Worldwide Berlinification!
Apr. 15th, 2009 11:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusThere are heartening signs that the recession is causing a creeping "Berlinification" of England. An article in the Business section of yesterday's Guardian said that MPs, desperate to prevent the recession turning Britain into a succession of ghost towns, have outlined a series of emergency measures which include giving thousands of grants to people who find creative uses for vacant shops -- and there are predicted to be more than 70,000 newly-chained and shuttered shops in Britain this year alone.
The article describes UK law coming halfway to meet potential squatters: "Planning rules will be relaxed to allow changes of use which go against local guidelines. For example, a disused clothes shop could become an art gallery or an empty Woolworths an NHS drop-in centre. Temporary lease agreements will enable owners who want to retain a vacant property in the long term to make it available for community or creative use."
This development shows the UK government embracing the so-called Slack Space movement described in a February article in The Guardian's art and design section. That article, though, came out and used the s-word: squat. "Artists and curators have begun colonising "slack space" freed up by the recession and are transforming vacant shops into "creative squats", galleries and studios."
The February article sees defunct branches of Woolworths and Carphone Warehouse colonised to house community cafes and performance art events. "We know recessions are awful," says a member of a group of art squatters who've taken over a parade of shops in Margate, "but they can be a good time for artists as creative ideas start appearing while otherwise redundant people are sitting at home fiddling and doing creative stuff."
Meanwhile, an article in last Sunday's Observer looked at The artists who are hot to squat. "Straitened times call for ever greater resourcefulness," wrote Hermione Hoby. "They also - luckily for artists if not the former occupants - mean more empty buildings than ever. According to England's Empty Homes Agency, 784,495 are unoccupied, and the number rises each day. Taking their cue from similar movements in Berlin and Amsterdam, artists in this country are realising that squatting provides not just freedom from paying rent but also extraordinary creative freedom. The chance to make large-scale work, to put on frequent, artist-curated exhibitions and to form collaborative relationships based on sharing a space, has made squatting more than simply a housing solution." Hermione's article covered the Da! Collective, Steal From Work, Artspace Lifespace, The Hannah Barry Gallery, and !WOWOW! collective.
Berlinification indeed; when Germany legalized squatting in the 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new verb -- Instandbesetzen -- entered the language; a combination of "to occupy" and "to renew". Berlin squatters became adept at adding cultural value to their squats, knowing it put them in a much stronger position. Many squats became cultural centres -- art galleries, music performance spaces, bookshops, coffee bars. Many of the places I go to regularly -- places with names like Eschloraque, Neurotitan, Zapata Coffee, Ausland -- began as squats, or still are.
Now, I'm too lazy to be a squatter myself; I don't have the energy for hacking at building infrastructure, making repairs, changing locks, let alone having confrontations with owners or police. I just want to get on with my own thing, thank you very much, and paying rent buys me time and space. But I live in a city that's been vastly improved by culturally-minded squatters, and I often think the current recession came along just in time to prevent Berlin getting too chi-chi, too bourgie-bourgie.
Since it's a global recession, I also like to think Berlin has now become a sort of template for cities all over the world. Whereas we might once have looked like a museum of crusty subcultures past their sell-by date, this city now looks like the future of Tokyo, the future of London, and the future of New York. We're your best-case scenario, guys, your optimal recessionary outcome. Everything else is dystopia, Escape-From-New-York stuff.
If the major cities of the world all become "Berlins", though, I can't guarantee I'd stay in the actual Berlin, the black flagship, the Big Squat itself. If Tokyo, for instance, got as cheap and cheerfully creative as Berlin -- if it became the kind of city you could simply occupy without having to scuttle around pointlessly making rent -- I'd be there in a flash. Secretly, what I'm doing here in Berlin is waiting for Tokyo to Berlinify.
The article describes UK law coming halfway to meet potential squatters: "Planning rules will be relaxed to allow changes of use which go against local guidelines. For example, a disused clothes shop could become an art gallery or an empty Woolworths an NHS drop-in centre. Temporary lease agreements will enable owners who want to retain a vacant property in the long term to make it available for community or creative use."
This development shows the UK government embracing the so-called Slack Space movement described in a February article in The Guardian's art and design section. That article, though, came out and used the s-word: squat. "Artists and curators have begun colonising "slack space" freed up by the recession and are transforming vacant shops into "creative squats", galleries and studios."
The February article sees defunct branches of Woolworths and Carphone Warehouse colonised to house community cafes and performance art events. "We know recessions are awful," says a member of a group of art squatters who've taken over a parade of shops in Margate, "but they can be a good time for artists as creative ideas start appearing while otherwise redundant people are sitting at home fiddling and doing creative stuff."
Meanwhile, an article in last Sunday's Observer looked at The artists who are hot to squat. "Straitened times call for ever greater resourcefulness," wrote Hermione Hoby. "They also - luckily for artists if not the former occupants - mean more empty buildings than ever. According to England's Empty Homes Agency, 784,495 are unoccupied, and the number rises each day. Taking their cue from similar movements in Berlin and Amsterdam, artists in this country are realising that squatting provides not just freedom from paying rent but also extraordinary creative freedom. The chance to make large-scale work, to put on frequent, artist-curated exhibitions and to form collaborative relationships based on sharing a space, has made squatting more than simply a housing solution." Hermione's article covered the Da! Collective, Steal From Work, Artspace Lifespace, The Hannah Barry Gallery, and !WOWOW! collective.
Berlinification indeed; when Germany legalized squatting in the 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new verb -- Instandbesetzen -- entered the language; a combination of "to occupy" and "to renew". Berlin squatters became adept at adding cultural value to their squats, knowing it put them in a much stronger position. Many squats became cultural centres -- art galleries, music performance spaces, bookshops, coffee bars. Many of the places I go to regularly -- places with names like Eschloraque, Neurotitan, Zapata Coffee, Ausland -- began as squats, or still are.
Now, I'm too lazy to be a squatter myself; I don't have the energy for hacking at building infrastructure, making repairs, changing locks, let alone having confrontations with owners or police. I just want to get on with my own thing, thank you very much, and paying rent buys me time and space. But I live in a city that's been vastly improved by culturally-minded squatters, and I often think the current recession came along just in time to prevent Berlin getting too chi-chi, too bourgie-bourgie.
Since it's a global recession, I also like to think Berlin has now become a sort of template for cities all over the world. Whereas we might once have looked like a museum of crusty subcultures past their sell-by date, this city now looks like the future of Tokyo, the future of London, and the future of New York. We're your best-case scenario, guys, your optimal recessionary outcome. Everything else is dystopia, Escape-From-New-York stuff.
If the major cities of the world all become "Berlins", though, I can't guarantee I'd stay in the actual Berlin, the black flagship, the Big Squat itself. If Tokyo, for instance, got as cheap and cheerfully creative as Berlin -- if it became the kind of city you could simply occupy without having to scuttle around pointlessly making rent -- I'd be there in a flash. Secretly, what I'm doing here in Berlin is waiting for Tokyo to Berlinify.
Berlin
Date: 2009-04-15 11:01 am (UTC)The international artists, musicians, writers et al, that choose to live here, enjoying Berlin's relatively cheap rents, liberalism and cultural diversity (and I count myself amongst this group) can easily exist in a bubble, indifferent to local concerns and politics and contributing little. Don't like the neighborhood, city, country? - Move.
There is never any need to take responsibility for the consequences of gentrification by culture - just keep one step ahead, so long as the rent is cheap. After all, the city, society, the world, exist for no other purpose than to facilitate our needs, provide a backdrop for our fabulous creativity - and isn't it great that everyone speaks English as well?
Re: Berlin
Date: 2009-04-15 11:09 am (UTC)Re: Berlin
Date: 2009-04-15 11:19 am (UTC)synagoguessynth gigs and colourful markets -- we're wandering. No, we're not rooted in blood and soil. Yes, we do usually add economic value, even if it's not always guaranteed to make us popular.Re: Berlin
Date: 2009-04-15 11:21 am (UTC)Re: Berlin
Date: 2009-04-15 11:35 am (UTC)Re: Berlin
Date: 2009-04-15 11:44 am (UTC)That phrase is a euphemism for "Jews" dreamed up by Stalin when he thought his Jewish doctors were trying to poison him, by the way. Stalin didn't want to evoke Hitler's anti-semitism, so he came up with "rootless cosmopolitans". I won't say the creative class add as much value as doctors and lawyers and all the other things Jews have tended to become, but we may possibly be ministering to your spiritual health. We're certainly not trying to poison you, anyway.
Re: Berlin
Date: 2009-04-15 12:22 pm (UTC)Re: Berlin
Date: 2009-04-15 12:51 pm (UTC)[Error: unknown template video]
Oh, wait, wasn't there something very like that at the last Berlin Biennale?
Re: Berlin
Date: 2009-04-15 03:33 pm (UTC)Re: Berlin
Date: 2009-04-15 12:48 pm (UTC)Yes, but unlike the jews of time past, you don't add cultural value, either.
You're not rooted not only in "blood and soil" but in anything. After you move elsewhere, a rain would sweep the city from any traces of your existence (to paraphrase Brecht).
It's a bit like a parasite, isn't it? Which is obviously pleasant (for the parasite), but not really value adding, forward looking, democratic and participatory (for the place).
To put it in perspective, none of the culture of any one place would be possible if that was the prevailling attitude of the creative class in the past.
Re: Berlin
Date: 2009-04-15 01:20 pm (UTC)In my view, if you live there, and you're generally injecting your income into the goods and services of the community (and really, how could you not be, at least to a healthy extent?), and in your spare time you're not doing anything particularly evil or socially corrosive, then your existence in the community is not a bad thing.
There's this silly assumption in what you say that, if you're not a native, or you're not breaking your back at a factory all day long, then you must be engaged in some sort of excess contributing to a larger cultural cancer. But at the end of the day, if your income is paying for domestic goods and services, filling the regional coffers, you're not a parasite, and it doesn't matter if you're filling that space or if a native is filling it, all things considered.
Re: Berlin
Date: 2009-04-15 01:56 pm (UTC)Well, that's the nub of it, isn't it? Assuming Momus pays no income tax in Germany, then does the sales tax etc he contributes to state coffers really pay for all the infrastructure he enjoys - police, transport, health etc.? It's not at all clear that Berliners are (financially at least) better off for having attracted a lot of poor artist types who will not be paying any income tax.
Re: Berlin
Date: 2009-04-15 02:34 pm (UTC)And even if Momus does take in a lot of his money from German sources, chances are that they're creative sources, and ones that wouldn't necessarily otherwise be going to native Germans. Sure, you could argue that capital is limited, and that this expenditure is felt in the German economy, no matter how inconsequential it may seem, but that would be stretching the point a little too far, in my opinion.
Re: Berlin
Date: 2009-04-15 04:00 pm (UTC)I may have had a more illustrious/lucrative career if I moved into a large city, but I can't bring myself to completely tear myself out of my familial and social fabric; "blood and soil" is a rhetorical device used to disparage people's civic commitment and, yes, collective values. I don't have children, but I have a lot of immediate family who occasionally need help: disabled kids, occasional financial crises, etc. I like having an immediate stake in my society. I don't think it precludes me from making a real contribution; in fact, it enables me to do just that, because I'm drawing from life rather than other art.
But it isn't merely familial ties, it's also geographic: I live on the edge of a federal preserve whose flora and fauna are unique and needs to be protected by committed citizens, since there are not enough rangers to ensure dumpers and poachers aren't destroying habitat. I've joined watchdog groups and attend state commission meetings to ensure that this region is preserved for future generations. I couldn't do that if I was flitting about being an absentee citizen--or worse, a consumer.
In other words: we may need airlings who pollinate these urban enclaves, but there's something to be said for those who stand their ground, too.
Re: Berlin
Date: 2009-04-15 04:27 pm (UTC)I welcome the idea of artists living next door to plumbers and teachers, becoming ambassadors of a sort, engaged in average people's everyday lives; there should be areas of critical mass, but an artistic diaspora in less fashionable areas is just as vital.
Re: Berlin
Date: 2009-04-15 09:48 pm (UTC)