Five - Age and gentrification in Berlin: urban ageing policy and the experiences of disadvantaged older people

Summary

Introduction

Berlin is a young city in the German context. It attracts people from all over the world, and is a magnet for German, European and international migration. Population growth and investor-friendly legislation are creating growing pressure in the housing market: rents have risen sharply and the signs of displacement processes forcing less affluent groups to the city's outskirts and large housing estates are unmistakable. These processes also affect older people, especially those whose income fails to keep pace with rising rents, or who need to move to more suitable accommodation due to illness and frailty.

This chapter begins by sketching gentrification processes in Berlin since the fall of the Wall and examining their relationship to the distribution of older populations across the city. The second section investigates how the city responds politically and administratively to the demands of age-friendly urban development. After examining city policies directed at older people, the focus shifts to the central borough of Mitte. Finally, in the third section, attention turns to one part of Mitte, the traditional working-class district of Moabit, which is today increasingly affected by gentrification. Two studies conducted in this community explore the everyday experience of older, in the main socially disadvantaged people, many of them in need of assistance and long-term care. The conclusion provides an overview of developments in the context of political processes, where urban transformation driven by economic interests generates growing conflict and contradiction with the needs of an ageing and increasingly less affluent population.

Age and gentrification in Berlin

Gentrification arrived comparatively late in Berlin. Holm (2010) dates the beginnings in West Berlin to the late 1980s, while the process did not affect East Berlin until the 1990s, following reunification and the relocation of Germany's seat of government. Since then, however, the city has rapidly ‘caught up’ with international developments, such that the process can be observed here in a compressed form. One or other stage of gentrification, in the sense of ‘the transformation of inner-city working class and other neighbourhoods to middle- and upper-middle-class residential, recreational, and other uses’ (Smith, 1987, p 99), can now be said to affect virtually all of Berlin's pre-1914 housing stock.