17 ‘Fantasies of antithesis’

Assessing Hamburg’s Gängeviertel as a tourist attraction

Nina Fraeser

 

 

Introduction

Located in the touristic centre of Hamburg, just a few minutes walk from the opera and the Jungfernstieg with its upscale retail stores and beautiful views of the river Alster, the Gängeviertel stands out between the neighbouring glass and steel office towers. This is not only due to the visual appearance of this nineteenth-century brick building complex, but also because the current uses, the ‘look and feel’ of the place, are in sharp contrast with the polished adjacent shopping and business districts. This last ensemble remaining from what was a historic working-class district had not seen major investments since the 1940s, and was left decaying and mostly vacant in expectance of redevelopment when it was squatted by a diverse group of artists, political activists, architects and planners in 2009. They organized exhibitions and art performances in the buildings and inner courtyards to make a loud and colourful statement against the selling out of not only the city’s architectural heritage but also its subcultural milieu.

Despite not having started as a protest movement against tourism as such, the case of the Gängeviertel sheds light on tourism-related resistance in three interrelated ways. First, as outlined in the introduction to this volume, tourism-related policies are part of a broader neoliberal urban agenda deploying creativity for urban marketing purposes in the context of inter-city competition. Thus, subcultural producers of alternative spaces are often caught up in processes of co-optation and instrumentalization fuelling the aims of policy-makers to establish their city as a brand. Second, the Gängeviertel with its central location and rich cultural offer has been struggling with the dynamics of commercialization by also becoming a tourist attraction in itself. Third, the case of the Gängeviertel allows us to reassess the notions of the tourist and tourism as such, as this space has attracted very different kinds of visitors. Some passively consume the qualities of the place, while others get involved in the social, cultural and political practices of the activists and local residents. It is thus not tourists per se, but particular kinds of visitors who differ from the ‘locals’. Yet the positive reporting potentially generated by those ‘passive’ visitors contributes to the public image and renown that has helped to prevent the demolition of the Gängeviertel. Those other visitors who engage with the practices of the Gängeviertel activists contribute to show that different ways of living collectively in the city are possible, becoming part of the Gängeviertel’s ‘commoning’ process.

This chapter first introduces the politics of urban tourism in Hamburg as part of the city’s neoliberal policy agenda and its focus on inter-urban competition, city branding and the notion of ‘creativity’. This lays out what the ‘anti’ is referring to when describing the Gängeviertel’s ‘fantasies of antithesis’. The following section presents the case of the Gängeviertel occupation within the context of a broader range of social mobilizations that brought forward the ‘Right to the City’ network and challenged mainstream policies and urban development trends in Hamburg at the time of its emergence in 2009.¹ Subsequently, reflections are made on the transformation of the Komm in die Gänge initiative² and how it has shaped the liveliness of the Gängeviertel in the six years up to the time of writing in 2015. The narrative is divided into four stages: the occupation; the path to legalization; institutionalization, co-optation and commercialization; and the contestations over the renovation and the aim to ensure self-management. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the openness to visitors and references to the city’s official branding policy agenda influenced the development of the Gängeviertel initiative. Finally, the transformation of the Gängeviertel into a tourist attraction itself and the implications of that process are discussed.

The entanglement of the politics of urban development and tourism: the case of Hamburg

The destructive logic of competition inherent in capitalist economies is borne out in the tourism political economy.

(Bianchi 2009: 469)

Despite being located roughly 100 kilometres from both the North and the Baltic Seas, Hamburg is mostly known for its harbour and tradition of trade. As the second largest city in Germany, the city-state counts 1.75 million inhabitants and its population is growing. Due to Hamburg’s three rivers and many canals, more than eight per cent of the city’s surface is covered by water and its harbour is the second largest in Europe. Hamburg is one of Europe’s most prosperous cities.³ However – as with many cities with economies based on trade, finance and the tertiary sector – Hamburg displays high levels of intra-urban inequalities and social segregation (Friedrichs and Triemer 2009; Birke 2010). Not only the city’s population, but also its tourism sector has been growing. In 2014 the city’s tourism trade reached an all-time high and recorded 6.1 million visitors and 12 million overnight stays (Hamburg Tourismus 2015). Visitor numbers increased 103 per cent between 2004 and 2014 (ibid. 2015) and the gross turnover in tourism-related industries has, according to the Chamber of Commerce, quadrupled in the twenty years up to 2010 (Bohnenstengel et al. 2011). This illustrates how tourism contributes to local prosperity and thus has become high on the local political agenda.

The emergence of tourism promotion as ‘being favoured for ailing urban economies’ (Harvey 1989: 13) needs to be traced back, in Hamburg, to the crisis of harbour-related industries in the 1970s. The shift towards post-Fordism resulted in high unemployment rates, low economic growth and rising welfare expenditure. This led to a new urban strategy and political regime emphasizing the importance of science, technology and culture (Birke 2014). The inaugural speech by the city’s mayor in 1983, Klaus von Dohnányi, under the title Unternehmen Hamburg (Corporation Hamburg) marked a turn towards an entrepreneurial approach to urban governance, in contrast to the Keynesian local political tradition of a ‘solidary city’⁴ (Berger and Schmalfeld 1999). Dohnányi stated that the city should be seen in an international competition for attracting creative people and capital (Dohnányi 1983), an approach which would shape the local political agenda for the subsequent decades.

When cities are transformed into destinations, culture becomes ‘more and more the business of cities’ (Zukin 1995: 1) and a tool to mask growing inequalities, segregation and distributional issues (Häussermann and Colomb 2003). Almost twenty years after the first reference to ‘corporation Hamburg’, the strategic development document for the city, titled Metropolis Hamburg – Growing City (HH 2002), set the increase in the city’s international attractiveness as one of four political objectives. This urban strategy focused on the creation of an image of Hamburg as a unique brand for attracting international enterprise and capital as well as tourists and ‘creative people’ (Dettmann et al. 2006; Birke 2010). This led to the foundation of Hamburg Marketing GmbH in 2003, a holding merging the city marketing agency with three other agencies: Hamburg Tourism, the Hamburg Convention Bureau and Hamburg Business Development, exemplifying the interconnection between urban marketing, tourism, large-scale events and the local economic development strategy. The spatial development plan based on the Metropolis Hamburg document links lively and economically strong neighbourhoods to the presence of ‘creative urban milieux’ in these areas (Pedersen et al. 2007: 134). The focus on city marketing and tourism promotion was reaffirmed in a follow-up monitoring report to the Growing City strategy, which states that ‘the tourism industry plays an outstanding role in relation to growth and employment and is essential for the service-centred metropolis Hamburg’ (Enderlein and Jackisch 2007: 52).

By 2007 it had become unmistakably clear how ‘creative city politics’ (Peck 2005; Markusen 2006; Mayer 2012a) had begun to influence Hamburg’s policy discourse and urban development. The city government integrated the concept ‘Hamburg, city of talents’ into the strategic development programme, directly referring to Richard Florida and his claims that cities need to be appealing to the ‘creative class’. In 2009 a brand consultancy report indicated the importance of local subcultures as a factor in attracting people and enterprises to Hamburg (Marketing-Hamburg 2009). The follow-up strategic development document of 2010 entitled Growth with Foresight introduced a post-2008 austerity discourse while still holding onto the idea of growth, with a focus on public spending to support renewable energy, the health sector and – again – the ‘creative economy’. The city chamber argued that ‘creativity is not only the key to economic success and innovation in society, but it is also facilitating lively cities and the wellbeing of its inhabitants’ (Senat-Hamburg 2010: 2). Olaf Scholz, who was elected mayor in 2011, vowed to further enhance Hamburg’s position as a ‘cultural metropolis’ (Briegleb 2011) and stated in 2013 that his way forward for Hamburg would involve ramping up efforts to compete internationally for capital and well-educated ‘creative’ future residents (Scholz 2013).

Irrespective of the missing proof of a correlation between the presence of a creative class and the economic well-being of cities (Peck 2005; Krätke 2012), the ‘cult of urban creativity’ has evolved into a central concept within Hamburg’s city branding programme (Walz 2011). During the late 2000s, Hamburg’s tourism and marketing agencies discovered the importance of local forms of cultural expression as a promotion tool, and consequently decided to use images of subcultural venues and music bands in their advertisements. This exemplifies how city marketing policies harness (sub)cultural milieux ‘as location-specific assets in the intensifying interurban competition’ (Mayer 2012c: 76). Thus city branding relies on people who actually live in a place, contributing through their everyday practices to the ‘look and feel’ and production of local (sub)cultures (Zenker and Beckmann 2012), while the cultural capital generated becomes appropriated by profit-maximizing private interests (Hoffman et al. 2003; Spirou 2011; Harvey 2012).

In the context of a neoliberal urban policy agenda upholding the international attractiveness and touristic image of the city, the thesis of the ‘creative city’, however, has also led to contestations – a ‘class struggle within the “creative class”’ (Krätke 2012: 147) and a critical demand for ‘the Right to the Creative City’ (Marcuse 2012). In Hamburg such struggles are embedded in a strong existing local squatters’ movement which emerged in the 1980s, predominantly centred on the Hafenstraße and Rote Flora. Both locations are currently mentioned in many tourist guides and presented as a ‘symbol of resistance’ (Schellhammer and Vogler 2008: 234) or ‘myth of the autonomous scene’ (Freydag 2006: 105). The efforts of the Hamburg city marketing and tourism agency to capitalize on this ‘subcultural creative class’ led up to various social mobilizations and served as a hotbed for the occupation of the Gängeviertel.

‘Fantasies of antithesis’⁵ – the Gängeviertel

Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It’s never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it.

(Perec 1997: 91)

In June 2009 a protest under the slogan ‘The city belongs to everyone – against rising rents, privatization and displacement’ mobilised more than one thousand people in Hamburg. It was followed by the formation of the local ‘Right to the City’⁶ network, which served as a linking platform for struggles related to the urban realm (personal interview, Twickel 2013). This brought together various local anti-gentrification groups such as No BNQ resisting urban renewal plans in the St Pauli neighbourhood, or the more artistic initiative Es regnet Kaviar (‘It’s raining caviar’) with its creative repertoire of protest actions. The local community centre Centro Sociale opened its doors in 2008, offering space for counter-cultural and social projects in the heart of the highly gentrified and commercialized area of the so-called Schanzenviertel, a tourist hotspot with boutique stores, bars and restaurants. By 2015, the Right to the City network comprised around sixty initiatives, ranging from anarchist and autonomous groups to residents’ associations, addressing a wide range of urban issues (Fritsche 2015). All the initiatives involved keep their individual agendas and approaches, but act in solidarity in calls for protest (personal interview, Ziehl 2013) – for instance in 2014 when the existence of the autonomous social centre Rote Flora was endangered – or develop common campaigns, most recently an anti-Olympic bid campaign in 2014 and 2015.

The occupation of the Gängeviertel, further described below, was closely related to the emergence of the Right to the City network which has been active in connecting struggles against urban development in Hamburg. Fuelled by the extensive public interest that accompanied the occupation, the Gängeviertel was seen as symbolic for the network’s demands for ‘free spaces’ and the self-organization of cultural producers (Gabriel et al. 2011). Another amplifying effect for the increasing involvement of people with this broader issue was the publication of a popular manifesto by local artists entitled Not in Our Name (NION) in October 2009. The opening line of the manifesto states: ‘A spectre has been haunting Europe since US economist Richard Florida predicted that the future belongs to cities in which the “creative class” feels at home’. The text then rejects the exploitation of cultural production and the festivalization of the city for the needs of upper middle classes and tourists:

We refuse to talk about this city in marketing categories. [. . .] We say: a city is not a brand. A city is not a corporation. A city is a community. We ask the social question which, in cities today, is also about a battle for territory. This is about taking over and defending places that make life worth living in this city, which don’t belong to the target group of the ‘growing city’. We claim our right to the city – together with all the residents of Hamburg who refuse to be a location factor.

(NION 2010)

What is today known as the Gängeviertel is the last part of a historic working-class district that combined housing and small-scale manufacturing. Since 1945 it had barely seen any investment. Covering a total surface of 0.45 ha, the Gängeviertel consists of twelve buildings, four courtyards and narrow passageways, with a former belt factory built in 1903 in the centre (Figure 17.1). In 2008 the local government agreed on selling the (then publicly owned) site to the Dutch investor Hanzevast, which had development plans involving the demolition of large parts of the Gängeviertel (Donsbach 2012). In 2009 though, a small group primarily made up of artists, whose presence had previously been tolerated in the vacant ground floor spaces of the building complex, started to call secret meetings in the cellar of one building to collectively imagine a different future for the Gängeviertel (Schuller et al. 2012). In the context of the tensions generated by the entrepreneurial urban political agenda of Hamburg’s city leaders, it was soon decided that something needed to be done in this particular space. The small group was gradually joined by interested architects, planners, political activists and others, but remained discreet, an attitude which had stemmed from the experiences of previous squatting actions in Hamburg and the state violence that occurred in response to them (Birke 2010).

Figure 17.1 The Gängeviertel captured from the neighbouring office block – the former Unilever tower – in June 2012.

Source: Franziska Holz.

Weeks in advance of the beginning of the occupation of the Gängeviertel, the group had secretly filled the abandoned spaces inside the buildings with art. Additionally, a logo, a red circle, and the slogan Komm in die Gänge were agreed upon. In a strategy reminiscent of contemporary guerrilla marketing techniques, the logo appeared on different walls of the city. The group decided to fix a date for a two-day festival in the quarter in August 2009 and announced a courtyard party to the police. They ordered portable toilets, fixed up the buildings, organized food and drinks, and hoped for ample attendance. The occupation unfolded during the event: while more and more visitors arrived, the seemingly abandoned buildings were opened one after the other in a secret orchestration. The visitors discovered the interiors of the historic buildings and the exhibitions and performances that had been set up. Throughout the two days there were regular meetings between the core activists. Banners were prepared for a protest march in case of eviction, a refuge inside one of the buildings was ready to hold the squat, paramedics and lawyers were on call, and a media centre was even set up, with activists trying to reach out to local politicians inviting them to the Gängeviertel – most of this unnoticed by the hundreds of visitors who enjoyed a colourful and exciting party (Stillich 2012). Mayer (2012b) referred to the approach developed on this first weekend as a form of ‘squatting with performance character’ and a left-wing newspaper critically named it ‘squatting with marketing competence’ (Eckhorst 2010). The police did not come near the buildings to carry out any evictions and on the following Monday the activists sat down and realized that they were now officially squatting twelve buildings in a prime location within Hamburg’s inner city.

In the years which have followed the occupation, the Gängeviertel initiative has embraced its ongoing ‘processual state’, meaning that its performative condition is always in the making, never finished (Gängeviertel e.V. 2012). Internally the organization of the quarter is based on principles of horizontality, consensus and decentralization through working groups and building collectives, while the main decision-making body is a weekly general assembly. The initial group of squatters consisted mainly of artists and cultural producers but grew rapidly due to an open policy of posters put up on the walls of the quarter for interested visitors to note down their names and qualifications and the activities they would be interested in helping with. The activists in the Gängeviertel became an increasingly heterogeneous group – political activists from the local autonomous scene joined the initiative as well as socially excluded people who did not have an artistic background.⁷

Countless cultural, artistic, social and political activities, events and initiatives have taken place since 2009. More than 200 people have joined the Gängeviertel association and about half of them consider the Gängeviertel as their everyday living space. The quarter today is as much a creative working and living space as it is a cultural venue, experimental zone, political centre and party location. It has also become a tourist attraction. Despite its very diverse visitors and the heterogeneous background of the activists, the common thread between their activities is to claim the Gängeviertel as a social cultural ‘free space’ and experimental zone.

In the following I will analyse in more depth the particular ways in which the dynamics in the Gängeviertel since 2009 have been entangled with urban marketing and tourism policies and practices, demonstrating how the activists have mobilized the official city marketing discourse and the ways in which the city government has integrated the Gängeviertel into its discourses on culture, creativity and urban development.

The arts of resistance: struggling with negotiations

We are concerned with battles or games between the strong and the weak, and with the ‘actions’ which remain possible for the latter.

(De Certeau 1984: 32)

We came to stay! The weekend of the occupation

From the very beginning the activists embraced a peculiar subversive tactic of taking the ‘creative city’ policy discourse of the city government, the city marketing agency and the urban development department seriously. The people engaged in the Gängeviertel occupation were fully aware of the importance of a city’s (sub)cultural offer for international attractiveness. By carving out a creative and artistic image instead of one of radical political activity, they sought to gain the support of a broader public, resulting in overall positive initial media coverage. The absence of police eviction during the most critical first 48 hours of the occupation was due to the many visitors to the spectacular, family-friendly festival. In fact, they seemed to offer exactly what the policy-makers in Hamburg were so desperately looking for: hip and somewhat neat subcultural activities – precisely what attracts millions of tourists nowadays to the rival city of Berlin. Before the occupation, the group had already utilized marketing and branding strategies to generate a positive curiosity towards the activities in the quarter. They quickly improvised ways to communicate actively with the media and invited local authorities to visit the quarter, while strategically avoiding the highly charged term ‘squat’ (Besetzung). On the Monday after the occupation weekend, a press conference was carried out with a tactical mixture of improvisation, professionalism and humour. It announced: ‘We had a great deal of tourists here in the past walking around the inner city looking for activity and they stood here [at the Gängeviertel] and asked themselves why is there no life?’ and further, ‘with this [occupation] we have lightened the workload of the city, considering their intention to better support “creatives” and the creative economy. We chose a location [. . .] and there is art and a concept which can now be discussed’ (Gängeviertel 2009, min. 1:00–3:00).

Second phase: towards legalization

That weekend was followed by a period of direct action mixed with tactical negotiations between the rapidly growing group of activists and the public authorities, who in the first instance tolerated and then permitted the use of the space. The city government was soon pressured to act, since the legal owner Hanzevast did not tolerate the occupation. Under public pressure and thanks to the tactical campaigns led by the activists, only four months after the occupation, the city government invested 2.8 million euros in December 2009 to buy back the whole building complex from the developer and committed itself to invest another 20 million euros to renovate the run-down buildings for social housing, artist studios, workshops and subsidized cultural uses.

In the critical phase up to the repurchase, the activists put the focus on maintaining constant cultural work at the site, organizing events and exhibitions, as well as taking a rather cooperative stance towards the public authorities. The Gängeviertel communication tactics integrated an emphasis on the architectural heritage of the quarter resonating with broad support from local elites and the media. This put pressure on the city government to accept responsibility for the preservation of this unique piece of built heritage. By tapping into the city government’s discourse on the importance of creativity (Figure 17.2), cultural programming and attractiveness for visitors, by offering guided tours and an archive of the quarter’s history supplementary to the exhibitions, events and concerts in the quarter, the Gängeviertel activists consciously traded cultural capital to the local government in exchange for the legalization of their activities.

Third phase: institutionalization, negotiations, co-optation and commodification

After the repurchase by the city government, a sigh of relief went through the Gängeviertel activists, who shifted their energies towards longer-term plans. There was a need to broaden their claims and carefully balance their language again, in part because they had fallen into disgrace among some activists from the autonomous, radical left scene in Hamburg and beyond. A broad critique of neoliberal urban development including issues such as social exclusion, housing shortage and rising living costs seemed to be more resistant to co-optation (Katz and Mayer 1985) than a narrowly focused protest around artistic workspace and heritage preservation.

Figure 17.2 Gängeviertel ‘advertisement’, a week after the occupation, August 2009. The banner reads: ‘10,000 square metres of unrenovated housing and working quarter – vacant for years! Starting from €0 per square meter. Already 80% creative use!’

Source: Christine Ebling.

In April 2010 the Komm in die Gänge initiative presented a concept for the future of the Gängeviertel – an alternative development plan for the quarter, which included reflections on its future management and endangered state of autonomy. With this document the activists laid the grounds for further negotiations with the city council’s departments. While the text pointed out the enormous influx of visitors – 30,000 within the first half year (Komm in die Gänge 2010: 4) – and highlighted the architectural quality of the buildings, it did not reduce the initiative’s demands for renovation and future self-management. It placed the Gängeviertel as a movement within the broader struggle for a ‘right to the city’ against the dominant form of ‘luxury-regeneration’ aimed at corporations and tourists and displacing lower-income inhabitants, public spaces and historic structures (ibid.: 5). In order to realize their aims, members of the initiative institutionalized its existence into a legally registered non-profit association (Gängeviertel e.V.), and later into a separate cooperative (Gängeviertel Genossenschaft 2010 eG). The latter’s main purpose was to start fundraising and form the future legal administrative body for the self-management of the quarter.

Parallel to this, the city council prided itself in having an open and supportive attitude towards the Gängeviertel in the policy document Growth with Foresight (Senat-Hamburg 2010). In 2011 the Gängeviertel cooperative applied for the UNESCO heritage title ‘site of cultural diversity’, which it was awarded in 2012 as one of only two initiatives in Germany. At the time of writing (August 2015), the following description of the Gängeviertel could be found on the official website of the city government under the section promoting Hamburg’s key public spaces and heritage sites:

Since a private investor wanted to demolish the remaining parts of the old Gängeviertel for new commercial buildings, a citizens’ group consisting of planners, artists, and creative people squatted the buildings in 2009. [. . .] Everyone can freely move around in the quarter. If you are lucky one of the residents will tour you through the Gängeviertel.

(HH 2015a)

In addition, the city government integrated the Gängeviertel into its discourse on creativity as a means for urban development. A whole set of articles about the local development scheme of the Gängeviertel and its participatory process can be found in a special section of the city’s website (HH 2015b). The idea of a ‘lively inner city quarter combining low rents with artistic uses’ (ibid.) is presented as if it was the city council’s initial plan. The city’s government has benefited from co-opting the social, cultural and political engagement that has been keeping the Gängeviertel alive and vibrant since 2009.

With reference to the case of the squatter’s movement in Amsterdam, scholars have shown that creative and cultural capital is traded by the social movement for legalization, subsidies and generally a better position in negotiations with public authorities (Pruijt 2003, 2004; Uitermark 2004; Martínez 2014). Owens (2008: 44) furthermore suggests that in a political context of urban competitiveness and city policies aiming at tourist attractiveness, squatters can stabilize their situation by ‘fashioning themselves as an alternative tourist attraction’. Despite the differences between Amsterdam and Hamburg, the processes of negotiation and institutionalization in the Gängeviertel seem to support such an argument. This also shows that co-optation of a social movement is not a passive process, something that happens ‘to’ the movement; neither is co-optation fully antithetical to the maintenance of radicalism and a continuous militancy (Uitermark 2004). If co-optation means at its core that oppositional social groups are turned into service providers (ibid.) and implies that ‘the state officials accept the ultimate goal of the movement’ (Pruijt 2003: 144), the case of the Gängeviertel has been an ambivalent one. While the activists are producing a cultural and social programme based on voluntary engagement, they still keep a close eye on their own goals of establishing a permanent self-managed space for counter-cultural production, with social housing and workshop uses, and a socio-cultural centre in the inner city. The activists have instrumentalized the marketing-oriented policy discourse in order to improve their situation and have then found themselves instrumentalized by the city authorities as the proof of their open and liberal attitude towards subcultures.

As Uitermark (2004) analysed with the case of the Amsterdam squatters’ movement, those squats with an artistic appeal were particularly targeted by co-optation and found themselves – in their struggle for legalisation – increasingly put in the role of a cultural service provider and thus also caught up in processes of commercialization. In light of the culturalization of the urban economy, artists and other cultural producers within a social movement seem to be in an ambiguous position. On the one hand they have a better stance in negotiations for legalization and subsidies as well as a better public image. On the other, they find their cultural activities exploited and co-opted, potentially causing alienation among them when they realise the ‘first-hand appropriation and exploitation of their creativity’ (Harvey 2012: 110).

The cultural appeal and authenticity the activists create in the Gängeviertel – which is desperately needed for city branding activities to attract tourists as well as capital – face the risk of fading away through processes of commodification. Constantly trying to keep their cafe, tea house, bar, exhibitions and events visitor-friendly, the activists have to emphasize their openness and the importance of their contribution to a culturally diverse city. They also run a gift shop for those visitors who wish to acquire an artwork produced in the Gängeviertel as a souvenir. These activities were, however, at the time of writing, mainly driven by voluntary work and did not generate a substantial profit. The growth of the tourism economy amplifies processes of commodification in subcultural spaces, and potentially of loss of authenticity (Hoffman et al. 2003). Such processes can be seen as both a necessity and a danger for a creative autonomous space such as the Gängeviertel.

Fourth phase: renovation, public investment and the aim of self-management

From the summer of 2013 onwards the quarter underwent a process of refurbishment, carried out by the municipal housing development agency working closely with the Gängeviertel association, which constantly sought to shape the process and future space allocation according to its strategic concept plan. Thanks to constant negotiations, internally as well as with the authorities, it seems likely that all buildings will stay in the hands of the activists (Gängeviertel e.V. 2012). At the time of writing (August 2015), the activists were still running the Gängeviertel and shaping the development and refurbishment of the quarter. However, conflicts kept cropping up – whether they concerned technical and heritage-related matters in the renovation process or the public authorities’ perceived upper hand over future uses of the Gängeviertel. Due to this, the Gängeviertel association left the renovation advisory board in February 2015 and by doing so temporarily put on hold the future planning and construction works (Gängeviertel 2015).

Instead of analysing urban social movements in terms of their ‘successes’, or giving another account of how a neoliberal urban regime co-opts, commodifies and exploits subcultural activities, I want to call for a different perspective. Describing the political context of Hamburg and the case of the Gängeviertel shows that, in some places, the contradictions inherent in current capitalism can be ‘hacked’ for the benefit of social movements and spaces of collective inventiveness, while at the same time commodification and co-optation take place to some extent. After the refurbishment of the Gängeviertel, the people who decide to stay will have to pay social-housing rents and provide financially viable commercial-cultural concepts for the shops, offices, exhibition spaces and other venues. Some will not be able to afford living in the Gängeviertel, particularly not if the provision of activities in the quarter continues to depend on mostly voluntary and unpaid work (Figure 17.3). So far the activists had viewed their work in the quarter as self-exploitation for the benefit of the collective, but they have been increasingly aware that the moment may arise when this voluntary labour could become exploited by others. The Gängeviertel remains an endangered space of possibility – a Möglichkeitstraum (Kahn 2012).

Figure 17.3 Graffiti reading: ‘It works ’cause we work’, on the wall of the first building handed over for refurbishment in the Gängeviertel, August 2013.

Source: Author.

Due to the public ownership of the land and buildings of the Gängeviertel,⁸ the allocation process for both housing units and other spaces has to follow a standardized procedure with individual rental contracts. The shops that opened in the first refurbished buildings were a bike workshop and a vegan cafe, both projects developed by activists from the Gängeviertel. Another consequence of the renovation is the changing visual image of the quarter, as the newly painted facades of the refurbished buildings are decorated with flowerpots, while on the last floor an ‘antifa’ (Anti Fascist Action) flag remains displayed on the balcony. When asked about what can be done to oppose the transformation into a beautified commercialized cultural quarter, some activists have stated in news interviews: ‘Make holes in the facades as soon as they are refurbished’ (Freitag 2014) and ‘continue to resist’ (Schipkowski 2014). At the time of writing, the stream of visitors had not dried up while the activists in the Gängeviertel were preparing their sixth birthday celebration, for which the flyer read: ‘6 year alarm!’, depicting a protest whistle shaped like the number six.

The Gängeviertel as a tourist attraction: tensions and contradictions

Tourist attractions do not spring fully formed into travel guides, ready for tourists’ consumption, but are rather products of contestation and construction.

(Owens 2008: 44)

The Gängeviertel has entered commercial tourist guides (e.g. Fründt 2015) and is described as a squatted space for subcultural and alternative art production which was heavily fought for, where ‘the inhabitants are very helpful and willing to tell more about the story of the quarter’ (Smit 2012: 19). The activists’ aim to be open to visitors contains, however, the potential for conflict. The built structure of the Gängeviertel’s passageways displays spatial porosity and it is also a conscious attempt by the activist group not to become enclosed but to stay open for all visitors and tourists. In fact, one of the main aims of the activists is to offer collective activities and events with no financial and commercial barriers, unlike the consumption-based public spaces of the surrounding area. An exemple of the contradiction that may arise from this openness was the decision to veto the request of a tourist agency that actually wanted to include the Gängeviertel as an attraction in one of their city tours. Although the courtyards of the quarter are public spaces, the residents considered that this went too far, some of them feeling that they already lived in a zoo with a constant influx of tourists photographing their everyday lives.

Not only has the Gängeviertel become a tourist attraction, but there are also different patterns of tourism taking place inside the quarter. As part of the cultural programme, many international artists and activists have been invited for concerts, exhibitions, workshops and debates hosted on the site, often temporarily integrating themselves into its social structure. The Gängeviertel contains a donation-based ‘hostel’ and an artist residency. It is therefore clear that certain kinds of tourists fit in better in spaces such as the Gängeviertel than others. The term ‘counterculture travellers’ – used by Owens (2008) to describe tourist squatters in Amsterdam – refers to visitors who are part of international networks of resistance and subcultural struggles and engage in local activism when travelling. In fact, ‘tourism can be both target and outcome of activism. Activism can both attract and resist tourism’ (ibid.: 44). Visitors who are used to alternative ways of living seem to have an easy time integrating into the functioning of the Gängeviertel and its social practices. This was illustrated by the example of a travelling social-political theatre group involved in a cooperative project between Germany and Latin America, who visited Hamburg in the summer of 2014. The group was hosted in the Gängeviertel’s hostel and used the kitchen, courtyards and other facilities for the time of their stay. For an observer it was clear that those visitors were used to non-commercial and collectively run spaces. They showed a high familiarity with the cultural codes, behaviours and ways of organizing of the Gängeviertel. On their second day, the visiting group organized an open dinner in the common cooking facilities and mingled effortlessly with the local activists.

However, not everyone feels welcome in the Gängeviertel: those tourists who are primarily drawn by the consumption-based spaces of the rest of the city centre are often challenged by the different ‘look and feel’ of the place and its different socio-spatial practices. Many only stop at the passageway which connects the courtyards of the quarter to the street, but do not dare to go inside, as if they were crossing the threshold of a private space. But the public character of the Gängeviertel’s courtyards just differs from the more sanitized and clean spaces of the adjacent shopping and business district. It offers spaces of encounter that overturn the dichotomy of public and private – towards a space of ‘commoning’ (Stavrides 2016). While the discomfort of many visitors still points to this present radical imaginary, its openness makes the exchange of experiences and knowledge of different lives possible.

Visiting spaces of creative autonomy – a different tourism narrative?

The presence of tourists and visitors in the quarter has become a topic of discussion within the activist group, and it is important to reflect on the internal dynamics between the people who are engaged in the Gängeviertel and the issue of tourism. The Gängeviertel can be seen as a space of what I have called ‘creative autonomy’ which is characterized by a twofold internal tension. On the one hand, the activists are caught up in constant internal negotiations between the desire to protect the self-management and autonomy of the space and the willingness to institutionalize and cooperate with the city authorities. On the other, there is a tension between artistic production and political activities in the Gängeviertel (Fraeser 2013). I want to argue, in line with Owens (2008), that the tourism issue intensifies the split within social movements of politics versus culture, arts and creativity.

The activists have been challenged by the constant influx of visitors. However, it appears irrelevant whether those visitors are actual tourists or residents of Hamburg. What matters is their approach to, and involvement with, the space: whether they passively consume the produced culture or become engaged in the processes of collective production of the space together with the activists, consequently becoming (temporary) activists themselves. For spaces such as the Gängeviertel this means that those socio-spatial practices actually taking place are not primarily defined by questions of ownership (Birke 2010) but by the degree of active engagement with the activities – in opposition to the passive consumption of a cultural programme. Such spaces are not completely pre-fixed, but are under constant negotiation in which activists create relatively open spaces of possibilities (Stavrides 2010). By challenging the dominant production of space and offering alternatives to neoliberal urban development, the Gängeviertel makes some tourists feel like ‘locals’ and other (often local) visitors feel alienated by the prevalent socio-spatial practices in the quarter, which they may not be familiar with. Due to its openness and central location, the quarter remains a point of entry into social movement activity and political engagement for those visitors not (yet) active in emancipatory urban struggles – may these be locals or tourists. Beyond this, the Gängeviertel as a collective project has constantly been shaped by the enthusiasm and engagement of newcomers.

Conclusion: resisting fantasies – within and beyond an antithesis

This chapter has explored some of the dynamics and tensions present in the Gängeviertel in relation to tourism policies and the influx of tourists. The analysis underlined the interlinkage of ‘creativity politics’ with city branding and showed that subcultural spaces have become selling points in the conventional tourism strategy of the city. I argued that – in addition to the central location and cultural programme on offer – the primacy given by the activists to openness to visitors (more than radical autonomy) has turned the Gängeviertel into something resembling a tourist attraction. In this context, it is necessary to call for a renegotiation of what is understood as ‘antithetical’, as spaces such as the Gängeviertel can take advantage of having become attractive for policy-makers and tourists alike, notwithstanding the co-optation and commercialization that this entails (Uitermark 2004; Novy and Colomb 2013). As this analysis has shown, it is not only inhabitants who shape an urban ‘free space’ and socio-cultural centre, but it is also those visitors who participate in the cultural projects and everyday life of the Gängeviertel who contribute to its diversity and quality.

It is within such ‘spaces of creative autonomy’, temporally taken out of the harshest effects of the logic of capitalist profitability, that it seems possible to focus on social reproduction as a battleground for creating spaces ‘beyond contemporary forms of domination’ (Stavrides 2016), and to collectively work towards a ‘radical imagination’ (Haiven and Khasnabish 2014). At the same time it is the ‘fantasy of antithesis’ to neoliberal political agendas that keeps alive such projects refusing to be business ventures, attractions refusing to commercialize their spectacle, and creativity refusing to be trapped in the demands of productivity and profitability. The crucial question is not whether the Gängeviertel has become a tourist attraction but how visitors act out in this socio-cultural space. This implies that resisting the pressure of commodification brought upon such spaces of creative autonomy in the context of a growing tourism economy will not be achieved by a general ‘anti-tourism’ attitude and by enclosure, but rather the opposite, as also argued by Arias-Sans and Russo in their account of the commoning process of Parc Güell in Barcelona (see Chapter 13). Ensuring openness to visitors needs to be a central concern to foster collective engagement in the making of a different city.

Notes

1This chapter is based on a mixed-method research design including exploratory visits to Hamburg and expert interviews during the winter of 2012 and spring of 2013, intensive ethnographic fieldwork carried out during the months of July and August 2013 conducting participant observation in the Gängeviertel, and a follow-up visit during July 2014. Additionally, a review of policy documents, political speeches and media reports in relation to urban development, city marketing and tourism policies in Hamburg, as well as media- and indie-media reports on local protest movements focusing on the Gängeviertel was conducted in late 2014. Unless otherwise stated, all quotes from original German sources mentioned in this book chapter were translated by the author.

2Komm in die Gänge is the name of the initiative that later developed into both the Gängeviertel e.V. (association) and the Gängeviertel cooperative (Genossenschaft). The title is a play on words inviting people to come into the alleyways (Gänge) of the Gängeviertel on the one hand, and on the other it is a German phrase meaning ‘get things moving’ (Novy and Colomb 2013).

3Hamburg is the fourth most prosperous region in Europe after Inner London, Luxembourg and Brussels Capital Region (htt­ps:­//w­ww.­de.­sta­tis­tik­/da­ten­/st­udi­e/1­500­72/­umf­rag­e/r­egi­one­n-m­it-­dem­-ho­ech­ste­n-b­ip-­je-­ein­woh­ner­-in­-eu­rop­a/ (accessed 23 October 2014)). Within Germany its GDP per capita is the highest of all federal states, at 61,700 euros in 2015, roughly 25,000 euros above the national average (htt­p:/­/de­.st­ati­sta­.co­m/s­tat­ist­ik/­dat­en/­stu­die­/73­061­/um­fra­ge/­bun­des­lae­nde­r-i­m-v­erg­lei­ch-­bru­tto­inl­and­spr­odu­kt/­ (accessed 22 April 2016)).

4The political discourse around tourism, cultural policies and creativity displayed here had over time been accompanied by various social policies, although these were not able to stop rising living costs and housing prices as well as continuous social segregation and urban poverty (Alisch 1997; Berger and Schmalfeld 1999).

5I want to thank a squatting activist in Vienna who, in a discussion around the contemporary interrelatedness of radical political action with processes of gentrification, labelled the persistent aim of living differently a ‘fantasy of antithesis’. Beyond this, I am grateful to those activists who allowed me to enter their living and working spaces and, by telling me their stories, made me learn from their realities and their fantasies.

6The ‘Right to the City’ is a notion based on Henri Lefebvre and his 1968 publication Le droit à la ville. It has ever since been interpreted and reused by critical scholars and activists. In the words of David Harvey (2012: 5): ‘To claim the right to the city [. . .] is to claim some kind of shaping power over the processes of urbanization, over the ways in which our cities are made and remade, and to do so in a fundamental and radical way.’ The concept became a slogan (Brenner et al. 2012) and ‘is less a juridical right, but rather an oppositional demand’ (Mayer 2012c: 71).

7In the 2010 publication ‘Concept for the Future of the Gängeviertel’ it is stated:

Who we are: painters, urban planners, graphic designers, illustrators, cooks, designers, social workers, gold- and silversmiths, unskilled labourers, photographers, architects, web designers, ivory sculptors, upholsterers, carpenters, gardeners, poets, social-welfare benefiters, project-developers, geriatric nurses, violinists, teachers, event managers, scientists, movie directors, restaurateurs, authors, psychologists, plumbing and heating installers, camera-men, performance- and conceptual- artists, hedonists, remedial teachers, DJs, street artists, scene designer, glassblower, musicians, programmers, lighting technicians, wood-, stone- and metal-sculptures, massage therapists, drama advisors, saddlers, educators, light-artists and non-artists, film-makers, media artists, students, stand builders, sinologists, bookbinders, scholarship-holders, retail dealers, fashion designers, singers, kindergarteners, and ecological vegetable sellers. (Komm in die Gänge 2010: 7)

8The future scenario preferred by the Gängeviertel activists is that the cooperative would sell enough shares to be able to buy the buildings off the city government and self-organize the allocation and maintenance process autonomously.

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