Berlin, Alexanderplatz by Weszkalnys Gisa.;

Author:Weszkalnys, Gisa.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2013-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 12: Signing of contracts between SenStadt and developers

Public and private, in Berlin’s planning context, acquired reality not merely through plans, contracts and laws; they were also perceived in the way people dressed, talked and interacted with each other; and they played themselves out in the ambivalent relationship the city had (and has) with investors. Administrators and city officials might have felt they had ‘the law’ on their side, but they sometimes appeared to lack the economic and symbolic capital that would make them equal negotiators. Indeed, where economic capital is played down, as in the context of the public-private partnership, symbolic capital would seem to become all the more significant (Bourdieu 1990: 118).

When it came to the negotiation of urban development contracts, SenStadt employees noted with a mixture of disdain and mockery that investors brought an entourage of lawyers and middlemen who would help them to strike the best deals. Similarly, a senior SenStadt official might warn a colleague not to take at face value the promises of investors’ representatives. The latter, he explained, were well versed in the art of rhetoric and often intended to coax their conversation partners into believing anything they said. Private investors’ rhetorical clout was a force to be reckoned with, as was their economic power. Investors were considered to have mastered cunning strategies to cloak the vagueness of their statements. The ‘internal politics’ of the investors, obscure to an outsider, and the apparent secrecy shrouding their activities were contentious issues in the RKA. As an exasperated RKA member noted, the representatives of an investor had announced that their building works would commence in March. But as March passed and nothing happened, he realized that they had never mentioned the year they were to start.

In the early 2000s, investors’ willingness to build was felt to be waning. Outside meetings, in the corridors of the administration, and behind closed doors, there were whispers that the investors at Alexanderplatz were not interested in creating a beautiful, liveable city or in contributing to its prosperity, but solely in ‘speculation’. They were suspected to have acquired the land at Alexanderplatz with the objective of making profit rather than actually building anything. This apparent reluctance to build was sometimes explained through uncontrollable swings of the market. Nevertheless, the doings of the agents of the private market could appear ‘opaque, mysterious, and beyond [administrators’] control’ (Dilley 1992: 5). Opacity was, to some extent, a mutual attribution. I heard representatives of private investors complain, not during meetings but afterwards as we were walking to the underground station, about things happening ‘behind closed doors’ at the planning administration, about their difficulties in locating the right department that could answer their queries, and about the ‘jungle of paragraphs’ and the ‘jumble’ of regulations and restrictions confronting them.

Crucially, investors’ seeming defiance and refusal to commit themselves to dates and actions threatened to make the work of the RKA futile: timetables became outdated as soon as they were set, and plans redundant almost the moment they were plotted out.

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