‘I leave the everyday behind, everyday’: Sounds and spaces of the revanchist middle classes in Berlin’s Fünf Morgen Dahlem Urban village

Abstract

Processes of gentrification and redevelopment have accelerated in Berlin in the decades following reunification, however the lens of research inquiry has most often been trained upon districts like Kreuzberg or Neukölln – areas synonymous with media portrayals of Berlin as a hedonistic, gritty, artistic location. These analyses rarely deal with how the regulation of sound features in Berlin’s reshaping via investment capital. This paper builds on previous research on housing developments and regeneration in Berlin, however it centres itself within the under-researched, affluent space of Dahlem in southwest Berlin. While this long affluent area does not necessarily undergo new-build gentrification, luxury developments like Fünf Morgen provoke sonic and spatial conflicts that highlight cleavages between different factions of the middle-classes. The paper shows how luxury housing projects come to shape the sonic and spatial atmospheres of cities via a micro-examination of sonic and spatial struggles around Fünf Morgen Dahlem Urban Village built almost 10 years ago. Through a discursive and ethnographic engagement with the everyday life of this site formerly occupied by the American Army Forces, the paper explores the urban atmospheres created by these projects after their instantiation. It evidences the neoliberal privatisation processes at work via sonic and spatial conflicts in already affluent city areas.