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“The Dynamics of the City – Fragmentation and Concentration” was the topic of a keynote lecture by Columbia University Professor Peter Marcuse (if the name sounds familiar, you might have heard of his father Herbert) at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin tonight. The lecture was the opening of a conference on cultural diversity in New York and Berlin.

Sitting at a panel next to moderator Margit Mayer of the Free University of Berlin, Marcuse started by asking the audience, “why we don’t we just celebrate the fact that we are culturally diverse and ignore it?” He certainly had no intention of doing that. Cultural diversity, he says, has been used as a justification by the powers that be to divide a city. Setting up his discussion on ways to solve existing problem in the cities, Marcuse challenged the conventional approach that focuses only on the “excluded,” saying that the “excluders” need to be looked at as well.

Marcuse introduced six terms for a culturally distinctive area:

• Ghetto – An area where a population group lives involuntary
• Enclave – An area where a group comes together voluntary and out of solidarity
• Quarter – A generic term for a neighborhood of distinctive characteristics
• Gentrified area – One of the above turned into a neighborhood for the affluent
• Suburbs – The result of a more or less voluntary withdrawal from the city
• Citadel – Privatized “public” place, like a gated community or Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz

Professor Marcuse criticized the Chicago School’s model for the development of the areas. The Chicago School postulated that the normal, and desired, development would lead from ghetto to enclave to quarter to a coherent melting pot, or an omelet, where you can’t recognize the different ingredients. Marcuse’s ideal city would be more like a stew. But then, he says, it has not happened like the Chicago School predicted anyway, citing specifically Harlem as a counterexample. After the Second World War, Harlem, having made the transformation to an enclave, became “abandoned” and only decades later started to be gentrified.

Marcuse then turned to the role of public policy. Again, there are different approaches to reducing inequality. One is “gilding the ghetto,” where such an area is supported financially and with infrastructure, and where incentatives to inhabitants to stay and work there are given. The other approach opens up the suburbs to the previously excluded. The current, in his words “neoliberal,” approach is essentially support of gentrification without much regard for the current inhabitants. He cites the Brooklyn Atlantic Yards as an extreme example hereof.

In what would later draw some dissent from the audience, Marcuse sees a parallel between slavery and the treatment of German “guest workers”. He does that to set up his statement “that there is a direction in Public Policy that is not all benevolent,” neither in Germany nor in the U.S. Following up, he picks on a Tagesspiegel article that shockingly finds that the interests of migrants are not so much different than those of the “majority,” and whose last line, I kid you not, is: “Wahrscheinlich sind Migranten irgendwie auch nur Deutsche.” (Probably migrants are also just only Germans) . The impression that he gets from the article is that if migrants are not “already basically German, they ought to be.” A wrong notion for Marcuse:

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He concluded with a commitment to diversity, arguing that it is not the problem:

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The conference “New York – Berlin: Cultural diversity in urban space” will continue until the 20th of October at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, Berlin. Admittance is free of charge.