PLANNING A EUROPEAN RACIAL CITY: Dealing (with) Dread in Twenty-first-century Berlin

Abstract

In this article I examine a participatory planning initiative in contemporary Berlin to propose a theoretical reflection on the entanglements between race and urban futures in the German capital. The promoters of the planning initiative aimed to solve the problem of drug dealing in an inner-city park. Motivated by no economic interests or concerns, they framed the problem they aimed to solve as the long-time residents’ dread of the figure of ‘the dealer’. The initiative ultimately gained broad consensus among residents, civil society and state institutions alike within an ‘affective economy’, which I call a ‘dread economy’. Such an ‘economy’, as I show, functioned as a cover-up device for race to remain the unspoken rationale of the initiative. Against the backdrop of Berlin's liberal and progressive (self-)image, I phenomenologically interrogate the conditions under which racial conceptions could be the rationale of a popular planning initiative. I argue that the ‘dread economy’ went unnoticed—and was therefore effective—because it was predicated on a counterintuitive combination of cultural tropes belonging to two seemingly unrelated forms of racism—anti-Black racism and anti-Jewish racism. I then extend my argument by analysing three cases of twenty-first-century Berlin planning, in which various racial conceptions quietly shaped citywide planning visions. In my conclusion, I call for further critical analysis of relational articulations of race in shaping European urban futures, and for comparative research with settler-colonial and postcolonial urban regions where different (combinations of) racial conceptions may structure dominant visions of the future.