Protest culture week in St. Pauli, Hamburg.
This week, we are pleased to welcome two new authors, Dominique Peck and Viktoria Scheifers, who are both Urban Design (M.Sc.) students at HafenCity University Hamburg. They have been working on the project “Hotel Wilhelmsburg” at Urban Design´s 1:1 laboratory and interdisciplinary education-research project Neighborhood’s University (UdN). Today’s article is the first of a series on this project.
We are standing in front of the stadium of FC St. Pauli, the district’s cult soccer club. They just lost another game. Together with us are about 1.400 people waiting for an announcement. Most of them are dressed in black or brown hoodies with skulls printed on them, FC St. Pauli’s mark; some enjoy a beer in the sun, some hand out flyers, and others watch what’s going on from a safe distance with their backs to an exterior wall. Finally, a voice roars out of speakers mounted to a truck with a banner. The upcoming 10 minutes of speeches mark the start of Protestkulturwoche (protest culture week) in St. Pauli.
St. Pauli is undergoing urban transformations for decades now. But the past 5 – 7 years have seen an unprecedented accumulation of investment capital in real estate. The identity of the district famous for its red-light and amusement street Reeperbahn is more and more turned into its unique selling proposition. These transformations have seen great efforts of inhabitants, local workers and others with a bond to the district to save it from the negative effects of gentrification. GWA St. Pauli e.V., an association founded in the 70’s as a student initiative to support homeless people and now an established cultural centre in the district, together with smaller initiatives organizes the protest culture week with the aim to look inward and reflect on this vibrant history of advocating the public realm.
From Sunday afternoon to Friday night we took part in two demonstrations, joined a film screening and went to see the exhibition at GWA’s office. What caught our attention throughout all events, in many of the speeches and interactions, was the dealing with information and the production of meaning. We found that the majority of content in the exhibition and also of interactions originates from practice-reflexive thought on everyday life.
The current process of the Esso-Häuser serves as a good example here: a building complex constructed in the late 50’s with about 100 flats, a hotel, an underground car park, bars, shops and a gas station facing Reeperbahn, is destined to be demolished. About a decade ago, inhabitants have noticed a lack of investment in the building’s structure, and finally were alarmed about the future of the complex in 2009, when the family business that is still running the gas station sold the entire building complex to Bavarian real estate investor Bayerische Hausbau. As the investor’s proclaimed future plans — to take the entire complex down and build extensively higher priced housing instead — were brought to the inhabitants, they took action. At first they organized a barbecue hoping to not only gather inhabitants but also to converge to the municipality and investors. The event became a first sign of protest when it was forbidden by the new owners. Later inhabitants set up a postcard campaign showcasing what we´d like to call residential biographies. One photo, done by a professional photographer in a honorary capacity, and about 80 to 100 words display peoples attachment to their homes. Beyond their own interest, the meanwhile founded initiative also has something to share with the neighborhood. In talks with and speeches from members of the group they pay attention to the fact that „no one in the district is safe“. Stories as theirs might happen to other dwellers and so everybody should be alarmed and have an eye on signs equal or similar to those they acted on: a lack of investment, when only fixed-term tenancy agreements are made, no interaction with owners and a changing ownership structure.
There are plenty of efforts similar to the one outlined above. As the term Protestkulturwoche already says, people understand themselves as a cultural movement. All information of initiatives emphasize that actions are born in everydayness. Most of their methods accommodate transformation in their focus on the active processes of production that take place in time. Our research effort explores the active practice of initiatives guided by our initially subjective perspectives.
Self-organization and learning by interaction
Any group of residents, business owners and people with a particular bond to a place (e.g., a flat, a cultural center, a public space) that attempts to advocate their rights must undergo some start-up problems if not risks (interventions are often bordering illegality). How do initiatives, in their fight for making everyday life, judge the structure of the situation they are in? To what extent are improvised actions based on street knowledge or activism, and how are people aware of the consequences of their actions? What effects do the politics of time have in long term conflicts? And what remains if groups succeed or fail?
Visual Culture
Along with every cultural movement goes a visual capturing of it. The relevance of pictures — no matter if in form of a photograph, film, or another way of lasting (at least temporary) expression — concerning political or social issues, is obvious. In protest, the visual is inevitable. If so, we have to take a closer look on the different layers of the visual capture of a protest (culture). The performed protest itself, no matter if it shows itself as a one time intervention or as a process, creates a visual appearance, that stays in the minds of the people. There is the actual documentation of the happening, created with and influenced by different intentions (which we can in general divide into the protestors and spectators perspective). And we see visuals related to protest, which stay in the urban environment as written or painted on walls, leftover posters or banners, stains, or in any perceivable way. The city is a legend of the things that took place in it and by doing so, the physical and symbolic space merges through the visual. Not only by being spatially visible, but also through captured moments that stay online, on paper, in the mind of people. So what role do the captured visuals in protest play in the city of Hamburg for a further , if any, development of a protest culture?
By weaving those two research motives together we hope to grasp the production of meaning in Hamburg’s protest culture with an approach meandering between art and science grounded in everydayness.
Dominique Peck and Viktoria Scheifers, are both Urban Design (M.Sc.) students at HafenCity University Hamburg. During our last project “Hotel Wilhelmsburg” at Urban Design´s 1:1 laboratory and interdisciplinary education-research project Neighborhood´s University (UdN), we dealt with the topic improvisation throughout working on the hotels PR and reception. The hotel project developed vividly in another way than expected (and everybody had different expectations), influenced by unpredictable happenings in interaction, that were not refused, but welcomed, and now formed a structure in the neighborhood that is self-supporting by students and residents. By working on a 1:1 scale, in direct contact with the research field, one experiences every actions reaction in personal, material and other manners. This not only leads to a reflective awareness of your own actions, but also holds you gloriously accountable throughout realization and use.
By taking action, Hamburg’s protest culture challenges the liberal norm actors which so often hide behind urban development processes. By bringing transparency into this protest movement’s actions, we hope to gain knowledge out of situations where actions challenge regulations.
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