Sybille Frank

Eigenlogik der Städte

Dass Hamburg, Munchen, Cottbus und Leipzig Stadte sind, wird niemand ernsthaft bestreiten wollen. Zugleich ist das Wissen, dass Hamburg ganz anders ist als Munchen, und dass Cottbus sich anders anfuhlt als Leipzig, in der menschlichen Alltagserfahrung tief verankert. Doch warum ist dies so? Warum wird nicht nur „die Stadt“ gemeinhin als anders als „das Land“, sondern warum werden auch Stadte als voneinander unterscheidbare und jeweils eigene soziale Gebilde imaginiert und erfahren? Eine fundierte Antwort auf diese Fragen zu finden, ist das Ziel des Forschungsansatzes „Eigenlogik der Stadte“. Er mochte das erwahnte Alltagswissen uber Stadt und Stadte, das Realitaten ausdruckt und immer wieder neu schafft, der wissenschaftlichen Analyse zuganglich machen. Seine Forschungsfragen lauten: Was ist Stadt, was ist allen Stadten gemeinsam? Wenn es so etwas gibt wie „Stadt“, was macht dann den Unterschied zwischen Stadten aus? Wie kann die besondere Wirklichkeit dieser Stadt im Unterschied zu jener Stadt – in dem hier aufgerufenen Beispiel von Hamburg im Unterschied zu Munchen oder auch von Cottbus im Unterschied zu Leipzig – theoretisch und empirisch erfasst werden?

Dwelling in mobile times: places, practices and contestations

ABSTRACT Mobile people dwell in local environments. The present special issue considers the relation between mobility and dwelling. This introduction to the special issue on ‘(Im)mobilities of dwelling: Places and practices’ provides a general introduction to places and practices of dwelling of highly mobile people and discusses why it is a promising subject for both cultural and mobilities studies that still needs to be addressed in its full theoretical and empirical significance. We carve out the state-of-the-art of research regarding (im)mobilities of dwelling and argue that dwelling and mobility are also an issue of power relations and contestations. Against this backdrop we demonstrate that mobility and dwelling are embedded in broader transformations of society, social inequalities and home. Moreover, this introduction demonstrates how the subsequent papers contribute to this integrated perspective on the mobile–immobile nexus.

Der aktuelle Perspektivenstreit in der Stadtsoziologie

Am Beginn der Kontroverse steht eine simple Frage: Kann »Stadt« ein Gegenstand soziologischer Analysen und Theoriebildung sein? Um die Beantwortung dieser Frage streitet man sich in der deutschen Stadtsoziologie seit Jahrzehnten.1 Heute halten sie manche fur »gelost« oder »obsolet geworden«,2 andere fur »umstrittener denn je«.3 Einig ist man sich daruber, dass es bei der Frage nach dem sozialwissenschaftlichen Gegenstand »Stadt« »ums Ganze«4 geht. Sie fuhrt in den Kern des stadtsoziologischen Selbstverstandnisses,5 sind mit ihr doch nicht weniger brisante Folgefragen verbunden: Kann die Stadt als »eine eigenstandige Ursache gesellschaftlicher Entwicklungen«6 verstanden werden? Was sonst, wenn nicht »die Stadt«, sollte im Fokus der Teildisziplin Stadtsoziologie stehen? Was gewinnt und was verliert man, wenn man das Stadtische als eigenstandigen Modus der Vergesellschaftung begreift? Und schlieslich: Wie und woruber soll man forschen? In den letzten zehn Jahren ist in der deutschen Stadtsoziologie um diesen Fragenkomplex eine lebhafte, bisweilen auch polemisch gefuhrte Debatte entstanden, um die es im Folgenden gehen soll. Grundsatzlich lassen sich zwei Positionen unterscheiden: Der erste – »kritische« –Ansatz wird vor allem durch Hartmut Hausermann und Walter Siebel7 vertreten, fur die die Stadt in Europa zuletzt in einer bestimmten Epoche – namlich im europaischen Mittelalter – zum »historischen Subjekt«8 wurde. Mit fortschreitender Industrialisierung sei der die Gesellschaftsentwicklung antreibende Gegensatz zwischen Stadt und Land im 19. Jahrhundert verschwunden. Die Stadt sei deshalb heute kein abgrenzbarer Gegenstand mehr, und Stadtsoziologie musse deshalb Gesellschaftsanalyse in der Stadt sein. Den zweiten – »eigenlogischen« – Ansatz haben Helmuth Berking und Martina Low vorgelegt.9 Sie gehen von einem an Louis Wirth orientierten universellen Stadt1.

Negotiating German colonial heritage in Berlin’s Afrikanisches Viertel

Abstract Conceptualising heritage as a contested process of past-based meaning production in the present, this paper analyses the ongoing dispute over street names in Berlin’s Afrikanisches Viertel. In 1899, Berlin named two of its newly-built streets Togo Street and Cameroon Street. Togo and Cameroon had been proclaimed the first German colonies in 1884. By 1958, 22 Berlin streets had been named after African regions that had been colonised by the German Empire or after German colonial protagonists. In 2004, several NGOs called for the renaming of some of these streets, igniting a fierce dispute over the heritage status of the German colonial past. Drawing on guided interviews and document analyses, we analyse this debate on three levels, showing how the NGOs and their claims have been marginalised on each level. While the level of agency can be traced back to the different positioning of the actors in the political field, the levels of temporality and spatiality belong to the realm of ideas about the world and one’s place in it. By exploring the authoritative power of traditional notions of permanence, and of place and space, this paper seeks to bring temporality and spatiality into the focus of those studying heritage-making practices.

Dwelling-in-motion: Indian Bollywood tourists and their hosts in the Swiss Alps

ABSTRACT Until recently, tourist routes typically led from ‘the West’ to the so-called ‘rest’ of the world, and travel guides and travel novels were the essential media for planning a journey. In recent years, however, the intensified circulation of place images through global communication media has connected more and more places with more and more imaginations, while the price reductions in and the expansion of travel offers as well as the economic upswing in parts of the global ‘East’, ‘Middle East’, and ‘South’ have set a rising number of these places within potential reach for ever more people. This paper investigates the places and performances of Indian Bollywood tourists and their hosts in and beyond a small town hotel in the Swiss mountains. The Swiss Alps are quite a ‘traditional’ destination of Indian tourism, as they were discovered by the Indian Bollywood film industry as a filming set as early as in the 1980s. Today, many Swiss towns display a comprehensive tourist infrastructure that specifically cares for the services needs of Indian tourists. Building on ethnographic field research and based on recent tourism mobilities studies, this paper explores the practices of Indian tourists in a transitory mode of dwelling and in a place familiar to them through the images produced by the film industry. Moreover, it retraces the way in which the Indian tourists’ practices of dwelling-in-motion have been co-produced and received by service and sales personnel as well as the local population, and how rather immobile imaginations rooted in colonial times structure both the discourses and interactions in the local tourist space.

Introduction: Heritage-Outside-In

‘Heritage’ is one social imaginary used by people to define identity in relation to ideas about the past. But global flows of people, ideas, imaginations and technologies (Appadurai 1996; Urry 2007) are challenging established group/community/national identities and the dominating systems and discourses of power that constitute heritage. This special issue offers a range of insights about those challenges to the nature and importance of heritage and identities from the perspectives of those ‘outside’ the authorised realm of heritage discourse (Smith 2006). Important to us are the power relations that constitute the shifting, contested and puzzling assumptions of difference used to define ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ positionality (Hall 1999; Littler 2005). We see ‘heritage-making’ as a process of cultural production in relation to the past by which people make sense of their world and their place within it, as well as strategically assert their voices in the public sphere. Heritage is interpreted not as an intrinsic quality possessed by objects, buildings or places or even intangible practices, but a signification or valuation of the past undertaken by all humans to give meaning to their lives. Heritage as ‘making’ is a performative act; an active and affective expression of individual and community senses of self (Robertson 2012). Performative heritage seen as an act of voice infers a more political expressing of opinion, being heard, and registering that opinion in a way that is recognised and valued in democratised world-making. Heritage expression as ‘world-making’ draws on Arendt (1958) who passionately argued for a public realm with the power to gather strangers together, mobilising both semblance and difference in order to confront the complexities and uncertainties of human life in diverse communities (Simon and Ashley 2010). In this process, peoples will seek to retain the ability to make worlds (choose, express and change their rooted identities) in ways that they control socially, economically and politically. By making heritage, ‘outside’ or minority individuals and groups represent their own cultural difference, but also articulate their relationship to the collective polity in their home/place/nation (Shryock 2004). Much international academic research about heritage and marginalised or minority peoples situates such peoples as ‘beneficiaries’ of mainstream institutional social inclusion activities (Lynch and Alberti 2010). This special issue takes the ‘outsider’ perspective, inspecting independent heritage-making actions and projects driven by ethnic, racial and other (sub)cultural groups and individuals. The research topics presented here aim to understand heritage-making activities as phenomena within globalisation and de-colonialisation, bound up in the negotiation of identities and subjectivities by marginalised or migratory peoples, thus shaped by the social, cultural and political ecologies of signification on the ground. The ‘outside-in’ approach is an essential component of critical heritage studies, which advocates a theoretically and politically informed analysis of the processes in society that produce and consume the past, often from a bottom up perspective (Smith 2012; Winter 2013; Witcomb and Buckley 2013). While heritage scholars have long included critical perspectives (e.g. Hewison 1987; Lowenthal 1996), critical heritage theorists foreground power relations and invite ‘the active participation of people and communities who to date have been marginalised in the creation and management of “heritage”’ (Smith 2012, 534). This special issue looks at those multifaceted power relations that ground in transcontinental

Nach der Katastrophe : Anmerkungen zur Entwicklung des westdeutschen Parteiensystems in den fünfziger Jahren

Peter Graf Kielmansegg (2000) hat in seinem epochalen Werk die Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland vom Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs bis zur Deutschen Vereinigung am 3. Oktober 1990 nachgezeichnet. Dabei stellt er unter anderem fest, dass „von allen Entwicklungen des ersten Jahrzehnts ... fur die Bonner Demokratie keine bedeutsamer (war) als die Entstehung des Parteiensystems, das die Geschichte der Republik dann dreisig Jahre bestimmen sollte“ (a.a.O.: 261).