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Official governmental plans outline and illustrate the goals and objectives to be instituted for a given urban area, and present the future of social space as clear and decided. How these goals and objectives were agreed upon and by whom, however, is left unsaid. By looking at space as socially contested, addressed is the idea that urban spatial transformation is not the result of a step-by-step, straightforward, and linear procedure. The manifested physical environment is a result of complex, chaotic, and lengthy processes of discussions and disagreements, of political movements between coalitions and oppositions, involving or ignoring the outspoken and/or the complacent, and influenced by cultural histories, cultural experience, and capital. In short, contested social space addresses social interactions and their relationship to the space that contextualises and results from it.
The original impetus of this dissertation were the observations of two social phenomena in Berlin: 1) the tendency of squatter movements to refuse the state and to “emigrate” (Aussteigen) by creating island communities otherwise known as “Trailer Fortresses” (“Wagenburgen”) and/or squats); and 2) the integration of immigrants into German society. They were compelling stories because it was not clear what the entity actually was, to which the former tried to refuse and the latter tried to join. Or in the reverse, it was not clear what it was that the State was protecting in its attempts to integrate and/or exclude. The integration process could not merely be about the crossing of a line on a map, or the jumping of bureaucratic hurdles through the immigration process, in order to join whatever it was that was inside. Governments retained and presented specific concepts of social space into which newcomers should integrate. Likewise, newcomers had a particular idea of what it was that they were joining. Similar could be said for many squatters, or the “refusers” (Aussteiger) of the state. They were not just sources of the hip and trendy waiting to be commodified and mainstreamed. Nor were they degenerates or anti-social. Their aussteigen did not mean a particular physical exit either. Instead, they seemed to work with a particular idea of a specific entity – a particular whole – that they rejected, and their struggle was about demanding space for alternative lifestyles amidst, despite, and free of, perceived dominating norms, and with or without the approval of the State.
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These two groups were studied because of their similar yet contradictory statuses within Berlin. Neither seemed particularly well represented in the political system. Both seemed to struggle to fit certain norms. There were instances also that both were festivalised, harmonised, or minimalised, and both seemed to struggle against the same Other (the State). As a result of these processes, both were restricted from community and discursive identity – something that would allow them to signify themselves, to claim their maximal differences and independent coeval trajectories, and produce space.
These stories of squatters and newcomers posed certain problems for social spatial theory. They seemed to be coherent groups on opposite trajectories. It would seem contradictory that in a city that prides itself in diversity that squatters are in and want out, while newcomers are out and want in. Why wouldn’t a politic of integration try to address issues of its own citizens? Why wouldn’t an integrations ethos apply to squatters? It would seem that there was an inward (internal squatter relations) and outward (control of international migration) closing and control of borders. These stories, then, posed the theoretical problem of borders.
The border – as a dividing line no matter how thin and as a manifestation of a contested space – necessitates the concept of a whole. The border represents the division, perimeter, or surface area of this whole. The border therefore signifies insiders and outsiders: on the one side or the other of the contradictory space, those inside or outside of fields, those inside or outside discursive arenas, those on one or another social trajectory. In other words, it constructs the Other: those that conceive of space and the others that do not; those that experience space and the others that do not; those that participate and the others that do not. A physical border can act as barrier or boundary that frames the whole. It may be a device of protection, exclusion, or control. It may be a point of entrance or of exit. It may be permeable, semi-permeable, or impermeable. Mental borders can discriminate or prejudge, or classify. Social spatial borders include all of the above and are manmade. They are ideological and real. Perceived space is wrought with borders that channel capital into particular flows, define the limits of transportation and communication systems, or fence off land designated towards particular uses. Conceived space pictoralises or charts out particular representations of space to signify particular purposes and rule out others. Or it expresses directives, hierarchies, or imperatives to channel and delineate social action. A contest arises as soon as one attempts to test, cross, redefine, or eliminate the border. Borders are experienced in lived space, and spark desire or complacency, fear or familiarity, artistic expression or formalism and repetition. Borders are seldom without dispute. A problem arises as soon as one tries to test, cross or redefine the border. Borders are not necessarily fixed over time, and it may be that an individual or group want to contest the limit, redefine it, or transverse to the other side. Each time an uncritical abstract subject of social space decides to do things another way, a border is challenged.
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Borders are problems of social space. But what is social space? In the 1970s, Lefebvre approached social space with his book The Production of Space in which he examined the thesis that, “(social) space is a (social) product,” (1991: 26; parenthesis as in original). In this exploration, social space was a dialectic of mental and physical spaces. In the opening statements of this chapter, for example, it may appear already evident that the negotiation of a resulting spatial texture is, by definition, a process of balancing and weighing off various viewpoints whether they are perspectives of an individual or a larger group. However, in this explanation, we see an illustration of urban social and spatial development, in which people, real body objects, interact, and affect change in the external physical environment. Lefebvre (1991:16) attempted to push the boundaries of this classical sociological paradigm, to include not just the sensual and real, but also the ephemeral, intellectual, representational, and imaginary. This dissertation also analyses the relationship between people and space, and interprets urban social spatial processes in Berlin. In addition to Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, Zygmunt Bauman, Pierre Bourdieu, Geraldine Pratt, M.P. Smith, Nancy Fraser, and Seyla Benhabib will also be examined.
That space matters is, in my view, best explained in Production of Space. Lefebvre’s work is valuable because he wrote of space in response to an age-old fundamental philosophical question: what is space? In doing so, he broke the rigid Cartesian lock that academic tradition had divided space into, and bridged the corporeal, physical world with the logico-epistemological. His triad (1991: 38-39) was one such attempt. Lefevre’s (1991: 94) social space was dialectical and had form, structure, and function. It was socially constructed, and therefore neither natural nor neutral. As social space is produced, or abstracted from the absolute, it is also inscribed (1991: 37, 55, 78, 95, 142, 229-291), and according to Lefebvre (1991: 160), this product of inscription can be decoded. Decoding, or reading space, could unveil the social processes overlaying the triad of lived, conceived, and perceived spaces. Finally, social space differentiates itself, and this differentiation process generated incoherencies, or contradictions (1991: 292-351). His response to the problems posed by high modernity and all its contradictions was a Marxist shift, where the production of space is something that each person can assume, and through collective action space, and all its power relations, can change. Lefebvre’s (1991: 365) urged his readers to locate contradictions in space as a starting point for social change.
Lefebvre has received much attention over the last few decades (Schmid 2008: 28) – attention that has sparked a “third wave” in Lefebvrology (Kipfer, Goonewardenda, Schmid, Milgrom 2008: 13). Some of this third-wave analyses of Lefebvre are helpful in Chapter Four. It was Lefebvre’s Marxism, however, that may lead to theoretical problems with difference. Already in the 1970s, feminist writers noticed that, “the categories of Marxism are sex blind.” (Hartmann 1981: 2). Marx and Engels had written (Hartmann 1981: 4) that the incorporation of women into the labour market was key to the emancipation of the proletariat, and that the revolution would bring about equality among the sexes because private property would be abolished, and all persons would be incorporated into the labour market equally. This could not explain, however, why it was that women took over certain roles and men others, in their service towards capitalism (Hartmann 1981: 5). This mandated an analysis of patriarchy (ibid.). This feminist view caused a problem: sex conflict interfered with class solidarity, and feminists were accused of fragmenting the “left”. Later the categories of sex and gender were abandoned, altogether, with the emergence of poststructural feminism (Weedon 2000: 76). As Lefebvre was loath to fragmentation, and totality was one of his central concepts (Schmuely 2008: 214), it would seem that there is a gaping cleft between Lefebvre’s emancipatory space and poststructuralist multiplicity.
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This fissure is seen in aforementioned social processes in Berlin. For this reason, this dissertation will also draw upon some authors from poststructuralist feminist geography. Massey (2005: 140-142) wrote of a “throwntogetherness” of multiple trajectories throughout social space. Individuals, groups, populations, and even single and groups of inanimate objects travelled around the earth on their own time-space trajectories. Each living and non-living being was on a separate time-space trajectory: trajectories that demarcated or border-lined difference. Massey (ibid.) also argued that borders and boundaries have the potential to inhibit the continual motion of social relations on all levels, and are thus attempts to capture and maintain a particular space-time continuum. Metanarratives are then, by definition, necessarily problematic. To Massey (ibid.), the exploration lay in coeval trajectories and radical multiplicity. Pratt’s project was quite different. She aimed to spatialise feminist theory and get around feminist standoffs such as the materiality of discourse (Pratt 2004: 12). Her work conflated nicely with Massey’s because she sought to expose transnational geographies and histories of her research subjects (Filipino domestic workers), and in doing so she redrew the map of Canada. She showed that trajectories are materially underpinned and are spatialised in Vancouver, and that these local trajectories span across national borders.
Poststructualism generally focussed on discourse and the logico-epistemolgical realms (Lefebvre 1991: 3-4, 10-11; Pratt 2004: 12). Pratt and Massey are among the few poststructural theorists who have shown that space matters – although neither referred to Lefebvre’s (1991: 38-39) spatial moments. Smith (2001) was interested in the role of agency and community in the production of space. Like Pratt, he argued (2001: 17, 111, 145) that people take part in creating the urban environment and that their transnationalist ties are woven into the urban fabric at very local levels. Urban life was infused with knowledge and meanings produced in transnational networks. Transnational trajectories needed therefore to be sorted out (ibid: 108-109). Bauman’s (2005) liquid modernity was a vision of space in which everything is flexible and in motion. Bourdieu (1984) showed that sociological status, or placement within a trajectory (to use Massey’s metaphor) was dependent on history. In deconstructing the universality of Kant’s pure aesthetic, Bourdieu (1984: 467) showed that class, economic and educational capital, and place of residence, defined social perceptions and aesthetics. Social background led to varying distributions of symbolic power and capital, and ultimately social spatial differentiation. Although vast in their scope, all of these authors share a fundamental concept of radical multiplicity.
Fraser (1993) and Benhabib (2004) offered insights into how such radical multiplicity and transnationalism could be organised politically. Although it was not her specific focus, Benhabib (2004: 218) showed how non-territorial based polities could be organised. In Fraser’s (1993: 13-18) view, diversity expanded democracy. She refuted the notion of a one and unified open public sphere, and argued that differences exist and can be neither neutralised nor negated. Furthermore, modifications to the notion of public must be made in order to accommodate difference. Counter publics could provide just the very space, that counter discourses require in order to form (1993: 14-15).
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After outlining my methodology in 1.2, I systematically review in depth the authors mentioned above in Chapter Two. First, Lefebvre and his invaluable contribution to the concept of social space will be reviewed. Second, some theorists of difference will be examined. Afterwards, I cut to Chapter Three and tell the stories of squatters and newcomers in Berlin. In Chapter Four, I focus the theoretical lenses on these stories to expose their theoretical borders and alternate ways of understanding them. At the end, in Chapter Four, the confines and the potentials of the theory are examined. This approach poses an opportunity to rethink these two phenomena regard these social movements in new ways, while at the same time an opportunity to rethink space itself.
When I came to Germany on my student visa years ago, I was fresh out of graduate school and ready to build on my knowledge base and research abroad. I had witnessed neoliberalisation of social housing policy in, and the amalgamation of local governments of Toronto – all under the name of Toronto, the new global city. From that I wanted to see how globalisation was affecting other cities. I was encouraged to investigate migration issues in Berlin. My original proposal to the Humboldt University read to the effect, that I would, “address the consequences of globalisation on the nature, composition, and socio-spatial patterns of multiculturalism in Berlin […] employing population analysis, mapping communities, media analysis and interviews.” To be sure, many of these methods were indeed applied, and will appear in this dissertation, particularly in Chapter Three. Yet, when I arrived, I could not read the codes. I couldn’t even read the signs, or most of the newspapers. I arrived blind, illiterate, and – as someone with a past that occurred in another language and that was by in large unknown and irrelevant to most if not all – I also arrived without a history. I just appeared on the scene, so it seemed. Because of this I ran into a problem of voice. Indeed, I could have pretended to be capable of escaping my body, and chosen a purely positivistic and empirical research approach. However, this approach would be problematic and limited (see Beauregard 2003: 183-184). At the same time, I also did not feel capable of a subjective assessment of Berlin, as someone who had never been a subject of Berlin. I therefore felt incapable of telling any story whatsoever. But could it really be that I had no voice at all?
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I stove to learn the German language, so that I could understand, pick apart, and even criticize the codes that surrounded me. All the while, I read English literature, made available to me by international online book stores, to keep abreast of debates in the Anglo-Saxon world from where I came. This was partly a survival tactic: should I drown in this foreign land, at least I could float back to my origins. I also married, had two children, and began to attach myself to informal networks of small families and businesses. I consciously refused German citizenship – on the grounds that I would have to relinquish my Canadian and American ones. For better or worse, for wrong, right or left, I settled. “I ch habe mich sogar verdeutscht,” (“I even Germanised”) I would tell myself. This was all before I realised that I myself could be categorised as a transnational economic migrant, and in retrospect it is clear that my research and theoretical approach reflects this transnationality. I realise now, that this was part of the time-consuming process of finding my subjective voice – my subjective voice as a foreigner.
For this ideational dissertation, I walk through the theory in Chapter Two, that one on one hand covers Lefebvre’s theory of spatial production, and on the other hand reviews theories of difference. The latter draws upon literature spanning transnational urbanism, poststructural feminism. In Chapter Three, I tell two stories of social phenomenon in Berlin. One might consider these to be “contours” (Pratt 2004: 163 -165) of Berlin that I viewed while finding my voice. These stories pull a thread in the fabric of Berlin that might otherwise be overlooked by pie charts and tables and other Cartesian means of knowing space without being present in it. Epistemologically, I situate my research methods as critically subjective observation, stemming from the premise that complete value-free positivism and objectivity is unattainable, and agreeing with Beauregard´s assertion that:
“objectivity and critical distance…are problematic practices, [and if] they are defined as the absence of subjectivity or as the search for a single truth, they are impossible to attain,” (Beauregard 2003: 183) |
As I want not and, indeed, cannot escape my body, and am unable to perceive the world without the filter of my comprehension, this dissertation does not uncover a new reality. Rather, this paper is an exploration of the Anglo-Saxon literature on difference in its relationship to Lefebvre’s production of space, while using the landscapes of Berlin as well as my own experiential knowledge (as an American-born Canadian landed as an immigrant in Germany) as illustrations.
Before moving on to describe the materials and methods of composing Chapter Three, I want to make a short statement concerning what might be construed as the feminist component of this dissertation. I do not actually consider myself a feminist. If feminism is a project of locating inequalities and power imbalances, I could say that I am a feminist in the same way that I would expect anyone to be when they discover that they are being discriminated against. I did consider myself a feminist when I was 10. As a child, it really galled me to think that people actually believed that girls were worse at math and science – something I knew was utterly false – and that the only thing they had to aspire to were their bodies. But I halted in this position when my gay father told me that there was more in the world to be angry about, than the easily fought disadvantaged position of women in the 1980s. Since then I never considered myself a feminist. I was raised in a very loving, well balanced family, where my kitchen savvy was taught to me by my father, and that women earning money was a fact of life as ordinary as brushing teeth. Although, women’s movements throughout the centuries have worked for and made this equality available to me, I personally, never felt the need to fight. What women had fought for over the decades prior to my birth, was – as a child growing up after the fact – normalcy to me. I would even admit that I belonged to the group of women who considered feminism an F-word. It was therefore odd, even discomforting, that I should be considered a feminist now, and that my work might be pigeon-holed into the category of women’s studies, or feminist studies. As it is, however, this dissertation is mainly about difference, Otherness, and borders, and the literature in feminism has undoubtedly contributed very much to this discourse.
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In Chapter Three stories are told. On one hand, they are the stories of squatters and newcomers, told to the best of my abilities. On the other hand, they are my stories. I say this, because as a transnational economic migrant who is at once suspended in the hybrid and blurry personality of migration, and footed in the foreign German educational system (i.e. at Humboldt University as a Canadian), how can one comprehend the complicated mass of Berlin? I am a fragment viewing fragments, so to speak. How then, can one view? Lefebvre employed levels (Goonewardena 2008: 126-127). Pratt (2004: 163-164) used contours. I use stories, whose reading is yet another representation of that space. It is my humble postmodern contribution to the multitude of stories that might be told about Berlin, that may stand in contrast to overarching metanarratives, and seeing as deconstructing metanarratives is a project of poststructural feminism, here again, my work might be considered feminist.
There is another element of my research approach that might be classified as feminist. Pratt (2004) discussed this phenomenon in relation to her “melodramatic” (Pratt 2004: 1) presentations of Filipino domestic workers. She commented that at first glance, having work labelled melodramatic, was not a compliment. She was able to harness this quality, however, as a corporeal reaction to the subject matter that binds the ephemeral into a physical understanding, and as a political means of subverting metanarratives. On melodrama, Pratt wrote:
“the carnivalesque juxtaposition of official documents and popular forms, such as gossip and melodrama, is used within this fiction to destabilize official histories because it has the effect of rendering official accounts as fabrications or fabulations. The pastiche of melodrama and documentary evidence thus opens a space to tell other, non-official, counter histories,” (Pratt 2004: 2). |
Melodrama, as a means of testing norms and invoking a corporeal reaction, had the capacity to politicise academic discourse by telling an alternative story. It became a method of understanding. Pratt wanted the reader to have an emotional reaction to the material. Pratt was not the first feminist thinker to push the limits of rationality. This has been a subject of debate in feminist philosophy for decades1.
This analysis is relevant to this dissertation because, on a couple of occasions, some of the readers of my work have commented that my style is sometimes “chatty” – a characteristic that is not particularly flattering at first glance. While I have made many attempts to reduce this quality in my work -- because somehow it embarrasses me -- and find the straight and systematic approach that is generally demanded of me, perhaps it is the very abandoning of systematic form that makes this dissertation different, and this dissertation is ultimately about difference. After all, just like Pratt’s (2004) domestic workers, neither the squatters nor many of the newcomers that I have examined in this dissertation, want to preserve the status quo. Furthermore, I have a personal interest in telling an alternative story. I, too, have a bodily reaction to some of the subject matter. As a foreigner in Germany and as someone who supposedly looks politically left, I too have been in situations where I have had to hide my foreign language tongue or be careful of where I walk, out of threat from neo-nazis. These are corporealities that sole empiricism seldom examine. Although further empirical analysis may well contribute to, and support my work, I hold a, “respect for the work that theorists can and have a responsibility to do,” (Pratt 2004: 3).
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To create the stories of squatters, I have relied heavily on information available through the internet. Many squats represent themselves at their websites. There are also websites that network them. This has been an invaluable source of data. To tell the stories of newcomers, I have relied on a multitude of traditional secondary sources, including statistics, census tracks, and maps. Where possible, music, newspaper and magazine clippings, and internet sources were also used. In both cases, I have relied on the use of photography to convey messages and provide a visual representation of the arguments composed in this paper. The photos in this paper are presented as visual imagery to compliment the sociological framework that is constructed. They are chosen to illustrate and provoke the reader on levels that may go beyond the limits put forth by the text.
During the process of data collection, I relied heavily on secondary sources. Sometimes my personal experience was drawn upon too. I drew my information from the squat’s self-presentation, as well as from representations of them from the City. Similarly, I drew information from the representations posed by immigration activist groups, as well as those of the City’s. In both cases, I remained at the level of the institution. Indeed, these stories might well be strengthened by interviews with participants. I could, however, at least draw out stories at the group level – I could simply rely on their open self-representation – without having to sort out individual perspectives on the issues. At the same time, I could locate possible weaknesses in policy and their implementation. By and large, however, the data sets available were radically different. Except for the Bethanien, that houses immigration initiatives, there was almost no overlap.
1 See, for example, Sherwin (1988), Morgan (1983), and Lloyd (1979).
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