Beschreibung
Introduction: Contested Cities in an Era of Crisis Martin Baumeister, Bruno Bonomo, Dieter Schott "Save Our Cities Now!" The Perception of Urban Crisis in the Early 1970s In May 1971, the Deutscher Städtetag, the Association of German Cities, held its convention in Munich. Hans-Jochen Vogel, president of the Association, mayor of the Bavarian capital and a prominent Social Democratic politician, gave the keynote lecture under the title of the convention's programmatic motto: "Save our cities now!" In his speech, Vogel drew a pitch-black picture of the situation of West German cities which, according to his diagnosis, were threatened by a deep crisis after the enormous effort and impressive successes of 25 years of postwar reconstruction. He saw obvious parallels to the United States, quoting President Nixon who had recently declared that one would need another American revolution in order to save the country's cities from the brink of a precipice. Munich's mayor listed a whole series of symptoms characterizing the difficult situation of the growing cities and urban agglomerations: among others, the decay of older residential areas and historic city centers, urban sprawl and the mushrooming of new faceless districts, traffic congestion and heavy pollution, an increasingly insufficient infrastructure in education and the public health system, growing social inequality and disintegration. Vogel diagnosed a deep urban crisis of epochal dimensions, which, for its part, was a manifestation of profound transformations in all spheres of life. He declared that the future of the cities would be decided not in the sphere of urbanism and by urban experts, but in politics. For Vogel, a pragmatic reformer and certainly not a radical intellectual, the roots of the problems were to be found in the development of capitalism, especially in exploding real estate prices and the disparity between strong private financial power and weak municipal finances. Vogel's statement as well as the Städtetag meeting had a considerable media impact at its time. The influential magazine Der Spiegel made it its cover story, transforming the Städtetag's strong appeal into the rather pessimistic question: "Can we still save the cities?" The weekly Die Zeit asked: "Are our cities dying?", echoing Jane Jacobs' famous critique of modernist urban planning and urban renewal in the United States of the fifties. For West German experts and politicians the apparently catastrophic situation of the great cities in the United States, plagued by social disintegration, racial conflicts and the impact of mass traffic and anonymous mass consumerism as evoked in the proliferating American debate about the "urban crisis", served as a warning of a future threatening their own cities. The West German debate of May 1971-properly speaking the culmination of a longer process of critical evaluation by German intellectuals-expressed a growing sense of unease about recent urban development and modern urban life. Summed up in the rather vague term of "urban crisis", this sense of unease gained ground in manifold political and academic discourses of the postwar era, especially during the sixties and seventies. "Urban crisis" referred to a variety of problems in rather different contexts. In the United States, it was marked by general societal struggles often perceived in categories of race and class, while in Western Europe it was influenced, apart from wider political and social contexts, by normative concepts and ideas of distinctive European traditions of city and urbanity. Marxist scholars used the term in order to denounce the strains and social costs of capitalist development which were becoming particularly evident in the urban centers of the Western hemisphere. For Henri Lefebvre, "la crise urbaine" was the "most central" of a whole series of crises affecting French society in the sixties, reflecting the country's deep transformation. Debates on the "urban crisis"-which intensified during the sixties-were closely interrelated on both sides of the Atlantic as well as in different political and ideological camps from the left to the right. Focusing on urban problems, on a deeper level they referred to general trends and developments concerning all areas of life, as Vogel claimed in his Munich speech in 1971. And all of them expressed an urgent desire to remedy a supposedly menacing, dangerous situation affecting the cities and their respective societies by political means. These could consist either of pragmatic, piecemeal reform, repair measures as spelled out by Vogel or-as the vociferous Left of the seventies hoped-of a fundamental societal change, a revolution which was to take cities as its point of departure. In Italy, symptoms of the "urban crisis" such as congestion, poor housing conditions, lack of municipal finances, inadequacy of services and increasing social tensions appeared "ever more widespread and acute" over the seventies. At the beginning of the decade, Rome, the capital, was seen as a symbol of the degradation and unlivability of the big cities. In September 1970, on the occasion of the celebrations for the centenary of the Porta Pia breach, the Christian Democratic mayor Clelio Darida had to admit that "one hundred years after its reunion with Italy" Rome had "grown on itself in a disorderly and hurried manner". It had not managed to develop "a valid relationship between history, tradition, culture and the needs and expectations of a modern metropolis at the center of an advanced country": it was, in sum, "a city where problems (some problems in particular) have reached the level of explosion". Rome's situation, however, was far from unique. Even Milan-the city that more than any other embodied the myth of urban modernity in the years of the economic miracle-in the changed context of the seventies, did not escape the critical, almost apocalyptic, representations of the metropolis in crisis, choked by congestion, decay and lack of green spaces. While planners, sociologists and political analysts discussed the origins of the "urban crisis" and its relationships to systems of governance and urban policies, Italo Calvino masterfully expressed the theme in literary terms. In one of his most renowned books, originally published in 1972, the great writer drafted a series of archetypical imaginary cities out of an evaluation of the contemporary urban world as passionate as it was critical: What is the city today, for us? I believe that I have written something like a last love poem addressed to the city, at a time when it is increasingly difficult to live there. It looks, indeed, as if we are approaching a period of crisis in urban life; and Invisible Cities is like a dream born out of the heart of the unlivable cities we know. The 1970s as a Period of Structural Rupture In the debates about "urban crisis" cities were often considered exemplary sites, as mirrors and hotspots of deep general transformations of Western societies, then still more felt or anticipated than fully grasped. The deep sense of crisis as perceived by contemporaries fits well with the way the seventies are addressed in current academic debates. Many historians hold that the seventies mark the opening of a profound longer-term crisis-ridden "structural rupture", though views and opinions about the scope and character of this break differ. While Niall Ferguson considers the seventies "more as the seedbed of future crises than as the crisis conjuncture itself" when "the shock of the global had only just begun", Charles Maier maintains that the "West did experience a decade of crisis, comparable to the earlier period of twentieth-century economic hammering in the 1930s and to the geopolitical meltdown that preceded World War I": "The turmoil of the 1970s provoked a fundamental rethinking of the economic and political axioms that had been taken for granted since the Second World War. It closed the postwar era ...
Die 1970er-Jahre gelten in der deutschen Zeitgeschichte als Epoche eines tief greifenden sozialen Wandels, eines "Strukturbruchs " im Übergang von der Industriemoderne zur postfordistischen Gesellschaft. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes widmen sich diesem Jahrzehnt erstmals aus einer stadthistorischen Perspektive und stellen dabei Entwicklungen in Westdeutschland und Italien einander gegenüber. In Fallstudien zu Städten vom Ruhrgebiet bis Sizilien wird untersucht, wie sich die Umbrüche dieser Zeit im Brennpunkt von städtischem Raum und städtischer Gesellschaft verdichten, als "urbane Krise" wahrgenommen und verhandelt werden und sich in Konflikten in der städtischen Politik sowie Kämpfen in und um die Stadt manifestieren.
Autorenporträt
Martin Baumeister ist emeritierter Professor für Europäische Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts an der Ludwig-Maximilans-Universität München; von 2012 bis 2024 war er Direktor des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom. Bruno Bonomo, Ph.D., ist Juniorprofessor für Zeitgeschichte an der Universität Rom 'La Sapienza'. Dieter Schott ist emeritierter Professor für Neuere Geschichte mit Schwerpunkt Stadt- und Umweltgeschichte an der TU Darmstadt.
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