Gentry Fication

This place on the left on Brunnenstraße is just one of many apartment blocks that has been cleared in Berlin recently, to get rid of squatters and make way for something new. On the front of the building is the graffitied message "we are all staying". Although the squatters were kicked out over a year ago - nothing has since happened to the site.

Squatting was back in the Berlin news again this last week with the highly publicised forced eviction of the inhabitants of Liebigstraße in Berlin-Friedrichshain. The tenants - who had previously been squatters - had been told by the landlords to leave ages ago, but they had been fighting in the courts up until the last minute to be able to remain in the building. In the end big business, and the riot police, won out of course. But 2500 police were needed for the operation, 40 of them were injured.

Wandering about on Saturday night in Kreuzberg, I saw the remains of the protesters. They had been fenced in by police because they had been taking part in a non-registered demonstration. That sounds surprisingly like something else in the news recently. Police were seemingly afraid that the demo would turn into something similar to what happened on Friday night, as protesters damaged windows and cars in central Berlin as they passed through.

For me the whole media hullaballoo and the accompanying protests are not just about evicting squatters, but are part of a larger issue. The squatters were just one of the many subcultures that were previously permitted to happily exist in Berlin up until about twenty years ago. But since then the city has started to undergo rapid gentrification. And THAT'S what people are up in arms about.

Putting up with squatters goes hand in hand with tolerating drunk punks and completely untalented musicians on the U-Bahn, so the argument goes. It's what gives Berlin its charm. It's what makes the city cool. To outsiders the argument might seem unrealistic. But, it does have some credence I think. After all no-one wants wealthy people like these two on the right moving in to their area, do they?