁾ That investigation led to Canadian public pension fund PSP and deliberate tax evasion through their shell company in Luxembourg, where a single address hosted multiple such shells. Since then, Canadian pension funds have continued to expand their holdings.

A similar story of opacity and unresponsiveness is told by a collection of artists, curators, and activists who traced the 2019 sale of a building in Oranienstraße 25 in Kreuzberg to a shell company in Luxembourg.¹⁴⁾ They also put together an informative and inspirational collection on the financialisation of housing in Berlin, arguing movingly that “Those of us who strive for a common city are not only affected by its financialisation, but are also co-opted by it, maintaining it through our actions.”¹⁵⁾ This story echoes, yet again, that of the anarchist bar Syndikat, which was evicted in 2020 from its Neukölln location of 35 years by a UK-based family of investors called the Pear brothers.¹⁶⁾ Here again, activists found a shell company based in Luxembourg. They also found a London-based foundation, financed by the Pear brothers, that apparently supports anti-fascist work (the foundation kicked out the Syndikat tenants from their London office when they sought a meeting). Syndikat’s eviction itself spurred a massive overnight protest by thousands of people, to no avail. That the Syndikat community was even able to identify the owners was no small feat. Trautvetter underscores the difficulty of identifying investors such as the Pear brothers who are not named in registers. According to his research, the Pear brothers have approximately 50 companies in Luxembourg and own approximately 6,000 apartments in Berlin. However, as he explains, “the link between these companies is hidden behind shell companies in Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands.”¹⁷⁾

The DWE movement put forward a referendum on the socialization of housing in Berlin in 2021. With 59% of the vote, the referendum passed and instructed the Berlin government to bring about the socialization of real estate companies that own 3,000 or more rental apartments in the city (affecting around 240,000 of Berlin’s 1.5 million rental apartments). The city government submitted the question of whether housing could be socialised under Article 15 of the German Constitution to an independent expert commission. In 2023, the Expert Commission on the Socialisation of Large Housing Companies submitted its final report, which concluded that socialisation based on the campaign’s ideas was legally feasible.¹⁸⁾ While implementation has been stalled, the recent electoral victory of Die Linke – a leftist, pro-housing socialisation party – may change that.¹⁹⁾

Public Imagination, Urban Space, and Social Change

Legal change often begins locally before expanding outward. Housing socialization is possible in Berlin today because of the work of artists, squatters, activists, and others who collectively manifested their vision first within the city’s physical spaces and then through the political action. I would argue that the massive popular support for the DWE referendum and popular claims to the city more generally rests on a history of public use and relationality to city space – a history of spatial practices unique to Berlin. Berlin’s art, embodied in protests, occupations, and myriad claims to city spaces in everyday life, has built a public imagination imbued with ideas and experiences of solidarity, community life, and alternative household structures.²⁰⁾

This has meaningful consequences. As Henry Giroux has argued, “a democratic public and collective imagination grows out of those public spaces that ‘allow us to be affected by, and imagine, others in new ways.’”²¹⁾ This collective imagination, in turn, reconfigures participation and democracy, enabling the public’s capacity to challenge neoliberal economic structures. In the case of Berlin, the city’s postwar history and recent culture of squatting, protest, and occupation – and the legal organization and developments examined above – seem to exemplify the collective formation of an anti-capitalist, solidarity-infused, influential consciousness through the embodied use of, and claim to, city spaces by its people.