Gentrification 1.0: Urban transformations in late-19th-century Berlin

On gentrification

References to gentrification have become so common over the past two decades that any discussion requires careful definition. Gentrification is usually understood as the development of a particular urban neighbourhood that had been largely disregarded by municipal planning and private investors. At the beginning of this process, relatively low rents and the potential of actually or supposedly unused spaces attract a well-educated but (currently) economically less well-situated stratum of the city’s own or outside population to this neighbourhood. By investing materially and socially into the neighbourhood, the newcomers rapidly change the physical appearance, cultural diversity, social background and, where applicable, ethnic composition of the neighbourhood (Hammel, 2009: 360–367; Kerstein, 1998; Lees et al., 2008: 9–35; Smith, 2000: 294–296). Landlords and real estate companies soon recognise the changing demand and begin investing in housing and marketing. This results in the rise of property values, the transformation of rental into owner-occupied apartments, the influx of wealthier social groups, increased rents in the remaining rental apartments and the emigration of parts of the original population into more affordable neighbourhoods – although there is considerable debate about whether displacement is a necessary feature of gentrification and, for that matter, about what displacement actually means (Freeman and Braconi, 2004; Häuβermann et al., 2002: 191–224; Holm, 2011; Palen and London, 1984: 12–13). As Chris Hamnett puts it, gentrification thus involves ‘both a change in the social composition of an area and its residents, and a change in the nature of the housing stock’ (Hamnett, 1991: 176).

Already in the early 1980s, Palen and London distinguished between five explanations that urban scholars offer when exploring the causes of gentrification. ‘Demographic-ecological’ explanations, they argued, usually consider aspects of population growth and changing employment patterns to be responsible for the reinvasion of the urban centre. While, secondly, explanations drawing on ‘community networks’ largely focus on the (dis)integration of local communities as factors for gentrification and displacement (or protection against it), ‘social movement’ approaches tend to explain urban reinvasion as a result of coordinated, purposeful group action. ‘Socio-cultural’ explanations, fourthly, regard dominant value systems and desires for self-representation among the new middle or ‘creative’ classes in particular as boosters for gentrification. In contrast, studies proposing ‘political-economic’ explanations usually concentrate on large-scale transformation or structural constraint rather than collective behaviour or individual choice (Palen and London, 1984: 14–23).

Over the course of the following decade, the latter two explanations increasingly merged into one of the two paradigms that began to dominate research on gentrification (Lees at al., 2010: 77–188). Whereas proponents of ‘consumption-side’ theories explained processes of gentrification by analysing the factors that drew new residents to an area (Butler, 1997; Caulfield, 1989; Ley, 1980, 2003, Mullins, 1982), followers of ‘production-side’ theories stressed the importance of structural changes in the given neighbourhood, the national economy or in global capital (Marcuse, 1985; Smith, 1979). While the former, in other words, assumed that the aspirations, economic demands and cultural lifeworlds of the newcomers were decisive factors triggering gentrification, the latter argued that gentrification occurred because of altering rent structures, public initiatives and incentives for or obstacles to investment. Beginning in the early 1990s, the rigidity of this dichotomy softened in the search of a more comprehensive understanding of gentrification. As a consequence, researchers today tend to explore more integrated models that strive to account equally for questions of capital and culture, politics and aesthetics or structure and agency (Atkinson and Bridge, 2005: 6; Hammel, 2009; Hamnett, 1991; Lees et al., 2008: xxii, 191–192).

Yet is the concept of gentrification helpful for a better understanding of 19th-century urban change? At first sight, the question appears absurd. After all, historical urbanisation is usually understood as a sort of antonym to gentrification. According to established historiography, rapid technological development, a new demand for manual labour and massive land enclosures drove large parts of the population from the countryside to the city. Rather than pouring into abandoned or deprived neighbourhoods that then became gentrified thanks to the newcomers’ peculiar expectations or their ability to pay higher rents, the new urban proletariat was concentrated in formerly under- or undeveloped parts of the city or its surroundings, which eventually became highly segregated neighbourhoods (Clark, 2000: 453–490; Daunton, 2000: 185–206; De Vries, 1984; Lees and Lees, 2007: 41–69; Lenger, 2009: 30–43; Matzerath, 1985; Mumford, 1961: 431–434; Zimmermann, 1996: 9–38). These nascent working-class neighbourhoods held very little attraction for wealthier urbanites who, by and large, wanted to move out of these quarters rather than into them. This widely accepted narrative – a narrative that is also captured in the functionalist Chicago School interpretation (Parks et al., 1925) – seems to be the reason that there is hardly any literature on gentrification prior to the second half of the 20th century. To the extent that intra-urban mobility has been studied at all, past research usually focused on questions of segregation rather than displacement (Lewis, 1979; Schnore, 1975; Ward, 1980). With few exceptions, gentrification is thus conceived of as a predominantly recent trend (Osman, 2017: 172; for exceptions, see Gould, 1995; Yates, 2015: 241, 247). Yet, as the following pages will show, the concept of gentrification has in fact much to offer for a better understanding of the socio-spatial dynamics in a city like late-19th-century Berlin.

Housing and rents in 19th-century Berlin

Around mid-century, very concrete changes in the city’s built environment showed that the Prussian capital was finally stripping off its largely artisanal character (Dietrich, 1981: 169–192; Richter, 1987: 656–663). Small, privately owned houses, which in the eyes of social-democratic observers symbolised a bygone world of cosiness, were increasingly being replaced by large-scale developments that were financed by stock corporations and wealthy investors. Wherever one looked, critics lamented, impressive construction sites rose into the sky, only to be knocked down half-finished in order to make room for bigger projects. These houses were no longer built to be lived in, but to be purchased. They had transformed from objects of use to articles of exchange. Berlin, in other words, had given birth to a modern real estate market (B.[ebel], 1872; Der Volksstaat, 1873; F, 1873). And this market yielded increasingly attractive returns (Schwabe, n.d. a: 183). Before the Franco-Prussian War, the inner-city districts of Dorotheenstadt, Friedrichstadt and Friedrich-Wilhelmstadt had witnessed the highest profit margins, yet by 1871 the pattern had reversed. Now inner-city property prices were still rising dramatically, yet it was in districts like the newly incorporated Moabit that prices increased eightfold (Bruch, 1872: 26; Statistisches Bureau, 1872: 104).

Even Berlin’s officials voiced concern over the social consequences of this development. The municipal statistician Ernst Bruch, for instance, argued that the real estate market utterly neglected the housing needs of lower-class tenants (Bruch, 1872: 40). Together with the widespread transformation of rental into owner-occupied apartments, the construction of large flats sharply reduced the supply of affordable housing which resulted in a dramatic increase of inner-city rents (Demokratische Zeitung, 1872a, 1872b; Neuer Social-Demokrat, 1872a, 1872b; Pionier: Central-Organ der Gewerkschaften Deutschlands, 1878). In the two years between 1870 and 1872 alone, rents in Berlin increased on average by 13 percent (Bruch, 1872: 22). Interpreting what would become an official rent statistic that revealed how much of their annual income Berliners paid in rent, Bruch’s colleague Ernst Engel concluded that, in general, ‘the smaller the income, the larger the share that is spent on housing’ (Engel, n.d.: 140). In the lowest-income group, between 23.5 and 27.5 percent of annual incomes went to housing costs (Schwabe, n.d. b). This group was heavily reliant on being able to rent apartments in the cheapest tier, under 50 Thaler a month. Yet the overall share of this tier had fallen from 30 percent at the beginning of the decade to a mere 10 percent by the late 1860s, while the share of apartments between 51 and 200 Thaler increased by 6 percent (Schwabe, 1867: 259). The remaining increase in rental housing was accounted for by apartments with rents between 201 and 1000 Thaler. These were clearly out of reach for lower-income groups (Bruch, 1872: 27). Even Berlin’s governing body admitted that, despite the massive boom in construction, a growing working-class population faced a continuously decreasing supply of affordable housing (Magistrat, 1879: 58–64).

Poor tenants reacted in different ways to rising rents. While some made painful cuts in their clothing and food budgets, others sublet parts of their flats or took in boarders in order to make ends meet (Neuer Social-Demokrat, 1872c). And yet others saw no other solution but to leave their apartments in search of more affordable ones. An official survey of 1879 revealed that about 50 percent of all tenants in Berlin had moved apartments within the previous two years – and that many of them had not left their apartment by choice (Magistrat, 1883: 103). Historical research has usually interpreted this phenomenon as occurring within the spatial boundaries of the proletarian quarter in question; that is, while tenants may have been forced out of their apartments, they remained in the same neighbourhood (Wehler, 2008: 785). Focusing on the emergence of heavily segregated working-class neighbourhoods, social and urban historians have thus disregarded the extent to which rising rents pushed poor tenants not only out of their apartments, but also out of the older, socio-economically mixed blocks and neighbourhoods. Luckily, there exists a precious body of sources that testifies to demographic shifts at the micro-level of individual streets. Beginning in 1843, the official address books ² that the city of Berlin published annually not only listed every single building in all incorporated streets, but also recorded the occupational background as well as social/civic status (such as privateer or widow) of all household heads. This neglected yet extraordinarily helpful source makes it possible to assess street-by-street changes in 19th-century Berlin neighbourhoods.

An uneven geography of inner-city mobility: Patterns of displacement

Let us take a look at Blumenstrasse, where the tenant revolt described in this article’s introduction broke out in the summer of 1872 (see District 7 in Figure 1). A comparison of aggregated address-book data reveals that the street witnessed an increase of about 300 new residents (excluding family members and boarders) between 1863 and 1874. Let us now take a closer look at the relative increase of various socio-economic groups. The number of manufacturers and factory owners doubled between 1863 and 1874. The number of traders and officials, as well as widows, increased by about a third. The number of servants increased by roughly two-thirds, while the number of workers increased by about a third. The number of single working women increased too, but it still remained relatively insignificant. Although they did so to different degrees, all socio-economic groups apparently participated in the absolute growth of Blumenstrasse from the mid-1860s to the mid-1870s. Yet if we single out servants and petty officials, we see that the increase in this group was accounted for almost exclusively by public employees like police officers, railroad clerks and postal workers. Barbers, door attendants, domestics, deliverers, care workers and secretaries were in fact the only occupational groups that actually stagnated during this period (Bünger, 1863: 17–19 [638–640, online]; Schwabe, 1874: 40–43 [1003–1006, online]). It was, in other words, ‘the precarious’ in personal services rather than workers or artisans who experienced displacement.

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Figure 1.

Map of the city of Berlin, 1874.

This trend seems to have occurred in other neighbourhoods, too. One of the newly designated streets in the southern district of Louisenstadt, Lausitzer Strasse – the same street where Berliners would protest the eviction of a defaulting family in 2013 – was first listed in the annual address book of 1867 (see District 5 in Figure 1). At that time, the address book recorded merely three houses on Lausitzer Strasse, all of which were named after the building contractor or master carpenter who lived in them (Bünger, 1867: 119 [831, online]). Seven years later, in 1874, the street had changed beyond recognition. There were nine new buildings and no less than 27 construction sites. Workers and artisans remained the single largest group residing on Lausitzer Strasse, but there was also a fair minority of state officials, merchants and constables (Schwabe, 1874: 204–205 [1167–1168, online]). This ratio changed little over the coming decade. If anything, the street became even more proletarian. In 1884, the total number of merchants, manufacturers, widows and small traders was a little over 100, while there were more than 250 workers and artisans. The number of servants had grown too, but, once again, their increase was both relatively modest and mostly accounted for by public employees like constables, fire officers and railway clerks. Domestic servants, nurses and barbers were virtually absent from Lausitzer Strasse in 1884 (Ludwig, 1884: 219–220 [1428–1429, online]).

The notorious Gartenstrasse in the north of the city reveals a similar picture (see District 11 in Figure 1). As early as the 1820s, the street had become known for its so-called family houses, Berlin’s first tenements, which were administered and owned by Baron von Wülknitz. These family houses attracted not only a great number of poor tenants, but also a constant stream of middle-class spectators, state officials and concerned philanthropists who visited the shabby and overcrowded dwellings both for personal excitement and out of a desire for social reform (Gailus, 1990: 16–17). Despite its ill-famed tenements, the social composition of Gartenstrasse was fairly mixed around the mid-century. In 1850, about 150 single individuals or family heads were recorded living on Gartenstrasse. About half of them were workers and craftspeople, with an overwhelming majority of weavers among them. The second-largest group, local peddlers and small traders, constituted about 20 percent of all residents. About 15 percent were businesspeople, officials or artists, while another 15 percent were servants, secretaries, barbers or barkeepers. Within 20 years, the number of single individuals or family heads living on Gartenstrasse rose from about 150 to almost 700. In 1870, workers and craftspeople still constituted by far the single largest group, although they no longer constituted an absolute majority (and the number of weavers in their ranks had declined sharply). The largest increase occurred among widows, businesspeople and state officials. Within two decades, the number of widows – many of them property owners – had increased tenfold (from four widows in 1850 to 39 in 1870), while businesspeople and officials now comprised more than 25 percent of all recorded residents. Although the absolute number of small traders and peddlers, on the one hand, and servants, secretaries, barbers and barkeepers, on the other, had also increased, they now collectively accounted for only about 12 percent of all residents. Similar to Blumenstrasse and Lausitzer Strasse, Gartenstrasse remained a predominantly proletarian neighbourhood, but it was increasingly losing its sub-proletarian base to small businesspeople, artists, singers, state officials and independent carters (Bünger, 1870: 73–75 [963–965, online]; Winckler, 1850: 40–41 [614–615, online]).

Let us finally take a closer look at Louisenstrasse, a street in the quickly developing neighbourhood of Friedrich-Wilhelm-Stadt in the north-west of the city (see District 12 in Figure 1). Contrary to its subsequent thoroughly bourgeois character, the address books of both 1844 and 1859 reveal a fairly mixed neighbourhood. The number of merchants, traders, state officials, artists and physicians largely corresponded to the combined number of workers, artisans and servants. Yet a comparison of 1859 and 1874 shows that, while the overall population of Louisenstrasse had grown by about 30 percent (from about 700 residents in 1859 to about 900 in 1874), the number of service workers – such as porters, servants and nurses – had actually dropped by 20 percent, despite the fact that many nurses lived here because of its proximity to the Charité clinic (Allgemeiner Wohnungs-Anzeiger, 1859: 92–94 [655–657, online]; Schwabe 1874: 222–226 [1185–1188, online]; Winckler, 1844: 621–623 [644–646, online]). The nature of real estate ownership had also changed considerably. In 1844, the majority of proprietors lived in the house they owned. By 1874, the number of owners living under the same roof as their tenants had decreased dramatically, while the number of houses owned by stock corporations and communities of heirs had increased significantly (Ludwig, 1890: 292–294 [1780–1782, online]; Schwabe, 1874: 222–225 [1185–1188, online]; Winckler, 1844:621–623 [644–646, online])

These observations indicate a general trend. All examples discussed so far were located in one of the emerging working-class neighbourhoods that encircled the old city centre (except for the middle-class strip in the west and south-west of the centre). This proletarian ring experienced a strikingly similar demographic development. Although the presence of groups like merchants and state officials increased over the course of the second half of the 19th century, workers and craftspeople remained the single largest group of residents. The only occupational group that either stagnated or decreased in this period of rapid overall growth was that of domestics and small service providers like barbers, messengers, night security guards and healthcare providers such as nurses or masseurs. Domestics and low-income service providers were thus among the first victims of gentrification in late-19th-century Berlin.

Yet this pattern does not apply equally to all residential zones in the city. While the emerging working-class neighbourhoods surrounding the city centre became ever more proletarian – thereby pushing sub-proletarian Berliners out of the neighbourhood or out of the statistical record – downtown Berlin experienced a demographic shift radically different from the trajectory discussed so far. Let us thus leave the proletarian circle behind and zoom in on the old city centre (see District 1 in Figure 1). In the spring of 1872, a note in the stock market paper Börsenkurier announced that a consortium of well-known local businesspeople had bought a complex of houses between An der Spandauerbrücke and Schönhauserstrasse, where it planned to make a breakthrough from one street to the other. Along the newly developed passage, the consortium intended to build a large 500-room hotel, several concert halls and 60 shops (Demokratische Zeitung, 1872c).

From the perspective of present-day urban geography, such a development plan reads like the quintessential door opener for processes of gentrification – processes that not only neglect the interests of local residents, but actually contribute to rising rents and the eventual exodus of less wealthy tenants (cf. Atkinson and Bridges, 2005: 2–3). A comparison of the area’s tenant structure before and after the announced development reveals a remarkable change. The small street An der Spandauerbrücke, for instance, experienced a thorough transformation in social composition and commercial use. In 1860, the street’s two most populous residential groups had been merchants, professionals, artists, state officials and rentiers on the one hand, and workers and artisans on the other. In addition, there was a relatively fair number of peddlers, servants and widows living on the street, whereas the number of manufacturers was very low. The street can thus be described as socially mixed. By 1895, however, the number of workers and artisans living on An der Spandauerbrücke had fallen by more than half, while the number of merchants and professionals had almost doubled in size. The number of petty dealers, small grocers and peddlers had dropped even more dramatically, while the number of manufacturers and factory owners had risen considerably.

This change in residential character was paralleled by a change in commercial use. In 1860, there was only one shop among this small strip of houses. In 1895, there were 34 shops that sold cigars or furniture to a remarkably transformed neighbourhood. Likewise, there were almost four times as many banks and insurance agencies in 1895 as in 1860. And finally, the street also experienced a sharp increase in not only production facilities, but also cultural institutions such as the concert halls that the consortium had promised to build and which, by 1895, had indeed opened their doors. Within a generation, An der Spandauerbrücke had changed from a socio-economically mixed and almost exclusively residential neighbourhood to a semi-residential neighbourhood that was dominated by wealthier tenants, banks and shops. And it seems that this trend applied to other inner-city neighbourhoods, too.

Compared to streets like Lausitzer or Blumenstrasse, discussed above, downtown Klosterstrasse witnessed relatively modest growth from 1850 to 1875. While the former streets experienced growth rates of 50 percent and more in a single decade, Klosterstrasse only grew by a mere 8 percent in 25 years. What did increase from 1850 to 1875, however, was the share of commercial usage. One of the oldest streets in the heart of Berlin, Klosterstrasse was now home to an extraordinary number of restaurants, hotels, banks, production sites and large storage spaces or shops for commodities such as wine, fur or colonial goods. These facilities catered to the tastes of a rapidly changing neighbourhood. In 1850, state officials, professionals, merchants, widows and artists comprised about half of all residents on Klosterstrasse. The other half was composed of small peddlers, servants and, first and foremost, a very large group of workers and artisans. In the course of the next two and a half decades, most groups either stagnated or grew – most impressively the group of merchants and manufacturers, which increased by almost 50 percent. Of all these groups, it was only that of workers that actually shrank. Not only did workers decrease relative to professionals, traders and officials, but they also dropped in absolute numbers. Klosterstrasse was becoming less and less proletarian. This transformation is also documented by a striking shift in ownership structure. In 1850, about three-quarters of all houses (excluding those owned by the state or Church) were owned by single individuals who resided in the house they owned. The remaining 20 percent or so belonged to proprietors who resided elsewhere. By 1875, the percentage of the latter had almost doubled. While in the first half of the century, smaller inner-city houses had often been owned by the master carpenter or bricklayer under whose supervision they had been built, new buildings tended to be not only significantly larger, but also owned by someone who did not reside there. The changing social composition of proprietors likewise underscores this finding. In 1850, about half of all houses on Klosterstrasse were owned by a working-class landlord, while the other half were owned by merchants, manufacturers, professionals or other non-working-class members. Only three houses were owned by a corporation. By 1875, the number had more than doubled. The number of working-class landlords had dropped from 36 to 13, while the number of non-working-class owners had risen to 44. There were almost three times as many non-working-class owners as working-class owners in 1875 (Societät, 1875: 171–173 [1236–1238, online]; Winckler, 1850: 64–66 [638–640, online]). Klosterstrasse had thus experienced ‘both a change in the social composition of an area and its residents, and a change in the nature of the housing stock’ (Hamnett, 1991: 176). It had, in other words, undergone a very high degree of gentrification.

Towards an explanation

By analysing a large sample of historical address book data, this article has shown that 19th-century Berlin underwent a phase of rapid gentrification that has passed virtually unnoticed by urban historiography. Similar to other cities of that time, Berlin’s formerly mixed, residential centre transformed into an area of commercial and representative use (Bernhardt, 1998: 18). Yet this does not mean that all residents were equally affected by this transformation. Rather, it was working-class residents in particular who were pushed out of the centre and into the proletarian ring surrounding the inner city. Here, working-class newcomers increasingly displaced domestics, low-income service providers and other sub-proletarian residents. Their number declined because they had moved somewhere else, because they could no longer afford to move here or because they had been forced out of their apartments and had become borders or subtenants who no longer appeared in the address books that recorded only independent heads of households. While the former two modes have been described as ‘direct’ and ‘exclusionary’ displacement, the latter one has been largely neglected in contemporary typologies of displacement (cf. Marcuse, 1985: 204–208). Though it did not necessarily involve physical displacement from a particular neighbourhood, boarding or apartment sharing constituted a sort of ‘socio-cultural displacement’ that was associated primarily with the loss of privacy, spatial self-determination and status or reputation among peers. As such, it involved a severe risk of isolation from social networks. By exploring an uneven geography of displacement, this article showed that 19th-century Berlin saw the emergence of a housing market that entailed distinct challenges for proletarian and sub-proletarian access to housing. Observing this trend is one thing; explaining it quite another. And yet, this is essential not only if we want to make sense of the historical phenomenon itself but also if we want to understand how interdisciplinary approaches might advance the theoretical apparatus of present-day urban research. In the remainder of this article, I therefore explore what lessons urban research can draw from historical Berlin. I will do so by comparing the driving forces of gentrification past and present.

One key difference between gentrification 1.0 and 2.0 is that ‘demographic-ecological’ explanations seem of limited use for the analysis of displacement portrayed here. Though 19th-century population growth in Berlin by far exceeded contemporary growth rates, the displacement of working-class tenants from the inner city cannot easily be accounted for by increased competition for housing in the centre. After all, Berlin’s central districts were the only ones that actually stagnated or even lost residents during this time (Magistrat, 1879: 49). Thus, inner-city displacement was not simply the result of housing demand exceeding housing supply. Similarly, Berlin’s employment statistics do not suggest that the decline of sub-proletarian tenants in working-class quarters mirrors a decrease in domestics and personal-service workers relative to other occupational groups. According to the Statistical Bureau of the City of Berlin, the number of personal servants had actually doubled, from 32,231 in 1861 to 67,673 in 1871 (Böckh, 1880: 13, 17). By the end of the decade, almost every fifth household in Berlin employed a personal servant (Böckh, 1878: 4–6; Kocka, 1990: 121). The number of servants continued to increase until the end of the century (Oswald, 1984: 220–223). The reason that domestics and servants disappeared from the address books thus cannot be accounted for by a general decline of their profession. Nor, finally, can the transforming socio-economic demography of Berlin’s historical neighbourhoods be explained by what Clay has termed ‘incumbent upgrading’ (Clay, 1979; see also Palen and London, 1984: 8). Clay argued that demographic change was not necessarily the result of actual displacement but that it could also reflect upward mobility of former lower-class residents or their children. Historical studies show that while upward mobility did exist in 19th-century Western societies, it was both modest and highly dependent on internal class position (Kaelble, 1983: 150–163; Kocka, 1990: 88, 106, 135; Wehler, 2008: 772–788). While this was beginning to change towards the end of the century, the vast majority of mid- to late-19th-century workers and servants (including their children) remained members of the lower classes for their entire life. Social mobility is thus unlikely to have caused the change in socio-economic demography discussed here.

Compared to contemporary gentrification, both state and municipality also played a less direct role in the displacement pattern discussed here. Boyd Whyte and Frisby’s (2012: 134) assumption that the historical development of Berlin’s real estate market was left entirely to private forces is somewhat misleading. After all, official building codes, land-use plans, as well as municipal taxation had a considerable impact on housing and social segregation in historical Berlin (Bernhardt, 1998: 24–25). It is unlikely, however, that state agency had a similar impact on historical displacement, whether positive or negative. In contrast to public measures that have recently been introduced to spur (from tax deduction for refurbishment to public subsidies for renovation) or curb (from rent control to the much-discussed ‘Milieu Protection’ that aims at defending the social mix of certain inner-city quarters) gentrification in Berlin, neither state nor municipality were directly involved in the historical displacement analysed here (Bernt and Holm, 2005; Franz, 2015: 224–258; O’Sullivan, 2015). It was not until the end of the century that the state began to intervene more actively in the urban real estate market (Thienel, 1973: 31–44, 357–360).

While demographic change and state agency offer little analytic insight for this study of historical gentrification, explanations drawing on production-side and consumption-side theories open more fruitful avenues. In fact, the central argument this article wishes to make is that distinct processes of supply and demand-driven displacement occurred simultaneously – and, therefore, that explanations need to reflect this intertwined reality. Most of present-day research on gentrification focuses on the respective urban area affected. As a consequence, scholars of gentrification tend to disregard where displaced tenants move to or what consequences such inner-city migration has for the neighbourhoods that absorb the displaced. While consumption-side explanations may help us understand the historical influx of non-proletarian residents to the centre, they regularly fail when applied to working-class quarters. Berlin’s transforming city centre provided plenty of social and cultural attraction for a nascent middle class longing for entertainment and new urban identities. These newcomers were drawn here not only by large department stores, concert halls and museums that displayed art and archeological plunder, but also by a pompous architecture that reflected nationalist pride and exaltation in the parvenu years of imperial Berlin (Richie, 1999: 207–233). Despite the renowned villa suburbs that housed some of Berlin’s most prominent industrialists, the city centre appealed to many bourgeois residents also for occupational reasons. Similar to other German cities, bankers and businesspeople no less than their educated employees demanded central housing not only for urban attraction but also for the shorter distance to their daily places of work (Augustine, 1991: 49–51).

Yet unlike today, newcomers were not drawn to today’s Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain or Neukölln in the surrounding of the centre because of the aesthetics and amenities of these places. Rather, they were pushed here by a lack of alternatives. The pressure on lower-class residents in the emerging working-class quarters of Berlin resulted not so much from the expectations and lifestyles of a more affluent clientele but from the cyclical run on real estate, the disproportional construction of large apartments and the accelerating transformation of rental into owner-occupied units. Severely diminishing the share of affordable housing, these trends indicate that outside of the centre, gentrification was driven by capital rather than culture. Fueled by national unity and French reparation payments, the urban economy flourished in the immediate aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War (Lange, 1972: 171–237; Schmieder, 1968: 353–389). Yet, especially in places like Berlin, capital faced an increasingly self-confident workforce. Thanks to a buoyant demand for labour, in the early 1870s many skilled trades were able to enforce substantial wage increases together with a significantly shorter workday (Bernstein, 1907: 227–273; Reick, 2016: 148–154; Renzsch, 1980: 46–69, 80–92, 130–140; Weipert, 2013: 29–41). Given organised labour’s ability to push for a more favourable distribution of wealth, it was little surprise that holders of capital saw the real estate market as a lucrative alternative for investment. Pushing into the nascent mortgage business and a highly speculative land market, this ‘financial fix’ was hoped to bypass the profit risks that militant labour posed (Arrighi, 1978; Bernhardt, 1998; Silver, 2008: 39–40). Interestingly, critics at that time already suggested that the boom of the early 1870s epitomised what would later be discussed as a phase of over-accumulation (Harvey, 1984: 190–196; Jessop, 2006: 142–166). As the Demokratische Zeitung put it in 1872, the ‘rapidly increasing land prices clearly resulted from an over-excess of money’ (Demokratische Zeitung, 1872d: 6). Berlin’s real estate market, in other words, presented itself as a safe haven for capital in the years prior to the outbreak of the crisis of 1873 which shattered the belief in long-term, low-risk profit.

The latter observation hints at two important temporal insights. First, studies of gentrification 1.0 draw attention to the quick sequence of boom and bust that characterised national economies like that of late-19th-century Germany (cf. Wehler, 2008: 552–610). This fact requires further research, as it surely influenced historical patterns of urban displacement. However, I will focus on a second temporal aspect here. In the introduction to their widely acclaimed volume Gentrification of the City, Smith and Williams define their object of investigation as the ‘rehabilitation of working-class and derelict housing and the consequent transformation of an area into a middle-class neighborhood’ (Smith and Williams, 1986: 1). Yet this definition – together with the greater part of gentrification research in contemporary urban geography and sociology – utterly neglects the long-term historical dimension. Rather than studying gentrification merely as a process of re-habilitation that started sometime after the Second World War, we should understand the preceding processes of habilitation as a first wave of gentrification. This first wave of gentrification presumably came to a halt only with the rise of public housing and real estate market regulation at the dawn of the 20th century. Current dynamics of gentrification thus cannot be understood as an unprecedentedly new phenomenon in urbanisation. Rather, they seem to be resuming a multidirectional dynamic of displacement that characterised cities like imperial Berlin just as much as fin-de-siecle Paris or Progressive Era New York (Varga, 2013; Yates, 2015: 217–223).

This insight, I argue in closing, also points towards a new path for research on urbanisation past and present. Analysing patterns of displacement allows us to acknowledge an often violent element in the making of cities. In so doing, it draws our attention to past social movements and their demands towards the city. Our present-day notion of gentrification is at least partially influenced by more than three decades of organised resistance against the displacement and dislocation associated with it. Studying the movements these conflicts gave birth to, the social sciences have enriched enormously our understanding of urban contestation, but it often seems as if these struggles emerged out of thin air in the aftermath of the 1960s (Bernt et al., 2013; Harvey, 2008; Holm, 2008; Mayer, 2009; Pickvance, 2003). The fact that we know so little about historical opposition to urban displacement does not mean that lower-class urbanites lacked a notion of space. Rather, it means that we have largely failed to inquire into spatial contestations of the past. But if there was, as this article suggests, Gentrification 1.0, there might also have been a historical Rights to the City struggle that opposed the commodification of housing and the sole prerogative of the real estate market. It is time, therefore, to explore the pre-history of urban movements.