Contested Neighbourhoods of Arrival: Migration and Conflicts Over Urban Space in the 1970s in Hamburg

This chapter examines urban conflicts on migration during the 1970s in Hamburg and asks for urban movements and “contentious politics” that dealt with questions of migrant housing and settlement in specific neighbourhoods. While in the years around 1970 different actors criticized and scandalized the housing conditions of labour migrants, depicting migrant tenants primarily as victims of exploitation by landlords, this changed in the mid-1970s when the focus of public attention turned to spatial “concentrations of foreigners”. These phenomena were considered as a threat for the urban fabric as well as for migrants’ integration. Despite a strong impact of this “ghetto discourse,” administrative strategies to dissolve such “concentrations” evoked protests. German-migrant citizens’ initiatives as well as migrant self-organisations, for example, criticized a ban on foreigners to move into a specific neighbourhood, regarding it as discriminatory. On the other hand, German residents and shop-owners blamed especially Turkish migrants for the decay of urban neighbourhoods or a worsening of the retail or school situation. But despite single protests, no larger “urban movement” on the nexus of migration and urban development emerged. Nevertheless, migrants transformed neighbourhoods or resisted dispersal policies also by “apolitical” activities such as the opening of shops or the settlement in certain areas.