In the middle of Freiburg, wrote Ricarda Huch in 1926, lies “the most beautiful treasure of the cityscape: the minster. It is not a place of secluded tranquility, as is otherwise given to the main church, but of the daily bustle of the market; the splendid department store and the dignified granary, seat of the City administration, border on it. In the midst of the cheerful hustle and bustle of everyday life, the house of honor of the Mother of God grows, from the blooming shimmer of its stones like a rose hedge. What the historian Huch described in her “Life Pictures of German Cities” using the example of Freiburg im Breisgau was a bow to one of the most traditional institutions in the country: the city as the center of society. The Baden boomtown may have saved a lot of it over time, which makes it so charming, but it is already part of a minority. The inner cities, which for centuries were the city itself, protected by walls, gates and freedoms, are in crisis.
The loss of attraction can be felt painfully in many places. A visit to the pedestrian zone reveals empty shops or the usual chain stores, where long-established shops were once, even to the casual onlookers. Diversity is being lost, after 8 p.m. their pedestrianized streets are there as if lockdown had just been declared. The number of visitors is falling: the time is obviously over, as “Long Saturday En D’r City”, a song by the Cologne dialect rockers Bläck Fööss, was the culmination of a weekend fun.
Don’t fool yourself, better times will come back by themselves. The corona pandemic only accelerated the downward trend, but did not cause it. Today, a mistake that goes back to the economic boom, but was never corrected decisively enough, is taking its toll: the reduction of inner cities to consumer space. For a long time the economy and the municipalities themselves benefited to such an extent that they forgot the soft factors that made the old city so attractive: the diversity, the colorful, the city as a place of residence and center and meeting point of urban society. Constantly new shopping malls and the displacement of the residents by shops guaranteed good money for both the retail trade and the city treasury – which the municipalities did not always know what to do with. Countless structural horrors, with which they intended to enrich the site, bear witness to this in their creepy and concrete-gray testimony. Experiments like Frankfurt’s new old town, which want to bring back the lost charm, are therefore by no means as reprehensible as some architecture critics, driven by their luxury problems, like to claim.
Restart and recollection
The concept of “city equals sales area” is a thing of the past, at the latest as a result of online trading, which is still growing. The city centers need both a new start and a return to their old role, yes, their values. They need financial help from the federal and state governments in order to be able to buy or rent vacant space, which can then be flexibly passed on to start-ups and founders or to sport and culture, which increases the attractiveness of the city. More rights would also be necessary and less bureaucracy that steals energy and time like the little gray men in the children’s story “Momo”. And the city should make living in the city easier. The German Association of Cities has just called for a lot of this in a clever strategy paper.
In addition, there is something that the association has not commented on as a precaution: the uncontrolled growth of commercial rents. Nothing except a new stock market crash or the introduction of a Leninist planned economy could be more unpopular in economic circles than the call to limit this too by law. But a brake on commercial rents may be necessary if the much invoked forces of the market in the city center continue to have so little healing effect. Perhaps then the times will come again, about which the Bläck Fööss sang: “En d’r Stadt es Remmi Demmi / All parking lots are full / All in all just Minschemasse / And they buy like crazy.”