„Lovelier without Döner? “:
Border conflicts in the urban citizen Regime.
 Homonormativity and the Emergence of an anti-Muslim Urbanism in St. Georg Hamburg 
Vassilis S. Tsianos & Marianne Pieper

In the Urban Studies, for quite a long time, the relation between migration and the city was characterized by an urbanistic empiricism: Either one was observing alarming processes of segregation or one was underlining the positive effects of the urban space per se for the immigrant gateway or community of primary settlement. Governing migration in the city was done without any analysis of processes of exploitation and their respective dominant subjects, namely the urban elites. Nina Glick Schiller and Ayse Caglar with their innovative book Locating Migration: Rescaling Cities and Migrants, are counted among the first ones   to insist on the need for a shifting perspective that would align an analysis of the strategies of exploitation pursued by urban elites in the context of migration research and of the politics of urban and regional scaling of unbalanced spatial developments within cities. A similar critique of the urbanistic empiricism is articulated by the queer-Urbanists David Bell and Jon Binnie (2004). They propose to analyze the transformation of politics of citizenship and urban sexual cultures and communities within Urban Study Research. Informed by such critical perspectives my objective hereinafter is to explore the relationship between the city and migration with regard to a particular social group which is rarely taken into account in the German-speaking Urban and Migration Studies: new urban elites (Bude, 2011, Bahners, 2011). I will try to combine this investigation with some new questions that I have met within my ethnographic field research in Hamburg.

When we look at the inner-city district St. Georg, which is located in a  so called multicultural area, increasingly more segregated or less mixed as the German term „entmischt“ indicate, we can observe the establishment of a new form of governing migration: a „new metropolitan mainstream“, to adopt a concept of the Swiss Urban Researchers Christian Schmid and Daniel Weiss (2004) for the post-liberal insight into the relation between city and migration. This programmatic research approach goes back to the studies by the „International Network for Urban Research and Action“ (INURA) who meanwhile have developed a comparative research and intervention project in thirty different cities. The „new metropolitan mainstream“ has to be understood as an urban development politics related norm. Thus, global processes of urbanization are thus provided with similar standards and determination processes about what would be deemed as urban or metropolitan. „New metropolitan mainstream“ has first to be understood as strategies and processes, expanding and differentiating by means of four dimensions:

"First, commercial and state strategies increasingly mesh today, whereby gentrification processes and the associated displacement of certain population groups are quite deliberately promoted by the political authorities, with measures for upgrading neighborhoods. Second, many of these strategies are based on political positions of the left or of the liberals and are asserted and implemented by the according political coalitions. Linked to that are manifold processes of integration and coopting of parts from former oppositional milieus. Third, different forms of urban upgrading enlarge today upon a global scale, and spread in the cities of the South, in the urban periphery but also in smaller cities. Associated to this is fourth a scale alteration. Not any more only individual districts are affected by this processes, but whole inner-city areas and even large sections of metropolitan regions are upgraded and transformed into reproductive spaces for the metropolitan elites." (Schmid, 2011, S. 42) 

In the process of transformation of traditionally multicultural inner-city districts such as St. Georg which since the 1990ies have been caused by gentrification and segregation politics (so called Entmischungspolitiken), all four process dimension of the „new metropolitan mainstream“ can be found in emblematic ways and they are even supplemented by a new one: „the sexual restructuring of the cities“, to assume a category used by David Bell and Jon Binnie for our analysis (S. 1818). The rhetoric of the „new metropolitan mainstream“ is not explicitly addressing the displacement of educationally disadvantaged local residents or residents with deficient educational background („bildungsfern“), but it expresses itself mainly via policies on ownership and spatial policies of a new urban mainstream or rather a very dominant social groups in the neighbourhood. In our case of St. Georg this is reflected in the defense of the Gay-community and the districts‘s pink economy by use of an anti-Muslim urbanism in which „politics of sexual citizenship“ are merged with security policies and city politics (Cetin, 2012). In contrast to the so called urban peripheral social hotspots the „new metropolitan mainstream“ in St.Georg, located near the main railway station and the city center, is particularly accompanied by a homonormative use and exploitation of effects of gentrification and anti-Muslim racism. In the summer 2007, the lesbian/gay city magazine Hinnerk initiated a debate under the title „Schöner ohne Döner?“ / „Lovelier without Döner?“ on homophobic attitudes, resentiments and assaults in the criminal district near the train station:
„While observing more than 30 mosques intensively, the Hamburg constitutional protection, has no knowledge about anti-gay hate speeches. It is a fact that homosexuality is a sin for believing  Muslims. That doesn't automatically mean they are violent criminals, but such a basic religious belief makes coexistence and mutual endurance  difficult“ (Hinnerk, 2007, p. 3).
This debate has traced back to a purposeful staging  of a ,sexual politics conflict‘ with the local mosque in the local press, particularly in the Hamburger Morgenpost (MoPo). For his article headlined „Muslims against gays“ / „Moslems gegen Schwule“ the journalist concerned from the Morgenpost newspaper employed a gay couple, who agreed to kiss in front of the  Centrum-mosque and to have their photograph taken. The influential daily newspaper Mopo shapes an aggressive gentrification discourse in the St. Georg neighbourhood, that accomplishes a journalistic backing of the ongoing purification of the neighborhood since many years. A social worker from St. George gets to the point:
„I believe that every attack in St. George is potentiated in perception. If something happens in Barmbek, people say: Yes, yes, that happens. Or: How bad! Such things happen even here! If something happens in St. George, a headline appears in the MoPo immediately.“
At the same time MoPo has regularly reported on two accused activists of the mosque, against whom – as became clear two years later without any proof investigations were launched on the organization of a criminal association_. Notwithstanding the fact that a dialogue between the representatives of the mosque and gay activists came about as a result of a purposeful and media-effective provocation and that the whole Centrum mosque was at the forefront of criminal investigations at this time when the staging of the conflict took place, the organizers of the neighbourhood-dialogue (namely gay-activists and Farid Müller, a parliamentarian from the Green Party) were emphatic about the continuation of such a dialogue - or rather: They presented its failure or better: its non-achievement as the clear evidence for an unacceptable transgression of  the limits of tolerance or rather for an homophobic islam in the district.
The dialogue-conflict with the Centrum-mosque evolved to an emblematic dispute over mosques in the middle of the city and with the mobilization of certain fears, images, and misgivings about „Muslim street violence“, the neighbourhood St. Georg developed into a panic space. By the way, it resulted from such fears that a demonstration in front of the mosque in the course of the traditional CSD parade as renounced. Already some years before, at the peak of counter-terrorism after 9/11, the panic spaces of „ethnic parallel societies“ („ethnischen Parallelgesellschaften“) became a laboratory of a new way of governing within the city district. This culminated in mosque-raids and in the closing of the Taiba-mosque (Bärbel, Beinhauer-Köhler, Leggewie, 2009, Friedrich/Schultes, 2012).
Insofar, together with Marianne Pieper, we understand the productivity of panics non only as ideological projects for hegemony, but as fields where assemblages of racism occur (Tsianos, Pieper, 2011). This is where articulations of knowledge based  discursive productions associate with the corresponding productions of affective intensities. In the interplay between meanings, narrative figurations and affective vectors new social technologies are formed: „urban panics“. They circulate within urban spaces and represent them as a deviant, exceptional, and panic space. The dispute over mosques represents an euphemism of the anti-Muslim urbanism. Here again, the description of „overextended neighbourhoods“ is based on statistics, as well as on expert- and resident-interviews: an accumulation of urban and social pathologies with always the same images and narratives („no Muslim superiority“ / „keine islamische Übermacht“, „open up the ghetto“ das „Ghetto öffnen“),which reproduce the predominant imagined idea of the problem district. But through this scandalization and affective charge of homophobic utterances of ethnicized ,Muslim-others‘ in the neighbourhood, a homonormative St.Georg-elite is constituted: This elite embodies the alleged tolerance of the majority society („Mehrheitsgesellschaft“) and promotes at the same time urban panics. For the protagonists of the pink economy which now is understood as being integrated in the privileging paradigm of the majority society not only embody the alleged tolerance of the dominance-society („Dominanzgesellschaft“) and are stopped in their demands for equality, but they serve also as a kind of supervisory authority, which scandalizes the homophobic utterances of the ethnicized Muslim actors, affectively charges them, and - as Jin Haritaworn (2009: 41ff, Kuntsman/Haritaworn/Petzen 2010) illustrates with the example of the „Smash Homophobia Demonstration“ in Berlin - transforms them in „urban panic“: Because the termination of a neighbourhood-dialogue on the part of the Centrum-mosque seems to be sufficient to show the limits of the „integrated city“ towards a legalistic islamism in the district and to claim the hegemony in a politics of sexual representation of the space.
The effectiveness of such panics does consist in an affectively charged intensity of self-activation of the new urban elites: They must enforce a „civilizing mission“, in which the  disciplining of deviant behaviour becomes mixed up with the measures of the neighbourhood management. Within the last five years and on the basis of gentrification effects around half of the migrant population has left St. Georg, while more than seventy percent of the freed-up apartments were rehabilitated to expensive single apartments. The fragment of an expert interview with a team member of the ASK redevelopment-agency and of the neighbourhood management St. Georg from 2011, which I would like to quote more detailed, elucidates this entanglement surprisingly frank:
„We invited the commercial owners and property owners located around the area Hansaplatz twice, well, the the district invited them with our support. And we said, people, you better pay attention: all your grubby nightclubs and bars, all that can't go on like this. We are going to make this area more beautiful, always we – the municipality – and we also want the places to be used in a different way. That leds to, individuals, who, well, individuals were called and told: listen, the selling of bier cans for 89 cents, it is then drunken at Hansaplatz, so you better find another tenant. That's how things are influenced. Or, the owners go to the municipality - our  co-operation partner at the municipality does things, a permission, a change of use or so, that's how the municipality takes influence - and says: We want decent restaurants to be located at the Hansaplatz, so that we can have a bit control over the public space through the outdoor dining. That's how things are influenced and over a period of two, three years the impact is enormous.(…) That is the interaction with measures in public spaces, changes in construction law and discussions with particular owners and public communication, what should the future of this road be. (...) Well there are different possibilities to take influence. For example, I made a provision in the land-use plan legally binding, in the land-use plan that has been designed for the redevelopment of Lange Reihe. A very simple sentence reading: Sexshops and gambling halls are excluded. For example, well someone is on the index with its meeting place for pimps and drug dealers, the  municipality office of the interior says: well, we will not approve, he could still make money there. No, but he pretends saying: I am being discriminated as a foreigner. The municipality says, But I can decide who I lease the area to run a outdoor restaurant. And the municipality says: you won't get it. Over and out! The existing stores are grandfathered, but if someone says: Well, I want to rent out now, I have a legal basis to tell him: You can do so, but not to this person. Such  provisions apply to parts of Steindamm, too. That's part of the land-use plan. And that way I have a legal basis.“

1 Werner Schiffauer has inspected this case meticulously in his study on „Bekämpfung des legalistischen Islamismus“ / „Struggling against the legalistic islamism“ in Germany  (2011). On the construction of a new anti-Muslim enemy-image see also: Friedrich/Schultes 2012._

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