Housing, Financialization, and Migration in the Current Global Crisis: An Ethnographically Informed View from Berlin

This article takes as a starting point a tenants’ initiative pursued predominantly by migrants in inner-city Berlin, the capital of a country considered to have profited from Europe’s debt and financial crisis of 2007–8. The two-year-long protest can be read within the framework of a series of public urban occupations during and after the crisis. This framing allows an investigation of how the dominance of finance in capitalism “hits the ground” and how frontiers of capital open up new territories to establish conditions for accumulation in the world’s cities. The article focuses on the political technologies that drive policy protocols of “integration” and “social diversity” and arrange the parameters of differential inclusion within which the business of privatization of real estate and social housing unfolds. It also asks how cultural, political, and social contestations develop in a society where few areas are unaffected by migration and mobility. In so doing, the article challenges an approach that assumes a national framework of analysis.