Ben Kerste
Creative city, contested city. A comparative approach between the cities of Marseille and Hamburg
The southern French port city of Marseille and its surrounding region was European Capital of Culture in 2013. This major cultural event was celebrated by the local elites as a milestone of urban renaissance with the frequently proclaimed aim of making Marseille the capital of the Mediterranean region. In terms of urban planning, the Capital of Culture can be read as a continuation and intensification of the state urban development project "Euroméditerranée", as part of which the northern harbor front has been completely redesigned since the early 2000s. As a delayed response to the post-industrial crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, the aim is to promote the economic and social development of the city, particularly in the tourism and service industry sectors, with limited success to date.
If such major events, similar to the Olympic Games, often increase the visibility and attractiveness of the host cities, they are equally subject to the risk of (re-)producing socio-spatial exclusion, poverty and dissatisfaction in the city. From this perspective, such an intensified phase of urban transformation can be understood as a moment of social conflict and political struggle, in which a wide variety of political activists campaign for democratic and participatory urban development, demand greater participation in social wealth or defend cultural freedoms and social practices.
In this dissertation project, I have been studying several such urban initiatives in Marseille since the end of 2012. The various actors behind the inner-city, independently organized "Carnaval de la Plaine et de Noailles", for example, are concerned with the appropriation of public space and the preservation of a socially mixed neighbourhood culture. In the "Le Grand Saint Barthélemy" district in the north of the city, which is characterized by unemployment and drug-related crime, an initiative is more fundamentally directed against social exclusion and post-colonial discrimination and thus raises the question of cultural participation and the promotion of difference.
Against the background of close participant observation and ethnographic descriptions of the various groups of actors, their practices and political discourses, their strategies and individual and collective biographies, the initiatives are to be made comprehensible and understandable in their specific urban context. In a second step, we are interested in the extent to which they succeed in making their specific interests, but also their ideas of the city, accessible to a wider public and endowing them with legitimacy and political influence. The focus here is particularly on the collective ability to form political alliances and cooperations, to locate particular interests in a larger, common context of action and to make them visible throughout the city.
A deeper examination of the Hamburg "Right to the City" network serves as a field of comparison. Against the backdrop of today's urban policies, which increasingly rely on architectural lighthouse projects and creative cultural policies as part of a propagated urban competition, we are interested in both the special and, above all, the generalizable aspects of the development and maintenance of political mobilizations in Marseille and Hamburg. Under what conditions has it been possible in Hamburg since 2009 to repeatedly network a range of actors and interest groups around issues such as rents and refugee policy in places like the Essohäuser or the Rote Flora? What role do the mobilization of individual and collective resources, the emergence of shared identities, access to the media and the elaboration of arguments in general discourses against the Hamburg company and the growing city play here? And finally, what does an examination of the urban protest landscape in Hamburg and Marseille show us about the politics and urban society of these cities in general?