In 1980, the disused Stollwerck chocolate factory in the inner city of Cologne became the site of one of the most spectacular squatting actions in West Germany. Hundreds of predominantly young people protested against the city's plans to tear down the industrial buildings and instead demanded the existing buildings be converted as a do-it-yourself project by the squatters themselves and other activist groups. The occupation of Stollwerck was the climax of a conflict over the question of how to cope with deindustrialization and transform Cologne into a post-industrial city. The exposed location of the factory's six hectare premises within the medieval city walls and adjacent to the Rhine River which were cramped with plants and warehouses made it prone to become an object of projection for diverging expectations and interests: politicians hoped to expand their power to shape the post-industrial city by maintaining control over the transformation; real-estate investors sought to profit from the anticipated changes in the city's structure; long-term residents longed for the restoration of stability in the area; and left-wing activists saw the opportunity to establish a socially inclusive and culturally diverse space.
The study of the Stollwerck controversy highlights how the process of deindustrialization and the subsequent emergence of post-industrial urbanity was as much shaped in its specific local context as it was the result of the realignment of economic forces on a regional or even global scale. In this, the article follows a recent trend in the research on deindustrialization. While classical studies such as Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison's 1982 The Deindustrialization of America Footnote 1 did analyse effects of deindustrialization on communities, they paid little attention to the opportunities of local societies to shape those changes. Instead, research in the 1980s tended to ‘idealize local communities’ and interpreted their decline as, according to Steven High, a ‘fundamental struggle between capital and community’, between overwhelming economic forces disregarding the local context and threatened societies dependent on that specific context.Footnote 2 Recent studies instead stress the impact of local policies and their variability as a means to engage with the downturn of traditional patterns of production in the post-war decades.Footnote 3 These studies restore the agency of local societies and thus tell a story of transformation rather than one of decline. In this light, deindustrialization appears as an ambivalent and open-ended process in which local interventions mattered and did make a difference. Local agency figures prominently as a force that has been able actively to shape the transition from industrial to post-industrial cities.Footnote 4 While these historical studies have so far almost exclusively focused on cities in North America, their theses seem to be even more relevant in the western European context. For one thing, urban economies were more diverse and flexible. This feature was often strategically employed to drive economic change. Many European cities also deliberately devoted themselves to retain certain urban structures that had grown over centuries to shape redevelopment. The scarce historical studies that exist on the deindustrialization of European cities indicate that they regularly drew on a stratum of social, cultural and material continuity.Footnote 5
In contrast to existing studies, this article does not analyse urban economic policy nor does it trace overall socio-economic change. Instead, it focuses entirely on the particular site of Stollwerck and explores the process of deindustrialization and redevelopment from a micro-perspective. The premises were a focal point of negotiations through which local society shaped the transition from an industrial into a post-industrial city: the site was an object onto which the aspired futures were projected. The conflict that evolved highlighted the continuing importance of local factors in determining redevelopment policy. From the very beginning, the shutdown of the chocolate factory was conceived as a chance actively to preconfigure the future of the city through redeveloping this particular site. Despite the primary focus on the evolving discourse, this article also reflects that it was the rearrangement of factual land-use patterns and the potentials of interfering with the material actuality that created both the necessity and opportunities to negotiate the future of Stollwerck. This article will therefore trace the local discourse over a concrete space that was (re-)created in relation to changing economic conditions in the second half of the twentieth century.
Voiding a site: the city's policies to decentralize industrial production
Deindustrialization came slowly in Cologne. Due to the reconstruction effort after World War II and the ‘Economic Miracle’, the city's industry grew rapidly. However, the growth of the food sector slowed down considerably as early as 1958/59 when the price of imported goods fell below that of domestic products. During the 1960s, food processing in Cologne, with Stollwerck being one of the major companies, continuously lost market shares.Footnote 6 Despite decreasing productivity, the physical structure of the Stollwerck plant was still a dominant feature on the southern fringe of the inner city by 1970. The factory shaped the entire neighbourhood known as Severinsviertel. It was by far the largest industrial plant, but by no means the only one in the area. A number of minor businesses dotted the Severinsviertel, and the adjacent Rhine harbour had made it a notorious working-class neighbourhood with a run-down and overcrowded housing stock.Footnote 7
While industry in the southern part of the inner city was ailing, the service sector in nearby locations was growing at an increasing speed. Insurance companies took the lead in this development: between 1950 and 1970 the number of those employed by insurers increased fourfold.Footnote 8 Following older mercantile traditions, Cologne had long been the headquarters of several of these firms. After World War II, the agglomeration of insurance businesses was further bolstered by companies relocating to the city from soviet-occupied East Germany.Footnote 9 The tension between the expanding service economy and the uses of the inner city related to stagnating industrial production was increasingly perceived as a deadlock situation by city officials. The pressure exerted by insurance companies already transforming parts of the inner city on their own account rose considerably,Footnote 10 while in other parts, large patches of land were still occupied by barely profitable production sites such as Stollwerck. By 1970, politicians of the ruling Social Democratic Party were desperately looking for a lever to resolve this tension and remain in control of the transformation of the inner city.
The chance came in 1971 when the entrepreneur Hans Imhoff, who had made a fortune in the food industry, took over the majority of shares of the Stollwerck AG.Footnote 11 Imhoff expected to raise productivity through erecting a new facility which would involve relocating the factory.Footnote 12 Local politicians were quick actively to support Imhoff's proposition as it fell in line with the policy of industrial decentralization. In this, Cologne followed examples in other western cities. The ‘industrial park’ which was well connected to transportation links (in particular to highways), featured ample space to expand, and offered a pleasant environment for its workforce, had heralded a new direction in industrial development.Footnote 13 As Imhoff presented his plans to modernize Stollwerck, a suitable property at the soon to be incorporated suburb of Porz was found and a 10 million Mark subsidy was promised. In return, Imhoff agreed to sell the inner-city property to the city for the fixed sum of 25 million Marks after production there had ceased.Footnote 14 While the chocolate company was able again to increase its productivity, this article will focus on the fact that the city's policy of industrial decentralization was actively employed to free space in the inner city.
Early in 1973, when Imhoff and city officials were still bargaining, it became publicly known that with the relocation of the chocolate factory the city council would adopt a formal redevelopment scheme for the Severinsviertel.Footnote 15 The new space that would be opened up was welcomed as a unique opportunity for the project to transform the southern part of the inner city. Hans-Georg Lange, spokesman of the local Social Democrats, stated that ‘For no other redevelopment project are the conditions as good as here . . . Through the release of the Stollwerck plot, it will be possible to produce adequate living conditions for the present inhabitants of the neighbourhood. The reuse of the site will also be an impulse for the regeneration of the area.’Footnote 16
Lange only hinted at a serious problem inherent in the concept which Social Democratic politicians and the city's administration had worked out for the Stollwerck site as part of the larger transformation of the inner city. On the one hand, they reassured the local community that they would preserve their neighbourhood, as Lange indicated addressing ‘present inhabitants’. On the other hand, Social Democrats had campaigned for a co-ordinated expansion of the service sector in the inner city and for making the city centre an attractive residential location for the middle classes employed in that sector.Footnote 17 The premises that the city was about to acquire from Imhoff were a decisive component of a strategy to keep control over the larger transformation of the inner city navigating between retaining older forms of ‘community’ and capitalizing on the socio-economic change radiating from the vibrant development of the service sector.
However, the latent discrepancy between the pledge to provide low-income housing for local residents and the strategic aim to upgrade the neighbourhood was not resolved in any convincing way. In fact, these discrepancies prevented any further specification of the future use of the site. By the time the plant shut down in 1974, the administration had not come up with a concrete strategy nor had the city council pressed for a plan. It was an essential aspect of the rising debate over Stollwerck that the attributed importance of the premises for the transformation of the inner city was not matched by authoritative proposals for the future use of the site. At this point, Stollwerck was not only a void space in the sense that it was defunct and its buildings considered obsolete, it was also a vacancy in a discursive sense: it was void of a fixed future.
Controlling development: property rights and public interests
While the city's administration refrained from authoring a concise plan for Stollwerck, a massive struggle over the development of the site had broken out behind the scenes. Few people knew about the actual status of the negotiations between the city and Stollwerck AG and decisions were exclusively reached between city director Hans Mohnen and Imhoff.Footnote 18 In these negotiations, Imhoff made it clear that he wanted to develop the property with private investors, despite the earlier agreement to sell to the city. In the summer of 1974, the situation escalated. With the growing public awareness of the lack of transparency and the lagging progress, Imhoff engaged in a deal that was purposefully kept off the records. Through a complex process, he effectively sold the premises to real-estate developer Renatus Rüger at twice the price the city had offered.Footnote 19 The appearance of professional real-estate brokers has hardly ever been asserted in the analysis of deindustrialization processes. Even though speculative in nature, it can be interpreted as an indicator of a broad confidence in the ability of local societies to shape successfully the transformation towards a post-industrial city.
It was out of this confidence that Rüger, still operating behind the scenes, had outlined a proposal of his own to develop the site. Its main concern was to retain the owner's rights to determine the basic aims of the redevelopment. Even though the proposal stressed the willingness to co-operate with the local administration, it argued for an approach that would have subordinated the city's planning efforts under the interests of the investor. While the statements of local politicians indicated that they aimed at housing for local inhabitants and middle-class families, Rüger pressed for commercial uses. The investor's proposal presented office and retail space as the most adequate use of the premises and declared that the entire inner city would benefit from this form of redevelopment: ‘market analyses have shown that there is a demand for commercial uses at the location of the Stollwerck site . . . There has to be a balanced structure of uses under the consideration of market conditions.’Footnote 20
In the face of the earlier agreement between Imhoff and the city, politicians were appalled at the fact that a new owner had been introduced through the backdoor who made his divergent interests more than clear. Lange, speaking for the Social Democratic majority in the city council, announced that the city considered making use of its right of compulsory purchase to expropriate Rüger.Footnote 21 While this was not as easy as Lange made it seem, the city's administration obstructed many of Rüger's moves. The investor's proposals for the redevelopment of Stollwerck were buried under red tape as the city administration did not move ahead on preparing an official plan for Stollwerck.Footnote 22 Rüger pointed to the owners’ rights that entitled him to be consulted when a formal redevelopment scheme was set up. He accused the city of abusing its planning powers and claimed that his own ‘legitimate interests’ as owner were disregarded ‘with the sole purpose to acquire the plot for communal building’.Footnote 23 In the end, Rüger's attempts to challenge the city's authority proved unsuccessful.
Through all this confusion during the mid-1970s, the issue remained highly obscure to the public. Rumours further aggravated the situation. The Communist Party, trying to gain support from working-class residents, dwelled on the fear for the uncertain future of the neighbourhood.Footnote 24 In 1975, a local citizen initiative, the Bürgerinitiative südliche Altstadt (BISA), took up the issue. From the outset, BISA activists had been sceptical of the politicians’ reassurance that they would preserve the existing community and provide low-income housing on the Stollwerck site. When the racketeering over the Stollwerck premises became public, Stephan Goerner, an architect who served as BISA's president, portrayed the occurrences as the result of the lack of public control over urban redevelopment. Goerner demanded direct and far-reaching involvement of affected residents in the planning process in order to ensure that the community he claimed to represent would survive and prevent private developers like Rüger from holding sway.Footnote 25 Although BISA was an advocate of radical participatory planning, the obscurity of the deals around Stollwerck seemed to confirm the group's arguments.Footnote 26
Both Rüger and the BISA challenged the city's authority – Rüger in the name of his rights as a property owner and BISA in the name of the local community's participatory rights. In this, the emerging conflict reflected a more general debate about the involvement of different stakeholders in redevelopment processes. The Federal Urban Development Act which served as the legal basis for the formal redevelopment scheme for Stollwerck and the surrounding Severinsviertel had been enacted by the reform-minded Brandt government only a few years earlier, in 1971. While it required that local stakeholders had to be involved in the planning, it did not specify how this should happen. It was left to the cities to interpret.Footnote 27 In effect, this caused insecurity within local administrations that had to establish procedures to include and eventually bring together a multitude of interests. Staff of the city of Cologne's urban renewal task-force complained that the new legislation required them to consider the rights of all those affected, ‘but gave no advice about how this was to be carried out’.Footnote 28 The institutional set-up in which interests were to be negotiated failed to provide a coherent nation-wide framework but purposefully allowed for local deliberations. Balancing private and public claims was a central aspect of shaping the transformation of cities and it was carried out on the local level.
Getting hold of the future: the emergence of alternative plans
As city officials did not put forward more than abstract announcements of their intentions, BISA asserted that it was the lack of viable plans for the Stollwerck site that kept the issue intangible. The activists assumed that if there were more precise plans, the local community would be encouraged to engage in a discourse over the site's future.Footnote 29 Out of this reasoning, a group led by the architect Goerner set out to draw up a proposal of their own called ‘Wohnen im Stollwerck’ which was publicized late in 1975. The overarching premise guiding their counter-planning was to provide dwellings affordable for the existing population of the Severinsviertel. Presuming that the reuse of the abandoned factory's basic fabric was cheaper than wholesale redevelopment, the group called for the conversion of the existing buildings that, having been used to process food, did not bear a hazardous legacy of pollution.Footnote 30
The BISA activists, most of them with an academic background like Goerner who had moved to the neighbourhood during the late 1960s, were inspired by neo-Marxist rhetoric of the time. The underlying notion, even though rarely vocalized by BISA, was that the customs and values of working-class communities served as the basis for potential class struggle.Footnote 31 However, with the loss of industrial jobs, a distinct urban working-class milieu was rapidly fading away in all cities across western Europe.Footnote 32 In contrast to what has been well documented for North American cities, deindustrialization in Cologne did not primarily result in an absolute loss of population, but rather led to an intensified fluctuation and a widely felt loss of social cohesion. Statistics show that the ratio of people moving out and in to the Severinsviertel was high while the number of residents stagnated. In 1970 alone 21 per cent of the total population had moved in and 24 per cent out of the southern part of the inner city.Footnote 33 The proportion of non-German residents, a significant indicator of social change, rose from 20.3 per cent in 1970 to 31.3 per cent in 1975.Footnote 34 Long-term working-class residents lamented ‘that so many people have moved here, so many strangers who don't understand our local customs.’Footnote 35 The rapidly changing social realities inherent in deindustrialization posed a critical challenge for such leftist groups as BISA who embraced alleged working-class communality.
In essence, BISA's ‘Wohnen im Stollwerck’ project was an attempt to preserve structures and values of working-class communities through the incipient transformation from an industrial into a post-industrial society in the face of the apparent erosion of this particular milieu. For the activists, this was to a certain extent a question of cost, as the call for low-cost housing indicates, but it was also a question of how to foster popular involvement and mutual solidarity which they assumed to be the politically relevant merit of working-class culture. The concern with communally used spaces was paramount as they provided a way to reproduce traditional ‘street life’ in such neighbourhoods as the Severinsviertel.Footnote 36 For this reason, the BISA proposal for Stollwerck included small shops and stores, social services and cultural facilities resembling the traditional structures just then being in decline in the surrounding neighbourhood. Above all, the activists’ Stollwerck would provide extensive spaces for communicative uses to be shared by all dwellers.Footnote 37
In this, neo-Marxist critique met with a concern about the vitality of the public sphere in the broader architectural community of Cologne. In the late 1960s, Erich Schneider-Wesseling, a US-trained architect, had begun to propagate the need for alternative redevelopments that guaranteed the preservation of local working-class communality.Footnote 38 In his plans, which were later taken up by BISA in their ‘Wohnen im Stollwerck’ proposal, individual apartments were centred around collectively used facilities and areas were provided where inhabitants could meet and organize their spare time together.Footnote 39
However, developing a structure that perpetuated alleged working-class community life was only one layer of the argument. Schneider-Wesseling claimed that ‘[t]he individual must be involved in the development of his environment so that he can identify with it. That is – we believe – a basic right of Man.’Footnote 40 In this, the architects combined advocating working-class communality with promoting anti-authoritarian principles in urban planning. Just like Schneider-Wesseling, Goerner called for the emancipation of the user in architecture and urban development. In his view, the layout, design and use of spaces in the future Stollwerck were to be determined in negotiation among the dwellers. For a planning process involving emancipated users, the existing Stollwerck seemed ideal: it was a rigid and stable construction, allowing future dwellers without any experience in architecture to plan and construct.Footnote 41 In the case of Stollwerck, deindustrialization seemed to open up a unique chance to pursue alternative paths of urban redevelopment.
Space planned according to the future users’ demands was considered to be ‘inherently antagonistic to the capitalist tendency to expand consumer markets’,Footnote 42 as Robert Goodman put it in his influential 1971 book After the Planners. Goodman's interpretation was common sense among critical architects such as Goerner. Assessing the principles of urban development in Cologne which, in his view, were dictated by monetary potency, as Rüger's attempt to influence the redevelopment of the Stollwerck site seemed to attest, he concluded that ‘[t]he individual is reduced to his spending power’.Footnote 43 Goerner and his fellow activists therefore imagined Stollwerck as a space where societal life could be organized solely according to the people's needs through voluntary negotiation and the direct mediation of interests. They did, however, deem it necessary that this self-organized space had to be shielded against the penetration of capitalist influence, as ‘liberated zones’ in Goodman's terms.
While Goerner's BISA advocated retaining the qualities of the working-class community of the Severinsviertel, they also – unaware of the pursuing dilemma – amplified a transformation that was already well under way in the area: the rise of a local counter-culture.Footnote 44 The demand for spaces to be ruled by autonomous self-organization, shielded from the interference of a capitalist society and the authorities enforcing the supremacy of capitalist norms, had become extremely popular among young radicals in West Germany in the mid-1970s.Footnote 45 This seemed to correlate with the ideals on which ‘Wohnen im Stollwerck’ was based but started to conflict with their attachment to alleged working-class values as the abandoned factory itself became the focus of various counter-cultural initiatives loosely associated with BISA. The claims for an autonomous space to be established on the premises were not identical with the architects’ proposal of 1975, but they fitted in quite well with the underlying assumptions of their projection. By the end of the 1970s, a whole range of alternative visions adhered to the Stollwerck site. Most of these visions exceeded the initial aim to preserve working-class communality through intensive participation in the planning process. They were more radical and appealed to groups that had very different motivations to experiment with alternative forms of social organization.
The clash of visions: appropriation and escalation
As the various expectations were projected on the Stollwerck site, the chance for actual implementation came when the city finally acquired the property from Rüger in 1978.Footnote 46 Soon after the purchase of Stollwerck, a BISA-led consortium of social and cultural initiatives managed to wrest an agreement from the city to use parts of the factory temporarily.Footnote 47 Some of the groups offered day care for children, others organized concerts and popular events or provided rehearsal rooms for bands, some catered for the special needs of migrants. Others promoted outright political goals, like the BISA itself or the Marxist Evening School. Most of these groups were clearly left-wing and had a counter-cultural agenda.Footnote 48 Still, they were supported by local Social Democrats who had pledged to confront the lack of social services in the neighbourhood under the condition that the use was temporary only.Footnote 49 Determining the ultimate future of the site was reserved for an official planning effort to be initiated and controlled by the city administration.
However, as soon as the activists’ groups established themselves in the buildings, tendencies to perpetuate their presence on the premises became apparent. The associated initiatives presented their move-in as the dedication of a ‘socio-cultural centre’.Footnote 50 BISA activists who provided the basic scheme considered it a first step to implement their visions of collectively used space for social services and cultural purposes.Footnote 51 During the following months, the city administration noticed activists’ transgressions of certain restrictions intended to establish themselves permanently on the premises.Footnote 52 Officials accurately concluded that the ultimate goal of the BISA-led activities was to predetermine the future development by appropriating the space of the abandoned Stollwerck.Footnote 53
Despite such tendencies, official planning for Stollwerck moved ahead under the premise that the city of Cologne had the undisputed authority to decide the site's future. In 1978, when the city acquired the property from Rüger, the city council announced a competition for ideas and called for proposals to be evaluated by an independent jury. From the activists’ viewpoint this set-up was appalling. They criticized the decision that only certified architects were allowed to submit their ideas and claimed the jury was biased, since they judged the proposals against a general framework presupposed by the city. In short, the critics argued the whole process was designed to exclude the local community from the decision-making and prevent potential self-organized development.Footnote 54
As BISA's critique focused on the nexus between low-cost and self-organized housing on the one hand and retaining the Stollwerck buildings as they were on the other hand, the conflict increasingly galvanized around the question whether plants and warehouses should and could be reused. It was precisely the unique qualities of the existing buildings that seemed to make both communality and participatory planning possible in a way that epitomized the activists’ visions of a post-industrial urban society.Footnote 55 However, city officials and the members of the independent jury favoured schemes to tear down the industrial structures and replace them with a mixture of town houses and public housing units.Footnote 56 Even before a decision had been reached, the head of the city council's urban planning commission made it more than clear that ‘Reuse of . . . the existing buildings as dwellings does not seem feasible for economic and structural reasons as well as it seems questionable for reasons of urban design.’Footnote 57 In any case, the material legacy of the industrial city became the central object of dispute. The existing fabric was seen as either enabling or impeding the sought for development. Therefore, the question whether the chocolate factory was demolished or not became to be seen as the critical decision predetermining the very character of the post-industrial city.
This was why the confrontation between activists and the city came to a head in 1980. While the administration's preparations to implement a plan for wholesale redevelopment of the site moved ahead, BISA proposed to install a model apartment in one of the existing factory buildings.Footnote 58 The activists expected to prove that their vision of converting the old plant together with future inhabitants was not a pipe dream. They wanted to demonstrate that conversion was technically possible, economically feasible and above all supported by local residents.Footnote 59 The apartment was intended to offer a concrete material experience of the possibilities anticipated as the result of self-organized redevelopment of the exiting structures. Due to the growing pressure by left-wing groups who were in fact already established on the premises and now threatened to occupy Stollwerck, city director Kurt Rossa gave in and allowed BISA to construct their model apartment only weeks before the city council's definite decision to clear the site.Footnote 60 However, after a lethal accident occurred in the disused plant, Rossa revoked this permission. During the following weeks, a fully fledged media battle emerged between activists and city officials now reconfirmed in their opinion that the existing building fabric of Stollwerck held severe dangers and therefore had to be torn down.Footnote 61
On 20 May 1980, the day the city council's urban development committee decided on Stollwerck, the conflict erupted. The premises were occupied by 200 people. While most of them had already used the old factory buildings on a temporary basis, the number of squatters increased over the following days to an estimated 1,000 people. Despite city officials demanding to clear the site, the local chief of police refused to intervene, claiming the complex structure of the site made an evacuation by force almost impossible.Footnote 62 While the squatters considered the occupation a success, as the very structure of the buildings seemed to protect them from the authorities’ interventions, these same structures aggravated internal conflict. It was practically impossible to forge any form of coherent sociability let alone to control the entire premises. In course, BISA's original aims were subdued under the even more fundamental quest for self-fulfilment and for social organization essentially free of constraints by activists that were generally younger and more radical than the citizens’ initiative's protagonists. In their reasoning, the occupied space served as a device for personal emancipation but it also legitimized deviance.Footnote 63 However, severe problems with anti-social and criminal behaviour followed. As a result, the squatters’ community started to crumble shortly after the spectacular success of the occupation. It took five weeks until a compromise between the more moderate squatters and the city ended the occupation. On 6 July, 1980 the remaining squatters peacefully left Stollwerck. In turn, leading politicians had promised a complete re-evaluation of the planning process for the abandoned industrial site.Footnote 64
The increasing severity of the conflict had been caused by the fact that the future of the abandoned industrial site had become disposable after five years of heated but ineffectual debate. After the city acquired the property in 1978, the situation changed substantially in that implementation was now an imminent aspect of the discourse over the site's future.
Constructing a post-industrial site: alternative culture and market demand
After the occupation had ended, Goerner and BISA had to admit that they were unable to channel the protest into viable forms of redevelopment, while the more radical squatters’ visions of a free and unrestricted society did not pass the test of reality. On the other side, city officials had not been able to exercise their authority over the squatted site and leading politicians who insisted on the wholesale demolition of the abandoned factory had to yield to a new majority within the Social Democratic party who considered the idea of reusing the existing Stollwerck buildings worth a second thought. The characteristics of the redevelopment that followed the occupation reflected a new form of post-industrial urbanity. It was neither streamlined according to the needs of the service sector, nor was it an alternative utopia. Instead, post-industrial urbanism as it came to characterize Stollwerck and the surrounding Severinsviertel was the result of the concurrence of oppositional activism and market driven development.
Stollwerck provided the anchor-point for a new kind of community that literally and figuratively emerged from the remnants of industrial society. This community reused abandoned spaces of the industrial era and organized itself in relation to values and structures that had developed out of the alleged merits of working-class communality. In this, it provided a specific cultural infrastructure, social networks, businesses and services for which there was a growing demand. This demand was fuelled by both youngsters defining themselves through counter-cultural lifestyles but also by a growing number of young people affiliated to the service sector. The development of a post-industrial urbanity in and around Stollwerck unintentionally served and reinforced the creation of a specific but significant market.
One of the most notable outcomes of the occupation of Stollwerck was that the city granted room for self-organized counter-cultural activities on the premises. In this setting, with its unique structure of the abandoned plants and its squatters’ legacy, a renowned creative atmosphere emerged with concerts, parties and artists using the space for their work. When the cultural activities in the still existent parts of Stollwerck had to cease in 1987, it had become internationally acclaimed.Footnote 65 In their final report on the redevelopment process, even the city's administration had to admit: ‘The qualities of events in this alternative atmosphere were acknowledged even by its critics.’Footnote 66 By the 1980s, counter-cultural activities had become an asset in the transformation of Cologne into a post-industrial city. Over the long term, creative economies complemented the growth of the service sector in replacing industrial production.
The cultural use of the abandoned factory coincided with an increasing interest in industrial heritage that began to appeal to the general public in West Germany. The nearby Ruhrgebiet served as a role-model.Footnote 67 Most of the buildings on the Stollwerck premises were only rebuilt after their destruction in World War II, but still the idea of preserving some elements of the area's industrial past was strong. By 1984, it was decided to go ahead with the conversion of one large factory building. This piece of old industrial fabric was integrated in the new layout of the site and served as its focal point.Footnote 68 On its completion, the renewed structure proved to provide very popular housing. In 1985, it won the German architectural prize for providing individualized dwellings designed in co-operation with the future residents.Footnote 69
Reusing the existing fabric did, as Goerner and BISA had predicted, provide a unique opportunity for participatory planning and the pluralization of dwelling units. This was actively exploited by the state-owned redevelopment company LEG that had been called in to manage the renewal of the Severinsviertel. LEG, with an open-minded staff on site, sensed that it could combine the demand for self-planned and self-organized projects with a demand for individualized dwelling units on the housing market.Footnote 70 LEG also encouraged future dwellers to form a co-operative that would construct and maintain buildings. In their strategy, they counted on the involvement of former activists whom they considered to be an avant-garde of future housing development. This future which drew heavily on the activists’ visions developed for Stollwerck during the 1970s lay in the provision of flexible and customized dwelling units.Footnote 71 However, LEG also expected it to serve a market created by the growing creative and service economies.Footnote 72
During the 1980s, LEG and the city's administration executed a development in accordance with the post-industrial urbanity that had emerged in the contest for the future of the Stollwerck site. While most of the industrial structures were torn down, much to the dismay of local activists, some buildings remained and new ones were modelled after their predecessors. In terms of the socio-economic transition, the changes that became apparent shortly after 1980 indicated that the prevalence of the activist community concurred with a middle-class influx, spurring familiar forms of gentrification. Ironically, the existence of an activist community had a decisive impact on the market as middle-class citizens were attracted to the vibrant and insubordinate atmosphere of the Severinsviertel.Footnote 73 With rents slowly rising, the number of residents in the southern part of the inner city began to grow again at the time when the conflict over Stollwerck was at its height.Footnote 74
Conclusions
Despite the fact that much of the industrial structure does not exist any more, Stollwerck is still a local lieu de memoir today, symbolizing the disputes of the 1970s and 1980s and serving as a landmark of post-industrial redevelopment in Germany. The changes that evolved around the site of the disused chocolate factory confirm the findings of the more recent studies on North American cities that deindustrialization was only the initial stage of a locally shaped transformation. While important impulses related to global economic shifts and changes in the traditional forms of industrial production, local societies were not ‘victims’ of these changes. In the case of Stollwerck, it is evident that deindustrialization of the inner city was driven by visions of a future without industry. Deindustrialization and redevelopment were inextricably intertwined.
This process was forged between the diverging futures that had been projected on the premises. A host of local actors were involved in shaping this transformation of Cologne into a post-industrial city. They actively sought to intervene because they were highly aware of challenges and potentials that lay in deindustrialization and redevelopment. The pursuing discourses adhered to the specific site itself: its location, its physical characteristics, its place in local policy and perception, its owners and neighbours. As negotiating the future of Stollwerck was conflict-laden, the results that became ever more visible in the 1980s were backed by a specific post-industrial urbanity. This urbanity had its very roots not only in the vibrancy of the conflict which had quite literally opened space for experimentation but also in the appropriation of remnants of the local industrial society. It did increase the attractiveness of the area in a sense that served the demand of the growing middle-class population of the inner city, albeit under a counter-cultural mantle.
Similar trajectories affected the development of many western European cities in the 1970s. In financial centres like Frankfurt and Zurich, as well as industrial cities like Glasgow and Roubaix, the transformations were shaped in confrontations between proponents of economic growth and left-wing activists.Footnote 75 In many cases, post-industrial urbanity, which by the 1980s contributed to a renewed attractiveness of inner cities, drew heavily on the legacy of such conflicts. The facets of the controversy exposed in this article, so narrowly focused on the fate of a six hectare site in Cologne, portray only one specific path that the transition from an industrial into a post-industrial city could take. More often than not, however, Stollwerck existed in every major western European city.
