Another way of approaching the theme of this book is by exploring the enactment of rules in everyday practices of regulatory enforcement. Dwelling in Berlin’s allotment gardens breaches the rules of the law, but it is also marked by other forms of intense regulation. Rather than being characterized through spontaneity, the construction of allotment huts is embedded in long-standing traditions of city life. Sheds transgress building codes but are organized strictly on clearly fenced plots. Although buildings are erected without permits, they are systematically serviced with water and electricity. Their residents exceed use rights, but they comply elsewhere with registration commitments. A closer look at the housing situation in the gardens provides insights into the ways in which transgressions are accommodated in the “formal” production of urban order and thereby also points out the institutional ambiguities on which allotment dwelling frequently depends.
Housing in the Margins relates these two approaches and argues that this matters because it accounts for housing and urban governance in a Western liberal democracy in ways that challenge some of the epistemological assumptions that have long been engrained in research on cities. With informal housing playing hardly more than a marginal role in scholarship on European, Canadian, or US cities, an exploration of how allotment dwelling is negotiated in Berlin troubles the North–South divisions that underlie much production of knowledge on urban informality and raises questions about the particularity of local experiences and the universality of concepts, including that of informality. I pursue this project with empirical and theoretical objectives: studying empirically how Berliners negotiate ways of staying put in allotment gardens and how boundaries around their dwelling practices are drawn, I aim at understanding the production and governance of housing precarity in a relatively rich European city. In theorizing these processes of governance, I seek to unveil the possibilities of conceptualizing informal housing in the context of bureaucracies that are commonly understood to regulate thoroughly, coherently, and according to fixed rules.
In the Margins: Allotment Dwelling in Berlin
An abundance of research has documented the history of allotment gardens, but it has rarely associated these sites with informal housing. Most of Berlin’s allotment compounds (see Figure 1.1) go back to a period of industrialization and rapid expansion of the city at the turn of the twentieth century. They are frequently referred to as colonies – a term that I adopt and contextualize in Chapter 3. As that chapter also details in depth, Berlin has witnessed more than a century of allotment governance in which dwelling on one’s plot was variably forbidden and politically sustained. The dwelling practices that persisted throughout two wars, rival political systems, and the increasingly profit-driven use of urban land have left their vestiges in the contemporary city: today’s landscape of allotment colonies, 876 compounds with 71,071 garden plots on 2,915 hectares of urban space (SenUVK, 2019: 24), is served by an infrastructure of mini-scale allotment huts, electricity networks, water hook-ups, and telephone lines (Urban, 2013; Hilbrandt, 2015).
FIGURE 1.1 View of allotment colony in Berlin-Neukölln. Source: Michael Berger.
By and large, allotment gardens can be characterized as spaces of the lower middle class, though over-proportionally white. Most gardeners are of an older generation that has fostered social networks between allotment holders who have gardened, plot by plot, over decades (SenSW, 2019: 32). Despite repeated exceptions with far-reaching consequences for the acceptability of dwelling, permanent residence on these sites is generally prohibited – today most centrally through the Federal Allotment Law, the Bundeskleingartengesetz (BKleinG). Yet, allotment holders rely on a variety of regulations as they take up residence within allotment huts. To avoid any misunderstandings, it should be stated that allotment dwelling is not a mass phenomenon. In addition to 1,131 gardeners who hold dwelling permits (documentation of the Berlin Senate, provided in an interview, 18.09.2013), an unknown number of Berliners with other legal statuses permanently reside in colonies, particularly in those that have functioning infrastructures throughout the year, including electricity connections and water pumps. Schwarzwohnen [literally: “black” (here signifying clandestine and unlawful) dwelling] remains the exception,3 although my research has taught me to expect at least one or two permanent dwellers in each colony and higher numbers in some of the colonies at the periphery of the city. Conversely, Sommerwohnen [summer dwelling] is a rather frequent practice. It implies moving “out” into the colonies in early spring and returning “back” into the city in late autumn, and possibly subletting one’s flat during the stay on the plot, or inhabiting a hut throughout longer vacations, or routinely spending the night.
In the diversity of these practices, the case of allotment dwelling widens understandings of housing precarity in a European city. In contradistinction to studies of homelessness (Mitchell, 1995; Marquardt, 2013), camps (Clough Marinaro, 2017; Pasquetti and Picker, 2017; Picker, 2019), emergency shelter, or some of the work on informal settlements in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, allotment dwelling does not limit the study of housing precarity to an exploration of severe urban poverty. Berlin’s allotments – even if some may be inhabited – are commonly seen as orderly and tradition-bound. It is to a lesser extent that allotment gardens also provide refuge for the income-poor – people scraping by on unemployment benefits, or migrant laborers, or pensioners with limited means, for example. Yet the case of allotment dwelling also speaks to growing social divides in which those at the bottom of the income ladder are additionally disempowered through the tensions in European housing markets and their spatial and social effects.
Over the years in which I researched and wrote this book, investment-led policy, housing privatization, and the financialization of real estate have crucially changed Berlin’s housing conditions. In the aftermath of the 2007/2008 financial crisis, processes of displacement and the associated deepening of social divides have increasingly appeared to be the order of the day (Aalbers and Holm, 2008; Bernt, 2012; Soederberg, 2017). As a result, Berlin has experienced a resurgence of interest in the “new” housing question (Schönig et al., 2017; PROKLA, 2018). A plethora of urban scholarship (e.g. Holm, 2011; Uffer, 2014) has drawn into sharp relief that Berlin’s housing crisis has been politically caused through neoliberal approaches to housing provisioning and the resultant reductions of social housing and rent increases in all market segments; that it is structurally determined through the global financial crisis that moved Berlin’s housing stock into the spotlight of capital flows; and that the crisis has been aggravated through the population growth of the city (Investitionsbank Berlin, 2017).
As I argue in Chapter 4, literatures explaining the resulting processes of gentrification and displacement focus predominantly on the political interventions that allow for or hinder gentrification, or on areas that experience gentrification and displacement (Holm, 2010; Schipper, 2018). This includes qualitative attention to incoming middle- to high-income pioneers and gentrifiers or quantitative explorations of population mobility incidences and rent increases to identify affected areas (e.g. Döring and Ulbricht, 2016). Yet, the debate remains limited in providing an understanding of the affected populations, their housing trajectories, and new forms and locations of residency – in part due to the difficulties of locating displaced residents (although see Helbrecht, 2016). The scarcity of literature on displaced populations is indicative of the lacuna of qualitative studies on housing precarity – including on the many faces of housing practices in irregular conditions. To date, informal housing is hardly recognized as existing in Berlin or in other European, Canadian, or US cities and rarely researched in relation to processes of governance (but see Chapter