ABSTRACT
Urban futures emerge not only from visionary yearnings for the city yet to come, but also from dystopian depictions of the city to be avoided. This is especially true for cities that strive to free themselves of their troubled histories and leave behind the ghosts of the past. For activists of a democratic and just urban renewal in the South African coastal city of Durban, segregation is a ghost from the past that haunts the city's present, one that shapes debates around the possibilities of a truly open and democratic urban sphere. In the eyes of city activists in the German capital, the youngest ghost inhabiting Berlin is gentrification. The process of upgrading and selling off the former GDR district of Prenzlauer Berg threatens to repeat itself in the low-income district of Neukölln, which finds itself increasingly conquered by young artsy hipsters. The concerns with segregation in South Africa and gentrification in Germany share a focal point: the refusal to accept a city that curtails the poorest population's right to the city. In each case, the dominant critical narrative (segregation/gentrification) is embedded in a particular “spatial history” (Abbas 2008: 12) and in the city's own dreams. This chapter traces these dreams (and nightmares) and reflects on the possibilities of overcoming the particular narrowness inherent in the two cases by reading one case against the other.
