No, we don’t want that again!

Berlin’s civil society creates public forum for municipal real estate. Could this be a model for Amsterdam?

On November 22nd, 2024, the Roundtable for Municipal Real Estate convened for the 40th time at the City Council of Berlin. For the past 12 years, the Roundtable has provided a public forum in which activists, politicians, and administration discuss public real estate and land policy, creating transparency and exchange through civic debate. AA talked to Andreas Krüger, founding member of Stadt NeuDenken and moderator of the Roundtable from day one, about its history, achievements, and the question of whether such an initiative could work in Amsterdam as well. 

AA: Could you please start by telling our readers how the Roundtable for Municipal Real Estate came into being? 
The event that triggered the initiative Stadt NeuDenken, out of which the roundtable emerged, was the announcement in 2011 by the then-mayor Klaus Wowereit that he wanted to turn the area between Checkpoint Charlie and the Jewish Museum into a high-end property development with an international art museum in its centre. This was an attempt by the old political guard, after the financial crisis, to get back to their practice of backroom deals, making sweeping decisions without parliamentary resolution, without discussion, without any exchange with the urban community. At that point, the more culturally oriented part of Berlin’s civil society – creatives, architects, agencies, artists, and so on – got together and wrote an open letter, which was signed by more than 600 institutions and people. It sparked a public discussion that, in the end, prevented a potentially catastrophic masterplan from destroying an important part of the city centre. 

However, we quickly found that we wanted to be more proactive, doing more than just sending out a petition, giving a few interviews, and then seeing what the politicians make of it. That’s how the idea came about to use this format of a roundtable in Berlin. The funny thing is that we got a hint from some parliamentary groups who told us, ‘Why don’t you go to the city council and see if you can get a room there?’ So, we went to the Abgeordnetenhaus and said, ‘We are the Roundtable for Municipal Real Estate, and we need a room for a meeting on a Friday, if possible, in the next few months’, and the porter leafed through their room allocation book and said, ‘Yes, room 311 is available on Friday.’

So basically, it was a bit of a slapstick action that started things, yet as a result, we were able to create an institution that could give voice and publicity to those who are usually pushed to the side, i.e. artists, cultural workers, everyone from these milieus, but also social organisations. Suddenly, we were able to create a public forum – a bit like the old Greek idea of an agora – for everything to do with Berlin’s publicly owned real estate.

That was the origin of the roundtable, and then it started, and usually took place four times a year. Sometimes the fourth time was replaced by a conference.
 

AA: Ok, so you managed to sneak into the building of the city council, but how did you get politicians, administration, and whoever else has something to say in public real estate to join you, to make the table round, as it were?
Well, we simply invited all those responsible from all parliamentary parties – the City Council, but then also at the district level, the real estate and city planning experts, and the specialised politicians. And they came in droves. The current finance senator, Stefan Evers, sat at the very first roundtable as the property policy spokesman for the Christian Democrats’ parliamentary group. Everyone was there: Social Democrats, Green Party, Liberals, the Left, and the Pirate Party.

Then slowly the press started arriving as well, which made us even more attractive because politicians and administration like to read and see themselves in the media.
But they also came out of curiosity about what was going on, out there in the city, perhaps also driven by a certain concern that these activists could make their life difficult. So, the least they could do was take a look at who they were and what they were up to.

Looking at the other side of this, I would now say that almost every precarious city initiative has been to the roundtable and presented their case there, which is really astonishing. And everyone who participated did so in their spare time. This was civil society in action, without any budget.

AA: One could imagine that it wasn’t 12 years of smooth sailing, though?
There were strong ups and downs. Sometimes there were 30 people, sometimes 150 to 180 people – certainly before the pandemic.

Today, the roundtable has official members from around 40 organisations. That’s the core group that sits at the roundtable. Then there are those who want to present their concerns, and there is always a presentation of a concrete real estate case. The rest is the audience. 

AA: Could you give a few examples of what the Roundtable on Public Real Estate has achieved? 
Two concrete examples. The first is about a house of artists and recording studios, but also studio living in Friedrichshain, not far from the Oberbaumbrücke. It was during the pandemic, and we were actually having our meeting in the tower of the former Tegel Airport. It was a live broadcast because of the pandemic, with six people on the podium. That group from Friedrichshain presented their case, which they thought was totally hopeless – it was basically going to be taken down tomorrow. Then, right after their presentation, the head of Facility Management, a subsidiary of Berliner Immobilienmanagement (BIM) came online, saying, ‘Oh, didn’t you know? The project is safe, we’re keeping it. The tenancy agreements will be extended on existing terms, and the house will be renovated step by step at our expense.’

The second example is the development of Tempelhofer Feld. At the time, we kind of provided a forum for a discussion that had gripped the whole city and gave the final push for the petition that no building should take place on it, which found a majority. After that session, which also had a massive online presence, we heard from many, many people who said our discussion helped them to make an informed decision, one way or another.

AA: Such a Roundtable, of course, doesn’t develop in a vacuum – it is the result of longer historical processes. Can this be compared to the situation in Amsterdam at all?
OK, let’s start with your first point about history. There is a fantastic, five-part documentary called Capital B, directed by Florian Opitz, that basically gives you an excellent idea about the pre-history of the Roundtable. It highlights the relationship between culture, real estate, and politics right after the fall of the Wall. As you know, for a few years after 1989, we had a situation, particularly in East-Berlin, with massive empty real estate and unclear property relations, which held capital investment at bay. This availability of space for non-commercial activity was the basis on which Berlin grew into the global arts and culture capital. There was so much space that almost anything could be done on a shoestring budget. This lasted for a few years, but once the property relations got sorted and capital came flowing into the city, many of these great sub- and pop-cultural initiatives, like Tresor and later Bar 25, were told to make room for commercial developments. This was the moment when many of those party people and artsy types became political activists. They weren’t always successful, but often they were. The learning curve for those activists was very steep indeed. The expertise and competence that Amsterdam’s subculture scene had built over decades of squatting, we had to acquire overnight. This created a new generation of activists who might have been militant in their thinking but became very versatile in their methods. 

In the autumn of 2012, the old networks of politics, administration, and private sector, which this new generation of activists had fought in the nineties and noughties, tried to restart their backroom entitlement games, just as they had done after the fall of the Wall. At that point, the activist scene had developed some serious organisational chops, which was partly expressed in Stadt NeuDenken and the Roundtable. There was now a broad and diverse network of civil society that stood up and said: ‘No, we don’t want that again.’

AA: In Amsterdam, this was the moment when Richard Florida and the creative city were embraced as city policy, and many cultural workers and former activists began to see themselves as entrepreneurs… 
This happened in Berlin as well to a degree. However, I think the interests and motivations of the self-styled creative entrepreneurs tended to always be coupled with the ones of those who wanted to fight for the purposes of social equality and access to the marginalised from marginalised groups, and so on. It was always strong, socio-political, and not one-sidedly ideological. There was a fundamental agreement that you can’t just leave the city to the powerful. There needs to be a basic democratic sharing of access to resources, space, power, the will to make decisions, and money. I think there was a basic tenacity in Berlin that, if I remember correctly, I also always experienced in Amsterdam.

Take someone like Sandy Kaltenborn, who is one of the protagonists of Capital B. On the one hand, he is a wild and very effective activist. On the other hand, he is a renowned visual designer who earns his money with his excellent work. He is somehow everything at once, and he has it in him and can represent it very credibly. I mean, he was never a member of the Roundtable, but what I’m trying to say is that this kind of very potent, paradoxical mix could also be found among the participants at the roundtable.

Would such an initiative fly in Amsterdam as well? On March 29, AA presents the documentary Capital B at the Ventilator Cinema at OT301, followed by a podium discussion with film director Florian Opitz, Andreas Krüger, and many others … 
Are we capable of making Amsterdam’s real estate politics more transparent? Do we have the expertise and organisational know-how to do this? What role could AA play in all of this?

More info about this event soon to be published.