Adelheid von Saldern. Stadt und Kommunikation in bundesrepublikanischen Umbruchszeiten. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006. 393 S. EUR 49.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-515-08918-0.

Reviewed by Ulf Zimmermann (Department of Political Science and International Affairs, Kennesaw State University)
Published on H-German (June, 2007)

Urban Conflict and Transition

The profoundly transitional time that culminated in Germany in the 1970s is the period covered in this volume on the "city and communication in times of radical change in the Federal Republic." It is divided into four sections, with two introductory chapters in the first and five chapters each in the others. The interdisciplinary collection shares the perspective that it is in cities that social conflicts are most concentrated and hence must be addressed most focally. Part of this premise will be quite familiar to American students of urban affairs; we have long experience, alas, with all the issues of racial and spatial conflict, lack of communication, and lack of participation in our cities and metropolitan areas. For the American reader the German urban "problem" therefore seems almost amusing by comparison.

Briefly surveying the topics to be examined in the first introductory chapter, editor Adelheid von Saldern observes that the city today is in tension between the "coherence" of the traditional city and "debordering" or "sprawl," as we say in the United States. "Communication" refers to social relations in the sense that society instantiates itself via communication, which takes place in different social, institutional, and regional dimensions: interpersonal communication, including "performances" by individuals and groups in urban space and "events" planned by more institutionalized agents. A tension also exists between public and private, especially between "public man" and "private woman," one likewise quite familiar to the American student of urban history. Cities, she notes, have exercised increasing autonomy in shaping themselves, particularly as citizens have become more active. Education and culture have become prominent aspects of city policy, with art added to the street scene everywhere to project a better "image."

In the second introductory essay Beate Binder terms "urbanity" a "moving metaphor" as the view of it has shifted from the vision enshrined in the 1933 Athens Charter, with its all-too-à la Corbusier machine-for-living designs, forbidding high-speed freeways, decentralization, and huge "Siedlungen," like those that most recently inflamed the edge of Paris and those that have been imploded across older urban America in the last decades. The functionalist excesses that drove these developments have been partly replaced by more people-oriented planning efforts. But, as she is quick to point out, the new development, even in its effort to leave ample room for the "unplanned" has, nonetheless, its own bias, that of the intellectual bourgeoisie. This may be true regarding the aesthetics of the city, but, as implied here and elsewhere in the volume, it is more than ever private capital that dictates its face. I would cite the Potzdamer Platz in Berlin as emblematic of this trend.

Section 2 traces "patterns of communications in new spaces," beginning with shopping malls. Though initially intended to be the new public community centers, these are really private spaces, as Walter Siebel reminds us and as we know from many recent studies of gated communities, business improvement districts, and, of course, malls themselves, all of which protect the "right" kinds of people from the "unwashed" they might encounter in truly public spaces. While this is well-trodden terrain, less familiar is the effort to create urbanity in completely purpose-planned, Los-Alamos-like R&D park suburbs outside of Munich that Martina Hessler examines. Outfitting these with a couple of cafes and a fitness center, she finds, does not make them into lively cities, which, as we learn from other contributions, takes much more, particularly public involvement.

This is where cities' efforts to expand pedestrian zones have been highly successful. They succeeded, as Jan Logemann shows, because of the overlap of historic center and shopping, because Germans lived more often around downtowns, and because German cities have more planning authority. They therefore became more than the typical American "consumer paradises."

The federal government, on the other hand, encouraged automobilization, as Meik Woike documents. But federal tax incentives for commuting by car effectively reduced the mobility of those without cars, for example, the "green widows" whose husbands took the car to work and who were thus hard-put to get jobs themselves. This raises the question, next addressed by Axel Priebs, of whether planners can control suburbanization or if German cities would suffer the fate of American cities, losing their taxpayers to the newly organizing suburbs. One solution was to use a regional taxing framework, following the long-ago established example of "Greater Berlin," a solution that continues to be debated in the United States.

In Section 3, "communication and representation" are examined via city festivals, initiated chiefly by Munich's preparation for the 1972 Olympics and further stimulated by the 1975 European Union "year of architectural heritage." Gottfried Korff identifies four factors that nicely explain these new urban developments: educational expansion with new participatory impulses (promoted by the SPD's "more democracy" slogan), the influence of an elite intellectual culture (writers prominently engaged in urban affairs), the influence of the new mass media, and, overarching all these, the new consumer orientation (yuppies are cited illustratively, if incorrectly).

Lu Seegers then focuses on the festival created to give Hanover "color" to counter its dismal image in Germans' eyes. City leaders emphasized enlisting citizen participation, including that of the Turkish and Greek immigrants. Such participation bore good but ironic fruit: When city officials decided their festival was too expensive, citizens protested and made the city commit to an annual contribution. In two other cities historic reconstruction projects failed and succeeded, respectively, as Georg Wagner-Kyora demonstrates, on the simple grounds that, if the original sites were not available such reconstructions could not be accomplished.

More explicitly about communication, Gregor Hassemer and Guenter Rager's chapter examines the import of the local in the media, finding that radio and television do not give much time to it, which leaves newspapers with this job. Newspapers that covered local public affairs had dwindled by more than half by the mid-1970s, but that portion had been replaced by an "alternative" press and the remaining larger papers had begun to include "suburban" sections, much as we find in the United States, as these suburbs became more firmly established. This chapter includes a trendy reference to social capital, measured in a way that would please Robert Putnam: In 1963, 32 percent of the population were still members of a Stammtisch, but in 1993 it was only 10 percent. In this section's last chapter, Uta Schmidt traces the Ruhr-area's effort to transform its image from that of an ugly industrial has-been to one of a natural beauty of great industrial history (in sepia) but "green" contemporary tourist appeal (foregrounded in bright color). The results of this campaign are not reported.

Section 4, "Challenges and Negotiations," begins with a chapter on one city's coming to terms with the needs of a growing Islamic presence. When members of that community wanted to build a minaret that was too tall for their neighbors, the mayor exercised judicious political leadership. Engaging the Islamic community's leaders in the debate, making them "partners," and therefore legitimate members of the community, clarified local politics. As Joerg Huettermann shows from an anthropologically informed perspective, the Islamic leaders could get much of what they wanted, but only by negotiating under the mayor's facilitation.

Next, Barbara Schmucki turns to the challenges of automobile traffic. Given the circumstances after the Second World War and the belated beginnings of an automotive culture in Germany, postwar urban construction was given over to building for the automobile and hence to traffic engineers. As cities became overrun with automobiles, planning turned to more holistic solutions, and from traffic engineers to city planners, who emphasized the impact of building on "people," no longer "privileging" automobiles. The early, and powerful, influence of the traffic planners owed much, as demonstrated here, to the political clout of the automobile industry after the war. By now, though, between various "green" impulses, citizen participation, and the new political and popular culture, pedestrian zones are privileged.

Another challenge, addressed by Christian Heppner, was the growing "youth problem." Young people had more free time, had grown accustomed to asserting their rights, and thus needed to be provided for. One city that tried to do this with a new youth center radicalized its young people even more by restricting their use of the center. Difficulties escalated as the families in the new projects increasingly were replaced by low-income families, as they themselves suburbanized, with the same results as in American public housing decades before. This experiment thus proved to be a failure. So much, it's aptly concluded, for top-down planning.

Turning to the countercultural youth movement, Detlef Siegfried details its impact on cities, as well as its reverberations in the provinces, as these youths established their own communities, including widespread squatting, within cities. In a similar vein, finally, Saldern and Barbara Zibelli address the place of women in the urban realm, finding that younger, more professional women were able to get some of their demands met, which included their call for "shorter routes" (to work, childcare, healthcare, and so on). But women's issues are still unresolved, particularly, as they note, now that "planning" is done more by private businesses than local governments.

As these adumbrations of the contents indicate, the contributions are rather uneven, some chiefly descriptive though quite informative, but without much analytical or theoretical traction. Part of the reason may be that the city-communication connection is a bit of a stretch. What we can conclude, though, is that the changes brought about in political culture by youth and other alternative movements of the 1960s, and their partial adoption by the SPD on the one hand, and the economic vicissitudes of market capitalism on the other, wrought commensurate changes in city politics and culture. Germans experienced all these stresses in a more compressed form, just as they had their belated industrialization after 1871, and all these issues came onto the urban policy scene at once in the 1970s.

By now, it appears, the trends have settled into many of the same patterns as in the United States: suburbanization is producing only slightly less sprawl than we are familiar with; gentrification is displacing the poor in central cities; German cities are having to "sell" themselves. But perhaps the Germans' many colorful city festivals, which invite everyone's participation, rather than ever more extravagant sports stadia, which invite only costly passive consumption, are a more engaging solution.

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Citation: Ulf Zimmermann. Review of Saldern, Adelheid von, Stadt und Kommunikation in bundesrepublikanischen Umbruchszeiten. H-German, H-Net Reviews. June, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13260

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