Ten years ago, the anniversary of fifty years of migration from Turkey to Germany was marked and celebrated: conferences were organized, there were discussion rounds and exhibitions. This year we are marking sixty years of migration from Turkey, and again various events are planned.
Yet one gets the impression that the relevance of Turkish migration for social transformation—and above all for urban development—is hastily added to discussions at ten-year intervals while hardly anything is actually done on the subject in between. Restrictive ways of dealing with migrants and their descendants continue to be perpetuated. Racism and institutional discrimination remain a part of everyday normality. Postmigrant members of the second and third migrant generations are still being confronted with negative attributions and they continue to have restricted access to social resources.
This commentary seeks to set out a radical shift in perspective and to focus on the truly significant contribution of Turkish migration for urban development in Germany.Footnote
1
I discuss this through the ways in which the city of Cologne experienced migration based on several qualitative studies that we have carried out over the past fifteen years. My main thesis is that cities like Cologne are hardly conceivable without migration. Turkish migrants who arrived in Cologne as so-called “guest workers” (Gastarbeiter) at the beginning of the 1960s and well into the 1970s, many of whom found employment in the Ford plants and with other firms, made a key contribution to the repopulation of Cologne, even though this is scarcely noted in public memory.
The city is migration
Migration has long been constitutive for the development of cities; urbanization without human mobility is hardly imaginable.Footnote
2
Industrialization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the genesis of huge labor markets in urban centers drove the in-migration of workers in search of a more secure existence. New working-class neighborhoods arose in the industrial centers in which migrants settled and developed their strategies for survival, partly under difficult circumstances. The cities in Europe were significantly shaped over centuries by a range of different migration flows. To that extent the labor migration after World War II was only one phase in which numerous cities underwent lasting changes and transformations.
Yet, these same working-class districts that have contributed to the making of cities have often been deprecated as “foreigner neighborhoods,” and deridingly labeled as ghettos, ethnic colonies, or “parallel societies.” It was such negative ascriptions that led to the stigmatization of immigrant districts territorially, which were often enough to push their residents into social marginalization. This predominant perspective leads to a situation where the essential constitutive nexus between migration and urban development is lost sight of. And the creative potential that such urban areas offer for urban life remains unrecognized, disregarded, and not properly evaluated down to the present day.
This commentary endeavors to shift the perspective and discuss the dynamic creative potential that migrant neighborhoods offer for urban development and local cohabitation. Seen from this vantage point, these are not “parallel societies” but rather in multiple ways success stories—even if realized under precarious conditions.
In this context I focus on a specific street in Cologne-Mülheim, which in its present-day reality is scarcely conceivable without the Turkish migration into the area since 1960. The Keupstrasse is a street that in media reports up to the present has been repeatedly denigrated and devalued as a ghetto or as a parallel society. The street’s current revitalization dates back to the period of the deindustrialization of the Mülheim district in Cologne during the 1970s when mostly Turkish immigrants took over stores and apartments that were left empty. They created a vital business district with a Mediterranean flair—a robust shopping street in which the old-timers there now also feel “integrated.” With its shops and gastronomic delights on offer Keupstrasse has been attracting many visitors. Neighborly coexistence seems to work quite well, contrary to various media reports. In addition, they are integrated into the local urban context not just through municipal structures but also via private and commercial networks, and over and beyond this into urban society.
The changing fortunes of Keupstrasse testify to the significance of migration in the history of Cologne’s urban development. Whether as a Roman colony, as a center for pilgrimage or commerce, as a French or Prussian military garrison town, as a destination for migration, as a magnet for tourists, or as a self-designated “northernmost province of Italy”—the development of Cologne with its radiating image as a Rhenish metropolis has always profited from influences and bonds extending over borders, indeed reaching across the world. Mobility and migration put their mark on social history and everyday culture in this metropolitan area, and have crafted a rich diversity which can certainly be viewed as the product of a history of migration over a period of 2,000 years.
Although Cologne appears to be a diverse and varied city shaped by migration and mobility, even after an extensive search in libraries and archives one can note that there is no systematic description from a current-day perspective recognizing and appreciating the realities of urban change as a result of migration. Even in alternative archival collections, mobility and migration in the twentieth century are dealt with as supposedly problematic constellations—either under the keyword of foreigner or, more critically, under racism. Whether treated from an exclusionary or paternalistic perspective—or in a dramatizing, criminalizing or ethnicizing, statistically descriptive, or polemically charged way—migration in public presentation is rarely considered as a self-evident component of urban everyday life. In contrast, the constant newly created contribution by every generation of immigrants to urban change is gladly welcomed and co-opted in everyday practical terms, yet is seldom perceived as something positive by municipal policy-makers or in the media. When urban diversity is focused on and highlighted, it tends principally to be in order to point toward deficits and conflicts. This selective prism of treatment is fateful and dire; it obstructs the proper view for a realistic assessment and mobilization of the positive potentials of migration and the urban competencies that it frees up and spurs.
A glance into the lived reality of the urban neighborhoods reveals that migrants from Turkey (today in their third generation) have already settled and become an integral component of cities, playing a positive role in shaping urban everyday life. Among people below the age of eighteen in Cologne nowadays almost 50 percent have a “migration background,” and this demographic trend is on the increase.
The fact that migration into the city is a constitutive element in urban development is something people can experience themselves on a daily basis in the Rhenish metropolis. In particular, migrants from Turkey and their descendants are becoming increasingly visible in the pulsing cityscape. They speak out and make claims, in some neighborhoods they organize large segments of the infrastructure, and through their economic activities they are making an essential contribution to the quality of life. We can see here a kind of self-organized integration.Footnote
3
The findings of more than twenty years of individual and collective research on immigrant districts in the Cologne metro region I conducted point to a new social grammar, which I wish to describe here and examine theoretically. This calls for focusing on a complex of nonspectacular urban everyday life practices that to date have at best simply been ignored.
A kind of municipal tunnel vision was already a characteristic feature of how Turkish guest workers were portrayed after World War II, who initially flowed into and filled the lower strata of the Cologne labor market, and in the view of Krämer-BadoniFootnote
4
were in this way integrated into the economy. Although deemed politically undesirable, they gradually settled in and stayed on, endeavoring under legally obstructive conditions to carve out a viable place for themselves in urban localities and to create and shape new spaces. In the 1970s, ever more Turkish migrants occupied former rows of shops, opening their own stores, stands, and businesses in urban neighborhoods that local native traders were leaving in the course of worldwide processes of economic restructuring. In doing so, these migrants brought life back to the streets and onto the sidewalks, making a decisive revitalizing contribution to the redevelopment and renovation of dilapidated urban spaces. In the process, kiosks, eating places, and grocery stores became their major source of income and gradually shaped the image of various districts in Cologne, such that nowadays life in a number of city squares and streets has taken on a Mediterranean flair. Seen from this perspective, one could view today’s reality in Cologne as an experiment in migration sociology; a kind of “experimental utopia.”Footnote
5
Flashback to the locus of arrival
As reflected in old films and photos from that era, the main train station in Cologne functioned in the first years of migrant recruitment as a main meeting point for Turkish guest workers, the imaginative bond to their places of origin. Most were accommodated in barracks built on the premises of firms or in collective housing complexes; they knew little German and had rare contact if any with the local native population. Initially the connection to their family members was also almost cut off given the state of long-distance communication then prevalent. Under these circumstances, taking a stroll to the main train station harbored hopes of encountering friends and acquaintances from their regions of origin and exchanging tidbits of news. The railroad station remained for a long time the only place for meeting people and communication, and few dared to enter the eateries or cafés in Cologne. Consequently, it was not surprising when soon the first “entrepreneurial spirits” ventured to establish their own places: eateries, small inns, tea houses, and cafés in neighborhoods close to the main train station, such as in the Eigelstein neighborhood and along the Weidengasse located there. The first Turkish shop on Weidengasse opened its doors in 1962. I would like to include here a brief flashback to the history of the presence of migrants in this neighborhood, which presents a striking contrast to that of Cologne-Mülheim. Here in the northern downtown Eigelstein district, there were developments that in public perception, albeit with a certain “exoticism,” were seen in a far more positive light than developments in the neighborhood of Cologne-Mülheim situated on the other side of the Rhine, to which I will turn below.
What was spared the destruction from air raids during World War II was destroyed by city planners in the 1960s, and the construction of the North-South Drive (Nord-Süd-Fahrt) was completed in 1972. Since the early 1960s, this six-lane downtown expressway divides the formerly busy street of Unter Krahnenbäumen into two. Many residents there were forced to move to other neighborhoods; businesses declined and jobs vanished, leading other residents to leave the area. In this desolate situation of deterioration, the guest workers, as in other neighborhoods, ultimately discovered the run-down neighborhood for themselves—especially the Weidengasse, which forms the geographic extension of the destroyed street Unter Krahnenbäumen on the other side of the expressway. Cheap housing options and proximity to the central train station proved especially attractive for new guest worker arrivals.
However, during the economic crisis at the beginning of the 1970s, many guest workers residing here lost their jobs. Many saw the only alternative to unemployment in self-employment and small entrepreneurship. They gradually took over the now empty shops and in time contributed significantly to the revival of the district. Yet, since Turkish guest workers only had residence permits with a time limit, they were not legally permitted to work in independent activities. In the beginning they could only arrange procurement of a commercial license via local middlemen and “front men,” who were then paid a monthly cash share for that service. The guest workers who decided not to return to Turkey but to stay on in Germany obtained in the course of time a residence permit with no time limit; it also gave them the right to establish their own business without a “front man.” Most of the businesses and stores on Weidengasse are currently owned and run by immigrants. By dint of a redevelopment project in 1990–5, the city of Cologne for its part also contributed to modernization of the street. It was transformed into a shopping street with an international flair. At first glance the Weidengasse, which Cologners like to call “tiny Istanbul,” appears marked by Turkish elements. Here you can have a good meal at a range of prices, several of Cologne’s “best Turkish addresses” are situated here, whether bakeries, butcher shops, fruit and vegetable dealers, or restaurants. But at second glance you notice that the businesspeople with a Turkish background who also sell merchandise such as jewelry, musical instruments, and wedding gowns have situated themselves directly alongside long-established second-hand shops.
This diversifying change in the population is described in an illustrated book about this street in the following way:
[T]he long-established residents have acquired new neighbors. Living today next door with the dyed-in-the-wool Cologne old-timers are Turks, Iranians, Syrians, Greeks, Armenians and Italians. They all leave their mark on the Weidengasse with their aura of Cologne and international radiance, making it into a livable local neighborhood street in which there beats an international heart, and whose fame extends far beyond the boundaries of Cologne.Footnote
6
Here in this central city space an everyday normality has in fact developed, which in the meantime has been recognized and valued as such by the Cologne public. That stands in marked contrast to the area on the “Schäl Sick” or “Rhenish right”—for natives of Cologne the worse off, literally “crooked” side of the Rhine—where Keupstrasse is located in Cologne-Mülheim.
Keupstrasse: an unrecognized success story
The discrepancy between the actual contribution of migration to the development of urban neighborhoods and public perception can be observed in the debates, which are occasionally quite heated, flaring around this street.
I choose to focus on this street precisely because it has been repeatedly demeaned and discredited by the media and the municipality through the use of such terms as ghetto and “parallel society.” In contrast to that, I argue that it can instead be described as a path-breaking model of urban development. It is thus an especially vivid example that can serve to point at the inconsistency and contradiction between everyday life practices and public discourse.Footnote
7
Here one can better grasp both the general economic structural change and the key points in the history of immigration into Germany.
Keupstrasse came into being in the course of industrialization in the nineteenth century in the then still separate town of Mülheim, which is now a district of Cologne. Industrial enterprises, the development of infrastructure, an influx of population, and growing residential settlements transformed this previously largely agricultural locality, causing it to morph into a significant industrial site. Typical working-class districts developed, replete with houses and apartments for low-income groups. Keupstrasse is situated directly in the middle of this urban district.
The first guest workers moved here in the 1950s. However, they were not the first migrants, because the cable factory of Felten & Guilleaume AG on nearby Schanzenstrasse already employed a large number of migrants. The apartments built on Keupstrasse since 1874 for meeting the needs of the new industrial location of Mülheim were meant for the workers of the cable plant. Already back then workers had to be recruited from afar and quickly came together as residents settled in a working-class neighborhood. As such, it was soon correspondingly subjected to discrimination and neglect by the municipal authorities.
A residential district in the town marked by migration developed as a result of an influx of refugees after World War II and labor migration. Diverse groups of migrants settled on Keupstrasse and then departed. The last large-scale migrant wave occurred at the time of guest worker recruitment in the early 1960s. The last group of migrants ultimately decided to remain on Keupstrasse. It consisted largely of migrants from Turkey. This period of mobility initially came to an end with the deindustrialization of Mülheim and the consequent decline of industrial employment. The closing of numerous traditional industrial enterprises and the relocation of large factories elsewhere led to high levels of local unemployment. Due to a drop in business veteran owners shut their businesses down and left Keupstrasse. What remained behind was a dilapidated neighborhood in dire need of redevelopment and renovation. The empty apartments, pubs, and shops were gradually taken over, as on Weidengasse, mainly by migrants from Turkey, because self-employment seemed to be the only alternative to unemployment. Gradually the shops and businesses began to be renovated and reopened. As service providers, small shops, and restaurants appeared, facades and apartments were also repaired and restored. A renovation project was ultimately also implemented by the city of Cologne. Today the street offers an attractive image.
One fact revealed by research is especially important for the development of the neighborhood in this process. The Turkish migrants initially made a virtue out of necessity, creating places of work so to speak “on their own account.”Footnote
8
Many businesspeople wonder why the street has such a negative reputation in the eyes of the public and feel that municipal policymakers and authorities have neither understood them nor taken their concerns seriously. This is so despite the fact that these neighborhood-embedded enterprises have great potential both economically and in terms of social integration—potential that should be perceived as a valuable urban resource. Seen against this backdrop, the discrepancy between everyday reality and public perception is striking. The revitalization of the area described above went hand in hand with the simultaneous emergence of the municipality’s rhetorical cries, amplified by the local media, warning of ghettoization and urban decay. In the process, the very name Keupstrasse became a negative metaphor in the city. Following a study by Heitmeyer and others in 1997 that warned about “parallel societies,” there was soon talk in Cologne alleging a “Turkish parallel society” on Keupstrasse.Footnote
9
Since then, Cologne’s citizens have been aware of the street’s bad name in local parlance, even if many have never been to the street personally—an area situated on the “wrong” side of the Rhine—“over there,” out of the way, and remote.
As a result of this dramatization, in 1999 a short report dealing with life on Keupstrasse was published, commissioned by the then Ministry for Social Affairs of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It expressed no criticism whatsoever of this disparaging image but rather agreed with it, incorporating the negative and scandalizing discourse right down to its quotations. The following passage is illustrative of this negative angle:
The social-spatial segregation of socially weak foreign and German families in the Keupstrasse area has led to competition for social spaces, jobs, recreation rooms, and to a clash between different systems of norms and values. Each of these spheres harbors potential for conflict. Isolation, hopelessness, fears about competition, disintegration and a readiness for violence have made the necessary communication and constructive discussion between migrants and Germans more difficult.Footnote
10
This report and the ways in which the media and local politics deal with the neighborhoodFootnote
11
ultimately show how the territorial stigmatization and isolation of the street are being advanced and deepened. Concepts such as parallel society or ghetto correspond to what Loïc WacquantFootnote
12
terms, in accordance with Pierre Bourdieu, a “scientific myth,” that is, a discursive formation that—cloaked in scientific coding and in a seemingly neutral manner—constructs social fantasies about differences between “us” and “them,” the “Others.”
Just how such thinking poisons urban everyday life was manifested in a drastic manner in a serious case that the media highlighted in 2004: on June 9, a nail bomb was thrown from a passing bicycle on Keupstrasse, and twenty-two residents were injured, four of them seriously, and several shops were destroyed and cars damaged.Footnote
13
Soon those adversely affected by the bomb attack came under suspicion, claiming the involvement of racketeers and the mafia in the attack. A number of persons on Keupstrasse were prosecuted and criminalized although there was no evidence that they had anything to do with this bomb attack. That is called racism. The actual culprit was not found, and the inquiry by the so-called SoKo Bosporus (Special Police Commission Bosporus) was at some point dropped, until almost a decade later the crime—flippantly and misleadingly termed the döner kebab murders—was finally resolved: this and other racist attacks had been perpetrated by the far-right neo-Nazi terror group the National Socialist Underground.Footnote
14
To “commemorate” the fifteenth anniversary of the attack, in June 2019 a neo-Nazi group distributed pamphlets in Mülheim bearing large swastikas and warning of imminent attacks against Muslims, telling them to leave Germany.Footnote
15
A pragmatic view
In the studies we have conducted since 2000 we have looked closely at everyday life on the street, in order to focus on very different aspects of importance for living in a neighborhood, utilizing a “thick description.”Footnote
16
The image of the street changes as soon as the focus of attention is no longer seen through a weaker external lens but rather through the powerful prism of an internal perspective.
Looking through this less customary lens at life on Keupstrasse, we found ourselves surrounded with rather trivial and nonspectacular urban everyday practices.Footnote
17
What is presented via external perception in a blurred and at times inappropriately negative form proved in close-up to be quite attractive. It quickly became clear that Keupstrasse is not some sort of self-contained parallel society but rather a highly differentiated, flexible neighborhood that is intertwined with the broader urban environment: economically, politically, socially, and legally. The Mediterranean ambience of this area is fascinating and can probably be found in other large cities. This mixture of cultural quotes and borrowings, which only putatively stem from the “culture of origin” of the migrants, proves to be a practical business strategy, a strategic concession to the local (here native German) conceptions of the “Orient.” What is being staged here is German Orientalism, what Edward Said had called an “imaginative geography.”Footnote
18
On this street and in this district new economic strategies are being developed and new traditions created. This neighborhood-specific development mirrors an urban everyday reality that is equally shaped and marked by local and global influences. In Keupstrasse what becomes visible in innumerable examples is what Robert Pütz terms “transcultural practice.”Footnote
19
Non-spectacular urban everyday practice
Manifest in many interviews that we have conducted for previous research were diverse overlapping and intersecting social and cultural experiences. Residents living on the street discussed what conflicts and barriers they were confronted with and what strategies they had developed to deal with that, as well as what role the family, friendships, and informal networks play in this connection. In short, interviews portray the ways in which the residents appropriate the neighborhood or the city, making it their own; how, through their hands-on utilization, they join hands in shaping the built environment and streetscape. In addition, the conversations show how in this urban quarter people make use of different economic, social, and cultural elements, in part transboundary in scope, redefining and combining them to form new structures and designs for living. For that reason, the development of Keupstrasse can clearly be categorized as a chapter of Cologne’s local history.
It becomes evident from conversations that the majority of those living in the neighborhood feel happy and content, stressing the quality of life they enjoy and identifying with the street. They cannot understand why their residential quarter is devalued in public discourse by means of the doggedly persistent and distorting image of the ghetto.
In conversations with the long-term native German residents, there are tones of a kindly disposed distance. People have adjusted to the way the street has developed and view the situation quite positively and pragmatically, albeit from an exotic perspective as old-time residents. The genesis of the economic structure of Keupstrasse shows how labor migrants from Turkey and their descendants, under discriminatory conditions, developed a culture of autonomy in the truest sense of the word, which would be inconceivable without the utilization of informal resources. Almost all the shops are family businesses, and often the entire family are bound up and engaged inside the respective shop or business. Quite often it is precisely the family businesses that in difficult times and at desolate locations are willing to take on risks and open up shops, in this way contributing to a fundamental improvement in the overall supply of goods and services in the neighborhood. Ms. M., the owner of a bakery on Keupstrasse, observes: “When we started out, in that phase the family stuck close together, working day and night, for several months, without any salary.”
Economic activities and social networks are closely intertwined. Since Turkish migrants are marginalized and often excluded from the formal labor market, they are forced to develop other strategies and competencies for building relations than is customary when it comes to the local native population. The economic development of Keupstrasse clearly shows that the businesspeople there can fall back and rely on networks and resources that are crucial for their survival. As networks and resources are mobilized, they are concomitantly also automatically bolstered. As Saskia Sassen has noted: “They accumulate social capital.”Footnote
20
Basically, it can be emphasized first and foremost that the discourse about Keupstrasse has undergone a definite change in recent years. The pejorative and derogatory voices have grown more restrained and faded largely into the background.
Conclusion and outlook
Although migrants from Turkey and their descendants have become a veritable centerpiece within the urban culture and local economy of Cologne and have made significant contributions to the quality of supply in city districts, only in exceptional cases is this fact highly regarded in connection with policies of urban development. It is high time that the development of such urban neighborhoods be officially recognized as a laudable achievement of the immigrants. And it is high time for the cultural and economic impetus flowing from immigration to become the focus of attention in urban policy.Footnote
21
Concepts of urban development policy can offer many possibilities in this context for including migration-related questions as a cross-cutting issue in conceptual reflections. In recent years some cities have started to work out guiding principles that seek to position topics specific to migration at the center of their strategic planning.Footnote
22
In contrast to the public “ghetto discourse,” migrant districts like the ones described here in Cologne are not only living proof for the cosmopolitanization and pluralization of everyday life but also for successful strategies in grappling with the challenges of our time—not least for the successful revitalization of urban districts by means of migration.
Keupstrasse as a “migrant neighborhood” (Migrantenveedel in the Cologne vernacular) has become an integral component of the urban district Köln-Mülheim and acts as a motor to drive forward the cosmopolitanism of the city. The impressions described above help elucidate how migrants have revitalized those neighborhoods that the city planners had long since given up on and in effect abandoned. Cognitive, spatial, and social mobility is evidently a basic urban experience manifested in particular in a diversity of lifeworlds.
In Cologne there’s a popular saying: “Every carnival merrymaker is different.” Another adage you can hear is: “All Cologners are immis” (“Alle Kölner sind Immis”—immigrants).
In principle today we’re all migrants. In other words, Keupstrasse proves to be a quite normal intermediate station within urban development, a development that began in the era of industrialization and will continue for the foreseeable future.
It would be appropriate and future-oriented if municipalities and the media would declare migration to be a guiding principle in their thinking and planning as a constitutive element of urban development. As Klaus M. Schmals has underscored: “It thus continues to be further requisite for our time to develop a conception of urban planning that remains cognizant of this positive historical nexus, rendering it the basis of a cooperation in togetherness that is free from the scourge of discrimination.”Footnote
23
Translated from the German by William Templer.
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Ten years ago, the anniversary of fifty years of migration from Turkey to Germany was marked and celebrated: conferences were organized, there were discussion rounds and exhibitions. This year we are marking sixty years of migration from Turkey, and again various events are planned.
Yet one gets the impression that the relevance of Turkish migration for social transformation—and above all for urban development—is hastily added to discussions at ten-year intervals while hardly anything is actually done on the subject in between. Restrictive ways of dealing with migrants and their descendants continue to be perpetuated. Racism and institutional discrimination remain a part of everyday normality. Postmigrant members of the second and third migrant generations are still being confronted with negative attributions and they continue to have restricted access to social resources.
This commentary seeks to set out a radical shift in perspective and to focus on the truly significant contribution of Turkish migration for urban development in Germany.Footnote 1 I discuss this through the ways in which the city of Cologne experienced migration based on several qualitative studies that we have carried out over the past fifteen years. My main thesis is that cities like Cologne are hardly conceivable without migration. Turkish migrants who arrived in Cologne as so-called “guest workers” (Gastarbeiter) at the beginning of the 1960s and well into the 1970s, many of whom found employment in the Ford plants and with other firms, made a key contribution to the repopulation of Cologne, even though this is scarcely noted in public memory.
The city is migration
Migration has long been constitutive for the development of cities; urbanization without human mobility is hardly imaginable.Footnote 2 Industrialization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the genesis of huge labor markets in urban centers drove the in-migration of workers in search of a more secure existence. New working-class neighborhoods arose in the industrial centers in which migrants settled and developed their strategies for survival, partly under difficult circumstances. The cities in Europe were significantly shaped over centuries by a range of different migration flows. To that extent the labor migration after World War II was only one phase in which numerous cities underwent lasting changes and transformations.
Yet, these same working-class districts that have contributed to the making of cities have often been deprecated as “foreigner neighborhoods,” and deridingly labeled as ghettos, ethnic colonies, or “parallel societies.” It was such negative ascriptions that led to the stigmatization of immigrant districts territorially, which were often enough to push their residents into social marginalization. This predominant perspective leads to a situation where the essential constitutive nexus between migration and urban development is lost sight of. And the creative potential that such urban areas offer for urban life remains unrecognized, disregarded, and not properly evaluated down to the present day.
This commentary endeavors to shift the perspective and discuss the dynamic creative potential that migrant neighborhoods offer for urban development and local cohabitation. Seen from this vantage point, these are not “parallel societies” but rather in multiple ways success stories—even if realized under precarious conditions.
In this context I focus on a specific street in Cologne-Mülheim, which in its present-day reality is scarcely conceivable without the Turkish migration into the area since 1960. The Keupstrasse is a street that in media reports up to the present has been repeatedly denigrated and devalued as a ghetto or as a parallel society. The street’s current revitalization dates back to the period of the deindustrialization of the Mülheim district in Cologne during the 1970s when mostly Turkish immigrants took over stores and apartments that were left empty. They created a vital business district with a Mediterranean flair—a robust shopping street in which the old-timers there now also feel “integrated.” With its shops and gastronomic delights on offer Keupstrasse has been attracting many visitors. Neighborly coexistence seems to work quite well, contrary to various media reports. In addition, they are integrated into the local urban context not just through municipal structures but also via private and commercial networks, and over and beyond this into urban society.
The changing fortunes of Keupstrasse testify to the significance of migration in the history of Cologne’s urban development. Whether as a Roman colony, as a center for pilgrimage or commerce, as a French or Prussian military garrison town, as a destination for migration, as a magnet for tourists, or as a self-designated “northernmost province of Italy”—the development of Cologne with its radiating image as a Rhenish metropolis has always profited from influences and bonds extending over borders, indeed reaching across the world. Mobility and migration put their mark on social history and everyday culture in this metropolitan area, and have crafted a rich diversity which can certainly be viewed as the product of a history of migration over a period of 2,000 years.
Although Cologne appears to be a diverse and varied city shaped by migration and mobility, even after an extensive search in libraries and archives one can note that there is no systematic description from a current-day perspective recognizing and appreciating the realities of urban change as a result of migration. Even in alternative archival collections, mobility and migration in the twentieth century are dealt with as supposedly problematic constellations—either under the keyword of foreigner or, more critically, under racism. Whether treated from an exclusionary or paternalistic perspective—or in a dramatizing, criminalizing or ethnicizing, statistically descriptive, or polemically charged way—migration in public presentation is rarely considered as a self-evident component of urban everyday life. In contrast, the constant newly created contribution by every generation of immigrants to urban change is gladly welcomed and co-opted in everyday practical terms, yet is seldom perceived as something positive by municipal policy-makers or in the media. When urban diversity is focused on and highlighted, it tends principally to be in order to point toward deficits and conflicts. This selective prism of treatment is fateful and dire; it obstructs the proper view for a realistic assessment and mobilization of the positive potentials of migration and the urban competencies that it frees up and spurs.
A glance into the lived reality of the urban neighborhoods reveals that migrants from Turkey (today in their third generation) have already settled and become an integral component of cities, playing a positive role in shaping urban everyday life. Among people below the age of eighteen in Cologne nowadays almost 50 percent have a “migration background,” and this demographic trend is on the increase.
The fact that migration into the city is a constitutive element in urban development is something people can experience themselves on a daily basis in the Rhenish metropolis. In particular, migrants from Turkey and their descendants are becoming increasingly visible in the pulsing cityscape. They speak out and make claims, in some neighborhoods they organize large segments of the infrastructure, and through their economic activities they are making an essential contribution to the quality of life. We can see here a kind of self-organized integration.Footnote 3
The findings of more than twenty years of individual and collective research on immigrant districts in the Cologne metro region I conducted point to a new social grammar, which I wish to describe here and examine theoretically. This calls for focusing on a complex of nonspectacular urban everyday life practices that to date have at best simply been ignored.
A kind of municipal tunnel vision was already a characteristic feature of how Turkish guest workers were portrayed after World War II, who initially flowed into and filled the lower strata of the Cologne labor market, and in the view of Krämer-BadoniFootnote 4 were in this way integrated into the economy. Although deemed politically undesirable, they gradually settled in and stayed on, endeavoring under legally obstructive conditions to carve out a viable place for themselves in urban localities and to create and shape new spaces. In the 1970s, ever more Turkish migrants occupied former rows of shops, opening their own stores, stands, and businesses in urban neighborhoods that local native traders were leaving in the course of worldwide processes of economic restructuring. In doing so, these migrants brought life back to the streets and onto the sidewalks, making a decisive revitalizing contribution to the redevelopment and renovation of dilapidated urban spaces. In the process, kiosks, eating places, and grocery stores became their major source of income and gradually shaped the image of various districts in Cologne, such that nowadays life in a number of city squares and streets has taken on a Mediterranean flair. Seen from this perspective, one could view today’s reality in Cologne as an experiment in migration sociology; a kind of “experimental utopia.”Footnote 5
Flashback to the locus of arrival
As reflected in old films and photos from that era, the main train station in Cologne functioned in the first years of migrant recruitment as a main meeting point for Turkish guest workers, the imaginative bond to their places of origin. Most were accommodated in barracks built on the premises of firms or in collective housing complexes; they knew little German and had rare contact if any with the local native population. Initially the connection to their family members was also almost cut off given the state of long-distance communication then prevalent. Under these circumstances, taking a stroll to the main train station harbored hopes of encountering friends and acquaintances from their regions of origin and exchanging tidbits of news. The railroad station remained for a long time the only place for meeting people and communication, and few dared to enter the eateries or cafés in Cologne. Consequently, it was not surprising when soon the first “entrepreneurial spirits” ventured to establish their own places: eateries, small inns, tea houses, and cafés in neighborhoods close to the main train station, such as in the Eigelstein neighborhood and along the Weidengasse located there. The first Turkish shop on Weidengasse opened its doors in 1962. I would like to include here a brief flashback to the history of the presence of migrants in this neighborhood, which presents a striking contrast to that of Cologne-Mülheim. Here in the northern downtown Eigelstein district, there were developments that in public perception, albeit with a certain “exoticism,” were seen in a far more positive light than developments in the neighborhood of Cologne-Mülheim situated on the other side of the Rhine, to which I will turn below.
What was spared the destruction from air raids during World War II was destroyed by city planners in the 1960s, and the construction of the North-South Drive (Nord-Süd-Fahrt) was completed in 1972. Since the early 1960s, this six-lane downtown expressway divides the formerly busy street of Unter Krahnenbäumen into two. Many residents there were forced to move to other neighborhoods; businesses declined and jobs vanished, leading other residents to leave the area. In this desolate situation of deterioration, the guest workers, as in other neighborhoods, ultimately discovered the run-down neighborhood for themselves—especially the Weidengasse, which forms the geographic extension of the destroyed street Unter Krahnenbäumen on the other side of the expressway. Cheap housing options and proximity to the central train station proved especially attractive for new guest worker arrivals.
However, during the economic crisis at the beginning of the 1970s, many guest workers residing here lost their jobs. Many saw the only alternative to unemployment in self-employment and small entrepreneurship. They gradually took over the now empty shops and in time contributed significantly to the revival of the district. Yet, since Turkish guest workers only had residence permits with a time limit, they were not legally permitted to work in independent activities. In the beginning they could only arrange procurement of a commercial license via local middlemen and “front men,” who were then paid a monthly cash share for that service. The guest workers who decided not to return to Turkey but to stay on in Germany obtained in the course of time a residence permit with no time limit; it also gave them the right to establish their own business without a “front man.” Most of the businesses and stores on Weidengasse are currently owned and run by immigrants. By dint of a redevelopment project in 1990–5, the city of Cologne for its part also contributed to modernization of the street. It was transformed into a shopping street with an international flair. At first glance the Weidengasse, which Cologners like to call “tiny Istanbul,” appears marked by Turkish elements. Here you can have a good meal at a range of prices, several of Cologne’s “best Turkish addresses” are situated here, whether bakeries, butcher shops, fruit and vegetable dealers, or restaurants. But at second glance you notice that the businesspeople with a Turkish background who also sell merchandise such as jewelry, musical instruments, and wedding gowns have situated themselves directly alongside long-established second-hand shops.
This diversifying change in the population is described in an illustrated book about this street in the following way:
[T]he long-established residents have acquired new neighbors. Living today next door with the dyed-in-the-wool Cologne old-timers are Turks, Iranians, Syrians, Greeks, Armenians and Italians. They all leave their mark on the Weidengasse with their aura of Cologne and international radiance, making it into a livable local neighborhood street in which there beats an international heart, and whose fame extends far beyond the boundaries of Cologne.Footnote 6
Here in this central city space an everyday normality has in fact developed, which in the meantime has been recognized and valued as such by the Cologne public. That stands in marked contrast to the area on the “Schäl Sick” or “Rhenish right”—for natives of Cologne the worse off, literally “crooked” side of the Rhine—where Keupstrasse is located in Cologne-Mülheim.
Keupstrasse: an unrecognized success story
The discrepancy between the actual contribution of migration to the development of urban neighborhoods and public perception can be observed in the debates, which are occasionally quite heated, flaring around this street.
I choose to focus on this street precisely because it has been repeatedly demeaned and discredited by the media and the municipality through the use of such terms as ghetto and “parallel society.” In contrast to that, I argue that it can instead be described as a path-breaking model of urban development. It is thus an especially vivid example that can serve to point at the inconsistency and contradiction between everyday life practices and public discourse.Footnote 7 Here one can better grasp both the general economic structural change and the key points in the history of immigration into Germany.
Keupstrasse came into being in the course of industrialization in the nineteenth century in the then still separate town of Mülheim, which is now a district of Cologne. Industrial enterprises, the development of infrastructure, an influx of population, and growing residential settlements transformed this previously largely agricultural locality, causing it to morph into a significant industrial site. Typical working-class districts developed, replete with houses and apartments for low-income groups. Keupstrasse is situated directly in the middle of this urban district.
The first guest workers moved here in the 1950s. However, they were not the first migrants, because the cable factory of Felten & Guilleaume AG on nearby Schanzenstrasse already employed a large number of migrants. The apartments built on Keupstrasse since 1874 for meeting the needs of the new industrial location of Mülheim were meant for the workers of the cable plant. Already back then workers had to be recruited from afar and quickly came together as residents settled in a working-class neighborhood. As such, it was soon correspondingly subjected to discrimination and neglect by the municipal authorities.
A residential district in the town marked by migration developed as a result of an influx of refugees after World War II and labor migration. Diverse groups of migrants settled on Keupstrasse and then departed. The last large-scale migrant wave occurred at the time of guest worker recruitment in the early 1960s. The last group of migrants ultimately decided to remain on Keupstrasse. It consisted largely of migrants from Turkey. This period of mobility initially came to an end with the deindustrialization of Mülheim and the consequent decline of industrial employment. The closing of numerous traditional industrial enterprises and the relocation of large factories elsewhere led to high levels of local unemployment. Due to a drop in business veteran owners shut their businesses down and left Keupstrasse. What remained behind was a dilapidated neighborhood in dire need of redevelopment and renovation. The empty apartments, pubs, and shops were gradually taken over, as on Weidengasse, mainly by migrants from Turkey, because self-employment seemed to be the only alternative to unemployment. Gradually the shops and businesses began to be renovated and reopened. As service providers, small shops, and restaurants appeared, facades and apartments were also repaired and restored. A renovation project was ultimately also implemented by the city of Cologne. Today the street offers an attractive image.
One fact revealed by research is especially important for the development of the neighborhood in this process. The Turkish migrants initially made a virtue out of necessity, creating places of work so to speak “on their own account.”Footnote 8
Many businesspeople wonder why the street has such a negative reputation in the eyes of the public and feel that municipal policymakers and authorities have neither understood them nor taken their concerns seriously. This is so despite the fact that these neighborhood-embedded enterprises have great potential both economically and in terms of social integration—potential that should be perceived as a valuable urban resource. Seen against this backdrop, the discrepancy between everyday reality and public perception is striking. The revitalization of the area described above went hand in hand with the simultaneous emergence of the municipality’s rhetorical cries, amplified by the local media, warning of ghettoization and urban decay. In the process, the very name Keupstrasse became a negative metaphor in the city. Following a study by Heitmeyer and others in 1997 that warned about “parallel societies,” there was soon talk in Cologne alleging a “Turkish parallel society” on Keupstrasse.Footnote 9 Since then, Cologne’s citizens have been aware of the street’s bad name in local parlance, even if many have never been to the street personally—an area situated on the “wrong” side of the Rhine—“over there,” out of the way, and remote.
As a result of this dramatization, in 1999 a short report dealing with life on Keupstrasse was published, commissioned by the then Ministry for Social Affairs of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It expressed no criticism whatsoever of this disparaging image but rather agreed with it, incorporating the negative and scandalizing discourse right down to its quotations. The following passage is illustrative of this negative angle:
The social-spatial segregation of socially weak foreign and German families in the Keupstrasse area has led to competition for social spaces, jobs, recreation rooms, and to a clash between different systems of norms and values. Each of these spheres harbors potential for conflict. Isolation, hopelessness, fears about competition, disintegration and a readiness for violence have made the necessary communication and constructive discussion between migrants and Germans more difficult.Footnote 10
This report and the ways in which the media and local politics deal with the neighborhoodFootnote 11 ultimately show how the territorial stigmatization and isolation of the street are being advanced and deepened. Concepts such as parallel society or ghetto correspond to what Loïc WacquantFootnote 12 terms, in accordance with Pierre Bourdieu, a “scientific myth,” that is, a discursive formation that—cloaked in scientific coding and in a seemingly neutral manner—constructs social fantasies about differences between “us” and “them,” the “Others.”
Just how such thinking poisons urban everyday life was manifested in a drastic manner in a serious case that the media highlighted in 2004: on June 9, a nail bomb was thrown from a passing bicycle on Keupstrasse, and twenty-two residents were injured, four of them seriously, and several shops were destroyed and cars damaged.Footnote 13 Soon those adversely affected by the bomb attack came under suspicion, claiming the involvement of racketeers and the mafia in the attack. A number of persons on Keupstrasse were prosecuted and criminalized although there was no evidence that they had anything to do with this bomb attack. That is called racism. The actual culprit was not found, and the inquiry by the so-called SoKo Bosporus (Special Police Commission Bosporus) was at some point dropped, until almost a decade later the crime—flippantly and misleadingly termed the döner kebab murders—was finally resolved: this and other racist attacks had been perpetrated by the far-right neo-Nazi terror group the National Socialist Underground.Footnote 14 To “commemorate” the fifteenth anniversary of the attack, in June 2019 a neo-Nazi group distributed pamphlets in Mülheim bearing large swastikas and warning of imminent attacks against Muslims, telling them to leave Germany.Footnote 15
A pragmatic view
In the studies we have conducted since 2000 we have looked closely at everyday life on the street, in order to focus on very different aspects of importance for living in a neighborhood, utilizing a “thick description.”Footnote 16 The image of the street changes as soon as the focus of attention is no longer seen through a weaker external lens but rather through the powerful prism of an internal perspective.
Looking through this less customary lens at life on Keupstrasse, we found ourselves surrounded with rather trivial and nonspectacular urban everyday practices.Footnote 17 What is presented via external perception in a blurred and at times inappropriately negative form proved in close-up to be quite attractive. It quickly became clear that Keupstrasse is not some sort of self-contained parallel society but rather a highly differentiated, flexible neighborhood that is intertwined with the broader urban environment: economically, politically, socially, and legally. The Mediterranean ambience of this area is fascinating and can probably be found in other large cities. This mixture of cultural quotes and borrowings, which only putatively stem from the “culture of origin” of the migrants, proves to be a practical business strategy, a strategic concession to the local (here native German) conceptions of the “Orient.” What is being staged here is German Orientalism, what Edward Said had called an “imaginative geography.”Footnote 18 On this street and in this district new economic strategies are being developed and new traditions created. This neighborhood-specific development mirrors an urban everyday reality that is equally shaped and marked by local and global influences. In Keupstrasse what becomes visible in innumerable examples is what Robert Pütz terms “transcultural practice.”Footnote 19
Non-spectacular urban everyday practice
Manifest in many interviews that we have conducted for previous research were diverse overlapping and intersecting social and cultural experiences. Residents living on the street discussed what conflicts and barriers they were confronted with and what strategies they had developed to deal with that, as well as what role the family, friendships, and informal networks play in this connection. In short, interviews portray the ways in which the residents appropriate the neighborhood or the city, making it their own; how, through their hands-on utilization, they join hands in shaping the built environment and streetscape. In addition, the conversations show how in this urban quarter people make use of different economic, social, and cultural elements, in part transboundary in scope, redefining and combining them to form new structures and designs for living. For that reason, the development of Keupstrasse can clearly be categorized as a chapter of Cologne’s local history.
It becomes evident from conversations that the majority of those living in the neighborhood feel happy and content, stressing the quality of life they enjoy and identifying with the street. They cannot understand why their residential quarter is devalued in public discourse by means of the doggedly persistent and distorting image of the ghetto.
In conversations with the long-term native German residents, there are tones of a kindly disposed distance. People have adjusted to the way the street has developed and view the situation quite positively and pragmatically, albeit from an exotic perspective as old-time residents. The genesis of the economic structure of Keupstrasse shows how labor migrants from Turkey and their descendants, under discriminatory conditions, developed a culture of autonomy in the truest sense of the word, which would be inconceivable without the utilization of informal resources. Almost all the shops are family businesses, and often the entire family are bound up and engaged inside the respective shop or business. Quite often it is precisely the family businesses that in difficult times and at desolate locations are willing to take on risks and open up shops, in this way contributing to a fundamental improvement in the overall supply of goods and services in the neighborhood. Ms. M., the owner of a bakery on Keupstrasse, observes: “When we started out, in that phase the family stuck close together, working day and night, for several months, without any salary.”
Economic activities and social networks are closely intertwined. Since Turkish migrants are marginalized and often excluded from the formal labor market, they are forced to develop other strategies and competencies for building relations than is customary when it comes to the local native population. The economic development of Keupstrasse clearly shows that the businesspeople there can fall back and rely on networks and resources that are crucial for their survival. As networks and resources are mobilized, they are concomitantly also automatically bolstered. As Saskia Sassen has noted: “They accumulate social capital.”Footnote 20 Basically, it can be emphasized first and foremost that the discourse about Keupstrasse has undergone a definite change in recent years. The pejorative and derogatory voices have grown more restrained and faded largely into the background.
Conclusion and outlook
Although migrants from Turkey and their descendants have become a veritable centerpiece within the urban culture and local economy of Cologne and have made significant contributions to the quality of supply in city districts, only in exceptional cases is this fact highly regarded in connection with policies of urban development. It is high time that the development of such urban neighborhoods be officially recognized as a laudable achievement of the immigrants. And it is high time for the cultural and economic impetus flowing from immigration to become the focus of attention in urban policy.Footnote 21
Concepts of urban development policy can offer many possibilities in this context for including migration-related questions as a cross-cutting issue in conceptual reflections. In recent years some cities have started to work out guiding principles that seek to position topics specific to migration at the center of their strategic planning.Footnote 22 In contrast to the public “ghetto discourse,” migrant districts like the ones described here in Cologne are not only living proof for the cosmopolitanization and pluralization of everyday life but also for successful strategies in grappling with the challenges of our time—not least for the successful revitalization of urban districts by means of migration.
Keupstrasse as a “migrant neighborhood” (Migrantenveedel in the Cologne vernacular) has become an integral component of the urban district Köln-Mülheim and acts as a motor to drive forward the cosmopolitanism of the city. The impressions described above help elucidate how migrants have revitalized those neighborhoods that the city planners had long since given up on and in effect abandoned. Cognitive, spatial, and social mobility is evidently a basic urban experience manifested in particular in a diversity of lifeworlds.
In Cologne there’s a popular saying: “Every carnival merrymaker is different.” Another adage you can hear is: “All Cologners are immis” (“Alle Kölner sind Immis”—immigrants).
In principle today we’re all migrants. In other words, Keupstrasse proves to be a quite normal intermediate station within urban development, a development that began in the era of industrialization and will continue for the foreseeable future.
It would be appropriate and future-oriented if municipalities and the media would declare migration to be a guiding principle in their thinking and planning as a constitutive element of urban development. As Klaus M. Schmals has underscored: “It thus continues to be further requisite for our time to develop a conception of urban planning that remains cognizant of this positive historical nexus, rendering it the basis of a cooperation in togetherness that is free from the scourge of discrimination.”Footnote 23
Translated from the German by William Templer.