BIENNALE ARCHITETTURA 2016 — NATIONAL PARTICIPATION OF GERMANY

MAKING HEIMAT. GERMANY, ARRIVAL COUNTRY is a response to the arrival of over a million refugees in Germany during 2015. The need for temporary accommodation on short-call is urgent, but just as urgent is the need for new ideas and reliable approaches to integration.
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EXAMPLE: DONG XUAN CENTER, BERLIN-LICHTENBERG The Dong Xuan Center is a huge trading center for goods and services of all kinds deep in East Berlin. The property is zoned commercial, which means that only wholesale business can be operated here and, in exceptional cases, services. But hardly anyone abides by this. Those who end up at the Dong Xuan Center are mostly people who have migrated from central Vietnam as well as from China, India, and Pakistan to escape poverty. In many cases they are unqualified and have no knowledge of German, and some of them don’t have a work or residence permit either. As a result, the 88,900 m2 facility in Berlin-Lichtenberg has seen a shadow economy with lighter and darker gray areas establish itself, although many people have managed to make the step up from illegality into regular employment.
Marietta Schwarz, journalist

About a thousand people work at the Dong Xuan Center in Berlin-Lichtenberg, many of them twelve to fifteen hours a day. The infrastructure allows new arrivals to start working almost immediately. Anyone who does not want to lease commercial space right away can tear the appropriate phone number from an announcement on the notice board: “Waitress wanted for Vietnamese restaurant” or “Cook wanted for Chinese restaurant.”

The series “Learning from Neukölln” by the photographer Florian Thein shows ground floor scenes in Berlin-Neukölln.

Since the 1990s, the increase in self-employed migrant workers has been considerably higher than among the native German population. Explanation:
1. the niche model—being self-employed allows one to develop specific qualities and skills and to serve one’s own community;
2. the culture model—self-employment is very important in many countries of origin (in southern Europe the rate of self-employment is much higher than in Germany);
3. the response model—self-employment as a response to the increasing difficulty of finding other ways of earning a living on the job market.
All three models suggest that making spatial resources available for the development of a small-scale “ethnic economy” is extremely important. After all, the vast majority of the self-employed, especially when they first start out, do not take up large areas and must try to keep financial risk to a minimum.
Maren Harnack, urbanist and Christian Holl, architecture critic

Segregation represents a necessary and inevitable step towards integration. Immigrants tend to move to areas where they can be close to compatriots who have been living there for some time. The city, with its patchwork of diverse microcosms, offers these kind of transitional spaces where the shock of migration is mitigated. But then again, a segregated milieu is always in danger of becoming a trap. So far, however, we have no grounds whatsoever to talk about ghettos or parallel societies in Germany. Moreover, talk of ghettos dramatizes the situation dangerously, since such labels are not without consequences: the German middle class and the better placed migrants move away from neighborhoods that have been stigmatized in this way.
Walter Siebel, sociologist

Discarded goods without any further use in Germany are collected on Billstrasse in Hamburg-Rothenburgsort, five kilometers southeast of the central station. Migrants without working permits are employed as day laborers in Hamburg’s informal economy: They carry, they pack, they load. Usually, the products are shipped to African countries. What cannot be sold or processed ends up in local landfills.

The “Thaiwiese” (Thai meadow) in the Preussen Park in Berlin-Wilmersdorf is a popular place to gather for members of the Thai community in Berlin. There, the Asian diaspora meets up for meals, to build new networks, and to speak their mother tongue. Asian specialties are sold at small stands for little money, which are now known across the entire city. The “Thaiwiese” is a successful example that shows how informal urbanism can work on the basis of immigrant networks.

EXAMPLE: RÜTLI SCHOOL In 2006, the Rütli high school in the Reuter-Kiez neighborhood of Berlin-Neukölln became a parade ground for camera teams, photographers, and journalists from all over. The teenagers knew exactly what their teachers thought of them and played their roles as delinquents perfectly. A boy who had just lost his milk teeth played the part of the most evil gangster very cutely, boasting: “I am the Godfather of Neukölln!”
Yet the Rütli scandal offended the pride of some responsible politicians. The then district mayor, Heinz Buschkowsky, hatched a plan to use the Rütli school to show how things could be done differently and put his full weight behind a concept to establish a “Campus Rütli.” A formerly “dirty word” now became a brand name. In an area occupying almost 50,000 square meters, a new social space for about five thousand local residents was to be created, a space in which the children of Arab and Turkish newcomers to Berlin would have a fair chance.
Mechthild Küpper, journalist

Offenbach has a long tradition of immigration. It functions as an “arrival destination” at the center of the Frankfurt/Rhein-Main area, a global metropolitan region with a high proportion of immigrants.
152 nations are represented in the population. Former migrant workers still make up the largest individual national groups, mainly Turks, Italians, and Greeks. Over the last ten to fifteen years other national groups have begun to arrive from the new EU member states in eastern and southeastern Europe, but also from Asia, North Africa, and other parts of the world. Within the “older” groups of immigrants from southern Europe and Turkey, a growing number of people, mostly from the second and third generations, are going on to higher education. There has been a large rise in the number of Turkish students attending high school, and many more of them are now going to university.
Homogeneous ethnic milieus can also be “upwardly mobile” if, for example, education is highly valued and a factor in gaining recognition and status within the group, as is the case for many migrants from Asia. However, homogeneous milieus can also be obstructive if, for fear of becoming a social outcast, they lead people to isolate themselves or to curb their educational ambitions and career aspirations.
Matthias Schulze-Böing, head of the Office for Labor Promotion, Statistics, and Integration of the City of Offenbach

OSMAN GÖVERIM, the forty-four-year-old café owner, is an Offenbacher born and bred and a unique phenomenon. Not just because he is a socially engaged Star Wars fan who decorates his café near the market square with stills, masks, and figures from the films. And not just because he has a Hummer sitting in a garage next door that he drives at most 3,000 miles a year, most of them through mud and debris. On the side, he also finds time to save his city.
A little bit at least. The street where Göverim opened his “Nerd Cantina” about ten years ago had long been an eyesore. Stores changed all the time and many were shady in some way. Now Göverim is campaigning as part of an interest group for the improvement of the street. Neither at school nor in his career has Göverim ever felt disadvantaged by the fact that he is the grandson of Turkish immigrants, proud Istanbulites. In school he struggled more to cope with the fact that he didn’t like studying, and today it’s only when people give him funny looks if he orders a pork schnitzel and a beer that he’s reminded of his background.
Denise Peikert, journalist

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