Produktive „Parallelgesellschaften“. Migration und Ordnung in der (neoliberalen) „Stadt der Vielfalt“. Productive „Parallel Societies“. Migration and Order in the (neoliberal) „City of Diversity“

Abstract

Urban administrations in Germany have been governing districts as “concentrations of foreigners”, problematizing them as signs of disintegration and urban decay and introducing policies aiming at their dissolution. Recently, however, programs of city development and migration policy are suggesting that German cities should give up their policies of desegregation and start to view migrant districts as productive sites of “diversity” featuring resources for the “local economy” and “civil society”. The paper argues that the effects of this shift in policies may be twofold: on the one hand, neoliberal forms of governance result in the delegetimization of national-social (i.e. ethno-centric) conceptions of urban order and thereby of a systematic notion of urban state-racism in Germany. On the other hand the details of the new strategies show how the conceptions of “ethnicity”, migrant “networks” or “economies” are to be managed as orders of resources and risks. Under these conditions of neoliberalization, “diversity” may spell out an uncertainty of urban belonging for specific categories of “migrant communities”, whose otherness must continuously be proven not to be a risk to the neighborhood, but a means of productivity.