Experimenting on racialized neighbourhoods: Internationale Bauausstellung Hamburg and the urban laboratory in Hamburg–Wilhelmsburg

Introduction

For almost a century, Wilhelmsburg was considered no place to live. Despite its close proximity to downtown Hamburg, Germany, the island in the Elbe river was regarded as a place where work was done and money was made (Zukunftskonferenz Wilhelmsburg, 2002), and where the city’s loudest and dirtiest functions were hidden from view (IBA Hamburg, 2010). City planners did not consider it an appropriate place for residential development, except to house the people who worked in the local shipyards, factories, and railway (Geschichtswerkstatt Wilhelmsburg und Hafen, n.d.). This notion defined its planning for many decades and produced a space that appeared to be ‘a patchwork of opposites’ (Keesenberg, 1989, translation by author) in terms of the variety of land uses, but that was shaped by a central logic of devaluation and separation from the rest of the city.

By the time the city-state of Hamburg initiated the Hamburg International Building Exhibition (IBA Hamburg) on the island in the early 2000s, Wilhelmsburg had developed a reputation as a ‘problem neighbourhood’, a ‘neighbourhood in crisis’, a ‘social hotspot’, and ‘the Bronx of the North’ (cf. Adanalı, 2013; Barth, 2000; Brinkbäumer, 2000; Hamburger Abendblatt, 2000; Twickel, 2011). The reputation turned on perceptions of the island as a neglected place of ‘poverty, unemployment, and foreigners’ (Gipp, 2001, translation by author); Wilhelmsburg had become a racialized space that was stigmatized because of its association with immigrants and racialized people (cf. James, 2012; Razack, 2002), which is to say people who are perceived as not belonging in Germany based on their hair and skin colour, name, religion, or language (cf. El-Tayeb, 2016).

The 2006–2013 IBA Hamburg was part of Hamburg’s ‘Leap Across the Elbe’, a framework that represented an about-face in the city’s planning towards growth along a southward development axis (Behörde für Stadtentwicklung und Umwelt, n.d.). Located at the middle of this axis, Wilhelmsburg gained political and planning attention not only as an area that was hungry for public investment (Zukunftskonferenz Wilhelmsburg, 2002), but as the ‘most important area of development for the city’, according to the city’s planners (Walter, 2005: 72, translation by author). IBA Hamburg was envisioned as an engine for development in Wilhelmsburg, to create space for new middle-class residents (Hellweg, 2013) while ‘integrating’ into the city a neighbourhood viewed as problematic.

IBAs (Internationale Bauausstellungen) are large-scale projects that create and transform built space, showcasing architectural innovation while addressing ostensibly pressing urban needs. Past IBAs, in what has become a 100-year German urban planning and architecture tradition, have transformed deindustrialized zones in the Ruhr valley, parts of the former East Germany, and the crumbling housing of 1980’s West Berlin (IBA Hamburg, 2015; Lütke Daldrup and Zlonicky, 2010; MacDougall, 2011). Like most recent IBAs, IBA Hamburg was framed as ‘an experimental field for urban development’ (Lütke Daldrup and Zlonicky, 2010: 14). The project-cum-event, which included more than 60 building and renovation projects, approached the island as a space for ‘real-time research and development. Like a laboratory. Except that the laboratory is in fact an entire district in the city and research leads to actual built space’ (IBA Hamburg, 2015). In addition to developing the urban landscape, IBA Hamburg (2011b) aimed to solve the ‘major social issues of our time’ through the production of knowledge that would shape urban life in Hamburg and beyond.

IBA Hamburg is not alone in embracing the laboratory moniker. Urban labs are proliferating, such as Google’s ‘Sidewalk Labs’ which is active in Toronto, where I live. In a 2014 special issue of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Andrew Karvonen and Bas van Heur (2014) argue that the urban lab is a discourse and a structure. It is a ‘new-old’ (386) concept that references a laboratory tradition, while also implying an innovative embrace of risk, uncertainty, and participation. Urban laboratories tend to be oriented towards producing knowledge in pursuit of ‘more desirable futures’ (387), suggest Karvonen and Van Heur, yet they are also part of a broader discourse that downplays or ignores power inequalities between urban actors and institutions (Karvonen and Van Heur, 2014).

In this article, I take this analysis a step further to ask what the urban laboratory discourse and structure achieves in a context where inequality has been central to the planning of the urban space itself, taking IBA Hamburg as a case study. I became interested in IBA Hamburg in 2011 while on a graduate study tour I heard the city’s head planner at the time argue that the key to solving Wilhelmsburg’s problems was to transform its population. I was struck by this formulation and have since been studying IBA Hamburg and Wilhelmsburg to understand who its population was thought to be (Chamberlain, 2012, 2013) and what transformations are actually taking place from the perspective of residents (Lintschnig, 2018). I draw in this article primarily on Foucauldian discourse analysis (Hook, 2001; Jäger and Maier, 2009) of IBA Hamburg’s considerable range of publications, including books, websites, videos, and newsletters, as well as on archival research and recent interviews with several planners and politicians in the neighbourhood. I argue that in IBA Hamburg the urban laboratory positions as new, innovative, and experimental urban planning strategies that are none of these things. The ‘experiment’ unfolding in Hamburg–Wilhelmsburg is one of ‘social mixing’, a strategy that has obtained common sense status in German planning and beyond (Bayer et al., 2014: 87; Münch, 2009), though it mobilizes racial categories to attempt the spatial control of racialized people (Ha, 2014; Haritaworn, 2012; Holm, 2009; Kipfer and Goonewardena, 2014). The practice of such control, including to their supposed benefit, is a practice that is as old as racialization itself and has been reflected in European cities for many hundreds of years (Nightingale, 2012).

Since an experiment should involve a new element of some kind (see Van Laak, 2006), I conclude that IBA Hamburg’s labelling of Wilhelmsburg as an urban laboratory is more discourse than structure. IBA Hamburg uses the ‘new-old’ qualities, particularly the consequence-free control of objects within a detached and bounded space, to reinforce the racialization of Wilhelmsburg residents, to legitimize mixing as though the likely impacts on vulnerable residents are unknown, and to frame those risks as knowledge production. A brief look at the laboratory discourse in colonial contexts reveals how old these racialized uses of ‘laboratorization’ are and supports the contention of Black German scholars and German scholars of Colour that colonial logics of dehumanization and objectification continue to inform how racism manifests in Germany today.

I begin with an exploration of the laboratory, drawing on work from laboratory studies and urban sociology to illuminate the imaginative infrastructure that enacts qualities of containment and control, delineates space for knowledge production, and confers power on the ‘investigators’ (Gieryn, 2006; Kohler, 2002).

The theory of the laboratory

A laboratory is a deliberately constructed space of knowledge production in which experimentation is designated to take place (Karvonen and Van Heur, 2014). Its deliberate construction can be understood in two senses: it is delineated and made into an experimental venue, and it is an ‘imaginative infrastructure’, a collection of imagined qualities that give it meaning in contrast to other places (Kohler, 2002). These imagined qualities confer particular power and authority on the investigators who construct and use laboratories (Gieryn, 2006).

Walls are a key feature of the imaginative infrastructure, separating a controlled inside from the uncontrolled outside (Guggenheim, 2012). The messiness of the world outside the laboratory is kept out, creating what are sometimes referred to as ‘placeless places’ (Kohler, 2002) designed to de-situate scientific experiments and re-situate them at a distance from everyday life. Distance offers the possibility of highly controlled and regulated experiments (Guggenheim, 2012; Strebel and Jacobs, 2014) as laboratory walls ‘segregate out potential contaminants—both natural and human’ (Gieryn, 2006: 6). Within the laboratory walls are objects, people, and instruments of manipulation and measurement; everything extraneous or disorganized is excluded.

Laboratory boundaries also serve a containment function, limiting the dangers of experimentation to within the laboratory’s walls (Strebel and Jacobs, 2014). Michael Guggenheim (2012), who explores the history of the laboratory in sociology, suggests that this crucial feature can be referred to as producing ‘consequence-free research’. Guggenheim (2012: 102, drawing on Krohn and Weyer, 1994) explains:

The practical operations in the lab, as well as epistemic operations of science, are both supposed to be without real-world consequences and reversible. As operations in the lab, an experiment, if it goes wrong, poses no danger to the outside world (obviously, if it works, it may be implemented, and then change the world, but the experiment itself does not).

In control, there is power. ‘Laboratory walls’, argues Thomas Gieryn (2006: 5), ‘enable scientists to gain exquisite control over the objects of their analysis. Wild nature gets repositioned in a technical and cultural environment that gives all power to the investigators’. Instead of dealing with research objects where they are and when they might be (subject to temporal limits or occurrences), the laboratory allows experimental manipulation to take place on the investigators’ terms (Knorr Cetina, 1995: 145–146). The power of the laboratory thus includes defining what will be excluded, what will be contained, and under what conditions.

This power and control are, however, imperfect and incomplete. Laboratory boundaries are necessarily porous, to enable laboratory products to travel and be used in the world (Latour, 1983). The partiality of containment is a source of unease and doubt (Guggenheim, 2012). Yet the laboratory is still an attractive technology because control, detachment, segregation, and so on are in fact conceptual qualities with particular epistemic virtues on which the scientist may trade to claim ‘privileged access to the truth’ (Gieryn, 2006: 11).

The experimental field: Hamburg–Wilhelmsburg

Wilhelmsburg is the largest river island in Europe and home to 55,000 people (Statistisches Amt für Hamburg und Schleswig-Holstein, 2018). While IBA Hamburg’s CEO referred to it as ‘terra incognita for the city’s inhabitants’ (Hellweg, 2010: 115), Wilhelmsburg in fact had a clear and distinctly negative reputation before the IBA began. In the film Soul Kitchen by Hamburg director Fatih Akin (2009), for example, two high school friends meet after years. One says that his business, the ‘soul kitchen’, is in Wilhelmsburg. There is a pause, a beat, and then a horrified look on his friend’s face that speaks volumes about how Wilhelmsburg was perceived from the outside. Media called the island ‘the Bronx of the North’ and ‘the Balkans of the North’, in reporting that focused on violence, poverty, and the concentration of ‘foreigners’ in the neighbourhood, particularly after several high-profile deaths in the year 2000 (Barth, 2000; Brinkbäumer, 2000; Gipp, 2001). In a nationally televised debate between candidates for the German Chancellorship, Wilhelmsburg was raised as an example of a ‘failed neighbourhood’ (Michael Weinreich, 2018, personal communication).

The island’s image to some extent mirrored conditions of relative poverty and unemployment that are still reflected in neighbourhood statistics. The unemployment rate in 2016 was almost twice the Hamburg average, 9.4% compared to 5.3%, and in 2013 the average yearly income was roughly half that of the city as a whole (€21,890 versus €39,054) and just a fifth that of the city’s richest neighbourhood (Statistisches Amt für Hamburg und Schleswig-Holstein, 2017, 2018). 22.5% of Wilhelmsburgers rely on social assistance to make ends meet, compared with 10.3% of residents city-wide, and 25% of apartments in Wilhelmsburg are designated social housing (Statistisches Amt für Hamburg und Schleswig-Holstein, 2018: 48). As an historically working-class neighbourhood, Wilhelmsburg has been a centre of wealth production but not of wealth, and processes of deindustrialization and the containerization and automation of Hamburg’s port hit the neighbourhood particularly hard (Zukunftskonferenz Wilhelmsburg, 2002).

Yet as the labels ‘Bronx’ and ‘Balkans’ hint, an imagination of Wilhelmsburg as outside of Germany was just as crucial to the island’s image and stigmatization. For decades it has been a racialized space: a space associated with racialized bodies and naturalized as their ‘correct’ place (James, 2012; Razack, 2002). Racialization, in this context, is defined as ‘the attribution of collective quasi-biological and or/cultural qualities that allow the perception of certain groups as not belonging, even when they are already part of society’ (El-Tayeb, 2016: 34, translation by author). Racialization produces ‘race’ (Ahmed, 2002), which is to say socially constructed categories that ‘once fixed, render groups of people as inferior, thereby justifying their marginalization and exploitation’ (Mirchandani et al., 2011: 120). In Germany, racialization maintains continuities with the categories and practices of hierarchization, objectification, and dehumanization that were central to German colonialism (Adjei, in Della et al., 2018; El-Tayeb, 2005; Ha, 2010; Opitz et al., 1992), such that Germanness depends upon racialization to define its others and itself (El-Tayeb, 2016) in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways that have been a taboo subject for decades. In Wilhelmsburg the overlapping social, political, and spatial aspects of racialization are illustrated.

Many Wilhelmsburg residents belong to groups that are treated as racial others in German society in general. Thirty-four per cent of Wilhelmsburgers are listed as ‘foreigners’ in most recent statistics and 60.4% of adults, 78.9% of youth, are labelled as people with ‘migration backgrounds’ (Statistisches Amt für Hamburg und Schleswig-Holstein, 2018). ‘Migration background’ is a racializing census category that defines people as distinct based on a family experience of migration, regardless of whether they immigrated themselves (Ahyoud et al., 2018; Institut für Migrations- und Rassismusforschung Hamburg, 2011). It is racializing because it is inherited by birth, carried in the body as an apparently immutable quality, and used to structure national belonging (Ahmed, 2002; El-Tayeb, 2016). In common parlance ‘migration background’ tends to be used simply to distinguish ‘others’ from people considered to be white, and thus contributes to what Mithu Sanyal (2019) calls the ‘3-H Formula’ of Germanness. The first two Hs – hair colour and skin colour (Haarfarbe and Hautfarbe) – determine whether one is perceived as a person with migration background in the everyday, while the third H – haemoglobin – determines whether one is considered a full citizen of Germany based on a persistent logic of belonging based on descent (Sanyal, 2019).

As the statistics denote racialization, they obscure the actual diversity of Wilhelmsburg residents. The island has been home to a significant Sinti community for several hundred years (Journalisten der Henri-Nannen-Schule, 2015). According to a recent district report listing Wilhelmsburgers’ ‘countries of origin’, 43% of residents have roots in Germany, 22.4% in Turkey, followed by Poland, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia/Montenegro, Afghanistan, Portugal, and Ghana (Bezirksamt Hamburg-Mitte, 2015), to name just the top-listed countries, and indeed to ignore for a moment how a focus on ties to elsewhere migrantizes (constructs as migrant) some German citizens (see Sow, 2018). Sixty-six per cent of Wilhelmsburgers, whatever their ‘country of origin’, are German citizens (Statistisches Amt für Hamburg und Schleswig-Holstein, 2018).

This obscuring of diversity has also been present in the racialization of the neighbourhood itself. ‘Problem neighbourhood’, the ‘Bronx of the North’: these media and political discourses depend centrally on an image of the ‘ghetto’, which has historically signified a space to which racialized people are confined (Stehle, 2006; Tsianos, 2013). The concept has travelled from Europe to the United States and back again, picking up anti-Black connotations on its way, while maintaining central tropes of violence, lawlessness, and social decay (Stehle, 2006). ‘The ghetto is constructed as a patriarchal, violent, and non-European space in the centre of Europe… a space that is “a problem” that “we” need to deal with’ (Stehle, 2006: 61). The ‘problem neighbourhood’ discourse, which is common in Germany in particular, likewise connotes a space that is ‘wicked, dangerous, and foreign’ (Keller, 2015, translation by author). These discourses are taken up in relation to neighbourhoods like Wilhelmsburg where there is poverty and low-quality housing, where the migrant and racialized populations are larger than average, and where the concentration of Turkish-speaking people in particular raises the spectre of supposed self-segregation (Çağlar, 2001; Stehle, 2006). Despite 60 years of history in German cities, Turkish communities continue to be seen as outsiders within (Çalışkan, 2011; Hinze, 2013), now more on the basis of religion than culture through a conflation of ‘Muslim’, with ‘Turkish’ and/or ‘non-European’ (Ramm, 2010; Yildiz, 2009). This anti-Muslim racism plays a role in Wilhelmsburg’s image as well, where the Muslim population is estimated at 18,000 people (Trautwein, 2014) and the variety of neighbourhood mosques stands as a visible sign of decades of Muslim placemaking (see Kuppinger, 2011).

The racialization of Wilhelmsburg as a space has not only been discursive, however, but also practical. City of Hamburg and IBA Hamburg publications acknowledge to some extent that the city contributed to the concentration of low-income and ‘migrant’ people in Wilhelmsburg over time, though racialization itself is ignored. The dominant planning discourse in Hamburg emphasizes two planning decisions in this regard: designation of the island as a space of work, and the decision to largely abandon it after a flood in 1962. The first decision emerged from the leadership of Fritz Schumacher, who was an architect and the Head of Urban Planning for the city from 1909 to 1933. Schumacher famously argued that ‘Geest land is for living, and marshland is for working’ (quoted in Zukunftskonferenz Wilhelmsburg, 2002: 5, translation by author), and thus that residential development should concentrate on the high ground to the north of the river Elbe, while the marshland of the Elbe islands was best suited to labour, and to industrial and harbour-related land uses. His formulation is often referenced by Hamburg (cf. Behörde für Stadtentwicklung und Umwelt, 2005) to explain how Wilhelmsburg developed equal measures of industry, workers housing, and farmland (Eckardt, 2017).

The second planning decision emerged after February 1962, when a storm surge from the North Sea broke through dikes at several points in northern Germany, killing 300 people, 200 of them in Wilhelmsburg. Most of the Wilhelmsburgers who died were living in makeshift housing in a low-lying area (Paech, 2008). After the flood, Hamburg moved to abandon housing in the northern part of the island and was stopped only by protests from some residents who wanted to stay (IBA Hamburg, 2011c). Parts of the island were nonetheless declared unfit for anything but industrial and manufacturing uses, and the city later called an official halt to all renovation and investment in housing (Paech, 2008). As many as 10,000 people moved away at this time, or as one planner puts it: ‘everybody who could afford to do so—only the low-income people stayed’ (Kai Dietrich, quoted in Rowe, 2015: 40). Those who stayed experienced an acceleration in the siting of ‘undesirable elements from the city of Hamburg’ (Schultz and Sieweke, 2008: 139), that over time included space-eating logistic centres and container yards, expanded highways cutting through the landscape, a sewage treatment plant, and a toxic waste dump (Humburg and Rothschuh, 2018).

The focus on these two decisions as the foundations of the ‘problem neighbourhood’ evades the specifically racialized aspects of the island’s development. When Schumacher declared the Elbe Islands a space for work rather than for living, 33,000 people were in fact already living in Wilhelmsburg (Behörde für Schule und Berufsbildung, n.d.), but they were largely people who were not considered to be German citizens, let alone the proper subjects of urban planning. From the earliest years of industrialization, the recruitment and employment of racialized labour was central to the development of the island (Geschichtswerkstatt Wilhelmsburg und Hafen, 2008, n.d.). From Polish-speaking workers in the late 19th century to Southern Europeans and North Africans in the so-called guest worker programme of the mid-20th century, Wilhelmsburg’s population and housing structure was built on the recruitment of people who were considered to be racially or culturally inferior to do the dirty and dangerous work of German industry. The pattern was one of low wages, poor living conditions, and vulnerability to the vicissitudes of employers, based on a differential system of entitlements in German law and policy (Chin, 2009; Dietz, 2008; Geschichtswerkstatt Wilhelmsburg und Hafen, 2008; Ha, 2007b). This is not to mention the forced labourers of the Second World War, many of them from Eastern Europe, who built for example the flak bunker that would eventually become an IBA Hamburg project (IBA Hamburg and Geschichtswerkstatt Wilhelmsburg und Hafen, 2013; Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung Hamburg, 2007).

Though the city assigns some responsibility for Wilhelmsburg’s ‘problems’ to its own past planning and politics, it fails to fully acknowledge how it specifically developed Wilhelmsburg, including its racialization. When the city renewed its planning of Wilhelmsburg as a space for work and waste after the flood, it continued to allocate housing to immigrants (Paech, 2008), and from the 1970s to specifically concentrate social housing on the island (Eckardt, 2017). It thus deliberately produced conditions of environmental racism and inequity: ‘the convergence of undesirable people together with undesirable land uses’ (Gosine and Teelucksingh, 2008: 48).

This sketch of Wilhelmsburg’s development as a racialized and stigmatized space illustrates some key aspects of the context in which IBA Hamburg’s urban lab is situated. The neighbourhood was produced as a ‘problem’ through many decades of racialization and concentration of racialized and low-income people on the island. Though IBA Hamburg positions its interventions and the city’s more broadly as ‘new’, the practices of experimentation in racialized space is quite old. As I will discuss in the following section, it traces back to European colonial history, in which racialized power and control were framed as knowledge production, and in which racial hierarchies made vast spaces and populations apparently available for experimentation.

Ruling through science: The colonial career of experimentation

There is a long tradition of exploitation of racialized communities in the name of knowledge production and of research as a tool of oppression and extraction (Smith, 2012; Sudbury, 2007). The laboratorization of a racialized space, where ‘walls’ have already been established by racial boundaries and need only be rearticulated as laboratory walls to serve investigators’ purposes, is not a particularly innovative practice. This has been done explicitly for example in 1920’s Chicago, where the Chicago School looked at African American ‘ghettos’ as fascinating ‘laboratory specimen’ (Wirth, 1928: 232–233, 282).

In the context of colonialism, British colonizers declared Africa a living laboratory, designating the entire continent for European knowledge production (Tilley, 2011). In U.S. colonial rule, Americans declared the Philippines a laboratory in which to conduct contained experiments on health and disease (Anderson, 1992). Scholars of colonial North Africa, Indonesia, India, and Puerto Rico have all shown that colonies have been treated as spaces of experimentation, especially for technologies that were new, not well supported in Europe, were themselves spatial, or which contributed directly to colonial rule (Fusté, 2010; Legg, 2007; Stoler and Cooper, 1997; Wright, 1997).

Laboratory discourses and structures in this context were closely tied to the imagination of colonized people as problematic and knowable, and as benefiting from laboratory control (Anderson, 1992; Fusté, 2010). The racial boundaries drawn between Europeans and ‘Others’, and between Germans and Africans, were articulated as natural hierarchies that positioned Germans as inherent rulers and Africans as closer to nature, savagery, and the animal (El-Tayeb, 2005). The designation of spaces of experimentation could be considered appropriate and necessary because ‘the colonized were construed as a collection of hygienically degenerate types, requiring constant surveillance, instruction, and sometimes isolation’ (Anderson, 1992: 526).

German colonialism in Africa so emphasized the role of knowledge production that it has been called ‘scientific colonialism’ or ‘ruling through science’ (Zimmerman, 2014: 105). Experimentation was imagined as beneficial to colonized Africans, and indeed as an educational opportunity in which they could acquire skills and values that they were thought to lack (Zimmerman, 2014). Both the products of experimentation and the laboratory relations themselves were useful to the colonial project; the imaginative infrastructure of the laboratory enacted relations of command and appropriation, harnessing stolen land and labour to German interests, while naturalizing those relations as scientific (Anderson, 1992; Neill, 2014; Zimmerman, 2014). Yet German colonizers were often ‘experimenting’ primarily with well-worn practices of violence and control, as well as with racial hygiene and strategies of apartheid (Van Laak, 2006), enacting the ‘will to laboratorization’ (as Strebel and Jacobs, 2014 call it) as a practice of superiority and colonial rule.

German colonial science also experimented on African bodies themselves. Eugen Fischer studied the colonial ‘bastard population’, as it was called at the time, to demonstrate the dangers of mixing (El-Tayeb, 2005). German scientists exploited the Herero and Nama victims of Germany’s first genocide for knowledge production, collecting skulls and body parts of the dead, and experimenting on those imprisoned and still alive (Zimmerman, 2001). This macabre yoking of experimentation and racial violence underscores how the authority of science has been used in German history as moral justification for atrocities (El-Tayeb, 2005).

The practice of laboratorizing racialized spaces and people thus has a long and disturbing history, particularly as an articulation of authority and control. The power of the ‘investigator’ has historically been used to harm racialized people while calling it improvement, development, and knowledge production. Given the ‘societal praxis of dehistoricization’ (Ha, 2003: 56, translation by author) that exists in relation to racialization and racism in Germany today, it is particularly salient that this is a German history as much as it is a European colonial history more broadly.

With its laboratorization of Wilhelmsburg, IBA Hamburg retreads some of this disturbing territory. It is not a ‘colonial’ project, but it mobilizes and depends upon racialization both for its logic and its content, presenting Wilhelmsburg and its residents as problematic and control as beneficial. The laboratory conditions are just as useful to the city as are the products of ‘experimentation’; to the extent that an experiment exists at all, it is one of ‘social mixing’ implemented not only by IBA Hamburg, but by concurrent city policy initiatives. IBA Hamburg provides a shield from critique for the city government and embeds the planned control of racialized and poor people in a narrative of knowledge production. Yet knowledge production is not a neutral undertaking, it mobilizes the assumptions and world views upon which a project is built (Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva, 2008), which here are assumptions that Wilhelmsburg residents themselves are the source of the neighbourhood’s problems.

‘The laboratory is an entire district in the city’

IBA Hamburg was initiated by the city-state of Hamburg in 2005 to drive investment and development primarily in Wilhelmsburg. Along with the International Garden Show, which also culminated in a 2013 ‘event year’ (Behörde für Stadtentwicklung und Umwelt, 2013), the massive redevelopment project provided a framework in which to undertake 60 plus projects in a relatively short period (for details, see IBA Hamburg, 2018). IBA Hamburg achieved this through €1 billion of public investment and what one planner who prefered to remain anonymous described to me as a ‘positive state of emergency’, in which various departments and bodies were empowered to work together quickly for the duration of the project (Anonymous, 2018, personal communication).

IBA Hamburg’s (2015) website referred to its undertakings in Hamburg–Wilhelmsburg as ‘real-time research and development. Like a laboratory. Except that the laboratory is in fact an entire district in the city and research leads to actual built space’. The project’s mission was framed as producing knowledge for the future of the metropolis (IBA Hamburg, 2011a, 2015), and this orientation was reinforced by gestures like calling its conferences ‘IBA Laboratories’ (IBA Hamburg, 2017). The IBA did not, however, outline any explicit programme for experimental research in its extensive publications, nor did it detail how any research findings might be documented or analysed. A short-term evaluation of neighbourhood changes began in 2010 as a result of local concerns that the project was one of state-led gentrification (see Analyse & Konzepte, 2013; on gentrification cf. Arbeitskreis Umstrukturierung Wilhelmsburg, 2013; IBA Hamburg, 2013a). Those evaluations ended with the 2013 event, though the IBA noted that its effects would only become clear over time (IBA Hamburg, 2013b).

IBA Hamburg’s use of the ‘new–old’ urban laboratory discourse/structure thus appears to be quite superficial. It is used here and there in the project’s materials, but without real definition and outline. In this superficiality it engaged some of the qualities that Karvonen and Van Heur link to the urban lab, particularly the embrace of risk and uncertainty. Large-scale urban development projects have long been recognized as especially risky undertakings. Some projects have made ‘big, barely reparable mistakes’ in Germany and beyond, they have created divided spaces and exacerbated social and economic segregation (Lütke Daldrup and Zlonicky, 2010: 10). Calling the island a laboratory contributed to the appearance of risk management and allowed the project to characterize its work as connected to the mainland only when it was convenient. Any unforeseen or undesirable impact could be contained and embedded within the narrative of experimentation. This was particularly bold considering how directly past city planning had contributed to the ‘problems’ that IBA Hamburg aimed to solve.

The nature of the risks and uncertainty being managed is revealed by looking beyond the IBA Hamburg to see precisely what kind of development it was meant to drive in Wilhelmsburg. The city’s agenda was to ‘mix’ the neighbourhood, a practice that presents a risk of displacement for low income and racialized residents (Bridge et al., 2012; Lees, 2008). Shortly before the mega-project the city began a subsidy programme to encourage students to move to the island, and particularly to take over larger apartments (Hamburgische Investitions- und Förderbank, 2016). At the same time a directive was given to public housing providers, which together account for over 50% of housing in Wilhelmsburg, to ‘reach out to socially stable families who do not have a migrant background’, in order to ‘improve the social mix’ of the neighbourhood (Adanalı, 2013: 97, translation by author). In practice, this has meant that people with ‘migrant-sounding names’ have had their housing applications passed over (Adanalı, 2013, translation by author), a practice which is legal due to an exception in the country’s equality laws when it comes to the so-called threat of ghettoization (Bundesministerium der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz, 2006). Though these strategies, including IBA Hamburg, all claim as their goal the attraction of ‘middle class’ people to the island, and thus purport to involve only a mixing of classes, the racial content of the mixing is clear in the specific practices and in the outline of the problem that they are meant to solve.

Here IBA Hamburg and its ‘laboratory’ played a significant role, problematizing Wilhelmsburg and its residents, positioning them as in need of ‘experimental’ mixing by emphasizing their racialization. While I have explored the racialization of Wilhelmsburg in IBA Hamburg in depth elsewhere (Chamberlain, 2012, 2013) it bears brief highlighting here how racialized residents appeared in IBA Hamburg’s books and website as a problem to be solved. On IBA Hamburg’s website to 2011, for example, Wilhelmsburg residents appeared in two main discursive forms: as a racialized, abstracted mass, and as a handful of token bodies in ethnic costumes. In both of these forms they were linked with conflict and social segregation, and targeted for integration. On pages presenting the general logic of the project, IBA Hamburg (2011a) stated for example that ‘as the diversity of cultures in our cities increases, so too do the conflicts: and segregation is a close companion to diversity…the divides that threaten to appear in the metropolis need to be overcome’. Vague and yet definitive, this is typical of the project’s online statements in the years before its building projects were completed. It uses what Foucault called ‘claims to nature’ to produce ‘segregation’ as a natural by-product of ‘diversity’ and to tie it to the mere presence of ‘diverse’ bodies (bodies categorized through racialization).

An emphasis on the value of integration for Wilhelmsburg rounded out the project’s framing of racialized residents as non-German and illustrated how the ‘divides threatening to appear in the metropolis’ would be overcome. Among the solutions that the IBA offered was an Education Drive (Bildungsoffensive), involving a concentration on improving Wilhelmsburg’s ‘learning landscape’ through physical spaces and coordination of educational resources. A pamphlet on the Drive argued that ‘through the improved learning landscape the societal integration chances of residents should be increased and the Elbe Islands made more attractive as a living location’ (Von Kalben et al., 2010: 1, translation by author). The only place where future racialized residents of Wilhelmsburg appeared in sketches and architectural renderings for IBA Hamburg was in images of educational facilities that featured women in hijab.

To the question of why an urban development project was getting involved in education, IBA Hamburg (2010) argued that ‘the socio-spatial image of our cities perfectly matches the educational profile’ (25). This is to say that Wilhelmsburgers are less likely to finish high school or go on to higher education than their peers city-wide. Though the United Nations has now reported multiple times on the structural disadvantaging of racialized, immigrant, and impoverished young people by the German school system (UN Human Rights Council, 2007, 2010, 2017), this issue tends to be attributed mainly to parents, repeating the blaming of individuals and communities for structural problems. It should thus be no surprise that the Education Drive is not credited with much achievement in Wilhelmsburg (cf. Zukunft Elbinsel Wilhelmsburg, 2019). As IBA Hamburg wrapped up in 2013, local activists were declaring the Education Drive a failure (Arbeitskreis Umstrukturierung Wilhelmsburg, n.d.) and Wilhelmsburg educators were writing open letters about the systematic under-resourcing of schools on the island (Das Kollegium der Nelson-Mandela-Schule, 2013).

IBA Hamburg’s mobilization of narratives of foreignness, conflict, segregation, and integration in Wilhelmsburg achieved something in and of itself. ‘Integration’ is a discourse and practice that subjugates immigrants and racialized people to the authority of the dominant society into which they should supposedly integrate (Ha, 2007a). Integration requires ‘a national culture and universal values (possessed automatically by all “original citizens”) in which newcomers must be instructed’ (Razack, 2008: 129–130). The links among diversity, conflict, and segregation rest firmly within current European discourse about the ghetto, in which the responsibility for conditions in urban areas is pinned on racialized people (El-Tayeb, 2012: 82). Rather than addressing the foundations of inequality, integration is posited as a kind of ‘development aid’ (see Ramm, 2010), or a civilizing mission (Ha, 2007a). IBA Hamburg thus reproduces Wilhelmsburg and its residents as non-German through its emphasis on integration, while at the same time reproducing a Germany into which they and the neighbourhood can be integrated.

In the context of the urban lab, these moves position residents as available for experimentation and as in need of the specific ‘experiment’ that the city had already begun: the ‘mixing’ of the neighbourhood. ‘The myth of social mix’ is a longstanding common sense in German planning and beyond (Bayer et al., 2014; Münch, 2009) that turns on the assumption that ‘the moving in of higher-income earners and of educated middle-class German families supposedly makes neighbourhoods better’ (Holm, in Bayer et al., 2014: 8, translation by author). It is called a myth because it is based on a shaky evidentiary foundation that assumes that the problem for people who live in stigmatized, low-income neighbourhoods is that they live among too many poor and racialized people (for discussion and evidence to the contrary, see Drever, 2004; Harlander, 2012; Holm, 2009; Münch, 2009; Oberwittler, 2007; Saville-Smith et al., 2015; Van Ham, 2012). With this as the problem, mixing offers a solution, as a strategy to attempt control of racialized and poor people through a combination of dispersal and proximity (Kipfer and Goonewardena, 2014), though there is ample evidence that this risks displacement and damaging of neighbourhood networks (cf. August, 2014; Bridge et al., 2012; Lees, 2008).

Just as the urban laboratory is a ‘mechanism of control and distribution’ (Karvonen and Van Heur, 2014: 382), so too is social mixing, and the ‘more desirable futures’ (380) it promises are not necessarily for long-time residents in the neighbourhood. On one level it seems the object of experimentation in Wilhelmsburg is the neighbourhood’s racialization itself; however, I find that social mixing cannot be considered an experiment at all. Social mixing is not new or innovative, it is a continuation of existing patterns in the urban spatial management of racialized communities, including specifically in Germany (MacDougall, 2011; Stehle, 2006). An experiment requires some new element, whatever it may be, not just the repetition of well-worn strategies of domination (Van Laak, 2006).

It thus appears that IBA Hamburg’s urban laboratory is largely rhetoric to reinforce existing patterns of development, as Karvonen and Van Heur warned. This should give pause to those considering taking up the urban laboratory discourse/structure. By approaching its work uncritically, the urban lab legitimizes and makes space for a ‘racialized technique of recasting relations of domination’ (Kipfer and Goonewardena, 2014: 103). It reproduces and furthers the longstanding devaluation of neighbourhood residents in racial terms, instead of pushing towards the realization of a city for all. The colonial continuity is particularly clear, as German scholars of Colour and Black German scholars have argued is often the case (El-Tayeb, 2005; Ha, 2003; Opitz et al., 1992). This is disappointing considering the public resources poured into the effort; Wilhelmsburgers and residents of similarly racialized and stigmatized neighbourhoods deserve a real change rather than attempts to obscure the risks of dominant planning models to their well-being.

Conclusion

In this article, I explored the urban laboratory as it was mobilized by the International Building Exhibition in Hamburg–Wilhelmsburg. Based on IBA Hamburg’s extensive publications, as well as on archival documents and interviews with local planners and politicians, I argued that the urban laboratory in Wilhelmsburg does not offer any of the newness or innovation that the discourse/structure can promise. It uses qualities of the ‘new–old’ concept to reinforce the racialization of Wilhelmsburg residents, to legitimize mixing as though the likely impacts on vulnerable residents are unknown, and to frame those risks as knowledge production.

It thus reproduces existing patterns of development in the neighbourhood, as theorists of the urban lab warn can be the case. As these patterns are of racialized inequality and environmental racism, this is of serious concern, as is the uncritical laboratorization of racialized space that is well-known from colonial contexts. The laboratory experiment here is not an experiment at all, but rather the old strategy of social mixing that has long held common sense status in German planning despite its dependence on racialized categories of difference in service of spatial control. The outcomes of such mixing for racialized people are a pressing area for future research.