Walter Siebel

Wesen und Zukunft der europäischen Stadt

European urbanity can be defined by three elements: First, centrality: the contrast of town and country; second, a way of life: the polarization of everyday life into a private and a public sphere; third, a hope: european urbanity cannot be understood without the hope for emancipation that has always been associated with urban life. The essay discusses how far these elements are still valid in modern city life. There are places of urbanity but not so much in the dormant historical centers as in the modern zones of transition, for instance locations of deindustrialization. The conclusion discusses ambiguities and contradictions: the daytime and the nighttime of urbanism.

Neue Formen politischer Planung: IBA Emscher Park und Expo 2000 Hannover

Project oriented planning is discussed as a new planning concept. After a description of its characteristics, some political and economic explanations of this new approach are presented. The main focus is a comparison of the IBA and the EXPO as two examples that mark the full possible range to which project oriented planning can be applied. Different outcomes of these two big events are—it is argued—partly due to different regional conditions and partly to specific aspects of the two alternative strategies. This is exemplified by the interrelationship between decentralization versus concentration, hard versus soft strategies, innovation versus continuity. The main thesis is that planning has to deal with contradictory tasks. Planning is the art of squaring the circle. Since there is no solution to this problem, differences in strategy are differences in coping with insoluble situations.

In Quest of the Good Urban Life: Socio-spatial Dynamics and Residential Building Stock Transformation in Zurich

This paper discusses socio-spatial dynamics and the transformation of the residential building stock in the global city of Zurich. It deals with five questions. Does Zurich exhibit the type of social polarisation outlined by the global city hypothesis? If so, how does social polarisation become visible in the context of a European city? Which actors in the real estate market are catering to the special tastes of the new urban middle class? With whom does the new middle class compete for space in the city? The paper argues that real estate developers customise the residential building stock and produce residential units for a targeted market—the new urban middle class. Furthermore, a new socio-spatial phenomenon—ennoblement—has evolved, as the new urban middle class takes residence in traditional upper-class neighbourhoods. By investing its own economic capital, this new middle class is hoping to profit from upper-class social and cultural capital.

Öffentlichkeit und Privatheit in der überwachten Stadt

Surveillance of cities is a major topic in contemporary urban sociology and criminology. Both threats to personal safety and new forms of social control such as video surveillance or the deployment of private security are seen as a menace for the traditional public character of the European city. On the one hand, surveillance can endanger anonymity in public places and access to public places as the two main characteristics of public space. On the other hand, personal fear of street crime also inhibits free access to public spaces. Otherwise the public discourse of a general decay of public space seems to be curtate. The dialectic between public and private sphere is a complex constitutional factor of European cities, and privatisation of public spaces, for example, implies more than just a legal transformation of a geographically restricted territory.

Bedingungen der Reurbanisierung

Abstract The article starts with some explanations for why large cities, and the inner cities in particular, are once again attracting residents and quality jobs (Part I). Mainly, reurbanization is defined somewhat differently from the usual sense, i.e., not as a re-concentration of the population and workplaces in the cities, but rather as an indicator of the growing relevance of the productive factors of the city (Part II). The modern large city is described as an independent source of innovation and, thus, as more than just a location where innovative operations and creative workforces prefer to settle. When the city itself is a productive force, it creates a ground for the increasing importance of suburban and urban policies in a society whose well-being is critically dependent on the productivity of the production factors, not from their number. One particular element of the productivity of the city is based on Georg Simmels work, namely, that size, density and heterogeneity are the basis of the eco...

Wie global ist die Weltstadthypothese

Abstract This paper is an empirical examination of the process of social polarization in global cities. Drawing on evidence from New York, London and Tokyo, Sassen claims that the processes of economic change linked to globalization are leading to a growing polarization of occupational and income structure whereby there is a growth of both the low-income and high-income strata paralleled by a decline of the middle class. Furthermore, Sassen states that the restructuring of the social urban and economic structure of global cities results in new sociospatial configurations, among them, gentrification and spatially concentrated poverty and physical decay. Using data from Zurich, Switzerland, it is argued that while Zurich exhibits social polarization as predicted by the global cities hypothesis, the extent of both the social as well as the spatial consequences of polarization in Zurich are not comparable to those described by Sassen. This paper highlights the distinctive effects in mediating the impact of gl...

Heroischer Städtebau: die Stadt als Projekt: Anmerkungen zu Vittorio Magnago Lampugnanis «Die Stadt von der Neuzeit bis zum 19. Jahrhundert. Urbane Entwürfe in Europa und Nordamerika»

Abstract In this article, urban sociologist Walter Siebel – author of Die Kultur der Stadt (Suhrkamp) – critically examines Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani’s most recent work, Die Stadt von der Neuzeit bis zum 19. Jahrhundert – Urbane Entwürfe in Europa und Nordamerika, thereby initiating a debate about the “view of the city”. English title: Heroic Urban Planning: The City as a Project

Ökologisches Wohnen im Widerstreit der Bedürfnisse

Okologisches Wohnen stellt Verhaltensanforderungen, und das heist: Anforderungen an verandertes Verhalten. Jeder Versuch, nur solche Masnahmen zur Okologisierung des Wohnens umzusetzen, die ohne entsprechende Verhaltensanderungenauskommen, bleibt entweder illusionar oder reduziert die moglichen Masnahmen auf einen okologisch suboptimalen, wenn nicht gar irrelevanten Rest — so das Ergebnis der bisherigen Ausfuhrungen. Dies zwingt zum Blick auf diejenigen, die in den okologischen Projekten wohnen, denn ihr Verhalten ist es, auf das es hier in erster Linie ankommt. So gern viele Planer solcher Projekte, die wissen oder zu wissen meinen, was okologisch gut ist, hiervon vielleicht absehen wurden: Die subjektive Bereitschaft der Bewohner, sich auf derartige Verhaltensanderungen einzulassen, ist nun einmal das Nadelohr, durch das alle Masnahmen zur Okologisierung des Wohnens hindurch mussen.

Resümee: Soziale Bedingungen eines umweltverträglicheren Wohnens

Menschliches Wohnen hat, wie jedes menschliche Verhalten, zwei Seiten: Es ist Teil des menschlichen Stoffwechselprozesses mit der Natur, und es findet im sozialen Raum statt. Okologisches Wohnen verfolgt zunachst die Absicht, die stoffliche Seite des Wohnens so zu verandern, das die Umwelt weniger belastet wird. Die Konsequenz seiner Doppelgesichtigkeit ist jedoch, das dies nicht ohne gleichzeitige Veranderungen im sozialen Raum vonstatten gehen kann.

Was ist ökologisches Bauen und Wohnen

Es gibt eine Vielzahl von Techniken und Masnahmen, die zu einer Reduktion der Umweltbelastungen im Wohnungsbau beitragen konnen und deshalb als ‘okologisch’ bezeichnet werden. Dazu zahlen die Stopptaste am 6-1-Spulkasten und der nicht versiegelte Holzfusboden ebenso wie Sonnenkollektoren, Komposthaufen und die Nachverdichtung. Fur einen systematischen Uberblick konnen okologische Techniken und Masnahmen in Anlehnung an andere Studien (z.B.: Gelfort et al. 1993; Ranft 1994) sechs Aktionsfeldern zugeordnet werden: Bau- und Wohflachen, Baustoffe, Energie, Wasser, Abfall sowie Grun- und Freiflachen (Ubersicht 1, S. 32).