ABSTRACT
Marginalization produces social fringes to the city. Fluid encounters with mainstream urbanites reinforce such social fringes when people cross the street to not pass a group of homeless, avoid sites where drug users congregate or ignore ‘a beggar in the street and make sure their eyes don’t meet’.1 Hence, those at the social fringes meet at spatial fringes where they are safe from such humiliating encounters that reinforce structural marginalization. At Leopoldplatz, a public square in the disadvantaged district Berlin-Wedding, urban poor congregated and created such a sanctuary. Mostly unemployed and residing in Berlin, they came to the square to engage with each other and consume drugs and alcohol. They called and described themselves as a scene. From an outside gaze, however, their public gatherings are likely to be seen as an outcome of ‘neighbourhood deterioration’. Understood as such, they evoke political actions of containment (Häußermann and Kapphan 2004, 214). In the case of Leopoldplatz, a programme for urban redevelopment, a square-wide ban on public alcohol consumption and an enhancement of police operations to prevent drug sales had been put in place. Together with a neoliberal national discourse on poverty as individual failure and immobility (see Lessenich 2009) it formed the multifaceted context that surrounded these urban poor (see Lamont and Mizrachi 2011). Here, the status of unemployment and public display of time, drugs and alcohol consumption imposed a negative image on people at Leopoldplatz.
