\"Typical Darmstadt. A City Describes Itself - A Case Study\"

Dear Colleagues,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

This paper kills several birds with one stone. I begin with an introduction to the city we come from. I then outline the programme we pursue at the Darmstadt Technical University "Centre of Research Excellence Urban Research" and discuss what we mean by the "character" of a city. Finally, I present the study we have done on the character of the city of Darmstadt.

I begin with a brief sketch of the city of Darmstadt.

1. A City of Science and Culture

Darmstadt is located in the metropolitan region Frankfurt Rhine-Main, that is to say, at the heart of the European growth zone, the so-called Blue Banana that stretches from London via Milan to the French city of Montpellier on the Mediterranean. Darmstadt is a middle-sized city with a population 150,000 and no major, urgent problems. In polls, the citizens of Darmstadt regularly state that they find little to criticize on major topics such as the housing situation or their sense of security. Darmstadt has almost twice as many jobs per head of population as the average for Europe. The unemployment rate is comparatively low. The city is not wealthy, but it does have economic room to manoeuvre. The purchasing power index, a measure of local consumption potential, is well above the German average. Not only connections to the European motorway and intercity rail networks but also the city's proximity to Frankfurt international airport (one of the largest in Europe) give the city excellent access to worldwide traffic flows.

Darmstadt bears the title science city. It owes this distinction to its technical university and two universities of applied science with a total of some 40,000 students and over 30 further research establishments and institutes, including the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT). In honour of these two facilities, a mini planet in our solar system has been given the name "Darmstadt." Also of international importance is the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research. In 1994 the 110th element was produced and named after the city: "darmstadtium." Major companies and facilities from the pharma industry and the communication and IT sector have also established themselves in Darmstadt, where they engage in applied research and development.

Darmstadt has an international reputation as a city of culture, as well, especially as a Jugendstil centre. This goes back to the artists' colony Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig established in 1899 to develop modern, forward-looking approaches to building and housing.

At the heart of this ensemble stands the Russian-Orthodox chapel built by the Petersburg architect Leontij Nikolaevič Benois. He erected it on specially imported Russian soil.

It had been commissioned by Tsar Nicolas II, who, when visiting Darmstadt, the home town of his wife, Tsarina Alexandra, wanted his family and court to be able to worship in a church of their own.

At present, an application is pending with UNESO for this wonderful ensemble of historical buildings to be declared a World Heritage site.

2. The Programme of the "Centre of Research Excellence Urban Research" at the Technical University of Darmstadt

The TU Darmstadt has some 25,000 students. Its motto is "Technology as Culture." For research and teaching, this means that technology is seen not only from the perspective of the engineering sciences but also from the point of view of the social sciences and humanities. In our "Centre of Research Excellence Urban Research," which enjoys the particular favour of the university, this combination comes fully to bear. Over 30 chairs in 14 subjects cooperate at the centre in far-reaching interdisciplinarity (sociology, philosophy, history, literary studies, economics, as well as the engineering and natural sciences).

At the moment we are working on 16 projects involving some 30 researchers, which are financed by the central sponsoring organization for research at universities and publicly financed research institutions in Germany (the German Research Foundation DFG). Apart from basic research, we also carry out studies in an advisory capacity for municipalities.

Attached to the Centre of Research Excellence is the International Graduate School for Urban Studies, where over 20 students from 9 countries are currently working on their doctorates.

We have also published a book series in which the volume "The Intrinsic Logic of Cities" edited by Martina Löw and Helmuth Berling has appeared. It has been translated into Russian and will hopefully soon be published by NLO-Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie.

3. What do we Mean by the "Character" of a City?

The point of departure for our work is the assumption that cities have an individual character or, to put it in literary terms, a soul. Reflecting on his native city Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is convinced that cities do indeed have a soul. They may, he claims, at first glance appear different to every resident, depending on how long each has lived there and what streets and buildings have aroused a certain awareness of life and which conjure particular memories. But Pamuk is convinced that, just as people may resemble one another in their innermost beings, their wishes and needs, this soul, which each carries deep within him like a good friend, is the same in everyone.

Of course, not only literature addresses the character and personality of cities. The American urban sociologist Janet Abu-Loghod, for example, sums up the results of her study on the global cities New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles with the remark: "In short, these cities are more than the sums of their parts, just as they are much more than the products of globalisation." The three cities have "unique personalities of individual cities." "Space," she explains, "in New York collects people; in Los Angeles it separates them. New Yorkers occupy a community; Angelenos occupy their own privacy." And Chicago? Typical of Chicago is how the music of the "blacks," blues in other words, is presented and perceived in this city: "the music and almost all of the musicians were "black" but almost all of the informally dressed attenders and appreciators were white." (424)

Such a description of cities connects with people's everyday experience there. The experience that Moscow is not St. Petersburg. Everyone knows this, and anyone who lives in a city or visits it can share this experience with others. People quite naturally talk about the good or bad character of a city, of how they have seen and felt people to be, of whether the population seem forbidding or friendly, of the charm or sobriety of the architecture, of its temperament, its rhythm, of the typical sound of the streets, etc. People often claim to love or hate a city. The character of a city has inscribed itself so strongly in people's consciousness and bodies that they have no hesitation to talk about the personal form of a city and its state of mind. They use terms like charming, hectic, hearty, or boring, attributes really reserved for humans. With these anthropomorphic descriptions, people express their emotions about a city. Applying a sort of emotion management, they reduce the complexity of perceptions and experiences in a city; they give linguistic expression to the emotional "form," to the "felt city" in a manner that allows them to speak of the city as a whole.

That Moscow is different from Berlin and that St. Petersburg has a different feel to it than Rome or New York is thus deeply embedded in people's everyday experience. But why is this so? And how can this state of affairs be scientifically investigated? From the point of view of urban sociology, the fact that we can characterize cities and perceive differences between them in this way raises the question of how we know that cities differ and why people share these very individual experiences with others. How does knowledge about the specificity of a city and how it differs from other cities shape life and work there? Finding well-founded answers to these questions is the aim of research into the "Intrinsic Logic of Cities," an approach that has been empirically and theoretically developed largely by Martina Löw and Helmuth Berking, and which we shall be discussing at a later point. This approach seeks to make everyday knowledge about the city and cities accessible to scholarly analysis.

The example of the city where I live, Frankfurt am Main, shows that scientific issues are involved that have come into focus particularly in the context of globalization. Frankfurt has a population of 700,000, 50 percent of whom are replaced every 6 to 7 years and 70 percent every 15 years or so. What is more, Frankfurt, a major financial and commercial centre competing with the like of London, Toronto, Zurich, and Madrid, is exposed to global homogenization processes. They are responsible not only for the international standardization of working processes and the ascendancy of investor architecture, but also for the nature of the merchandise on sale downtown, increasingly dominated by international advertising and global fashion labels available in any larger city. Nevertheless, the specific character of the city persists – Frankfurt remains distinctively Frankfurt, with its rhythm and ways of doing things, with the particular way people work, dress, handle social, political, and cultural matters, and so forth.

4. Study on the Character of the City of Darmstadt

I now come to our study on the character of Darmstadt.
It goes by the title "Typical Darmstadt. A City Describes Itself" and was carried out in 2009 and 2010 by Martina Löw and myself in cooperation with a Darmstadt foundation. It is an explorative study, a first attempt to tackle the subject empirically. The obvious procedure was to start at the house door with a proposal to our "own" city to think together about what constitutes the character of the place and what holds it together. The study was funded by the private foundation mentioned.


The "Intrinsic Logic of Cities" research programme investigates the fundamental structure of a specific city. It looks at the city as a whole and at the mechanisms that produce and reproduce such phenomena. The aim of the "Typical Darmstadt" study is more modest. In examining the character of the city, it addresses only one aspect of urban intrinsic logic, namely the emotional contextualization of the city. It looks at the emotions that a city arouses or that are projected onto the city. By the character of a city we mean feelings, moods, and attitudes evoked by it but which are also typically employed to characterize it. Sociologically, this can also be summed up as the structure of feeling. The concept goes back to the English literary scholar Raymond Williams, who claimed that shared and felt ways of life and culture produce a specific view of the world. English urban researchers (Jan Taylor, Karen Evans und Penny Fraser 1996) have spoken of "local structures of feeling" to express the circumstance that specific cultures of feeling develop in cities that emanate from the city and which are also applied to it. If, like Orhan Pamuk, we describe a city like Istanbul as melancholic, and if more or less anyone living there or visiting is able to catch this underlying mood, it shows that people are marked by the specific tone of feeling of the city. It does not mean that all residents and visitors are melancholic. For people differ as individuals in how they deal with the melancholy of a city. Some find the mood romantic, others exciting, still others depressing. What is decisive is that all the inhabitants of a city have to cope with the basic mood specific to the city, even if they differ in how they do so.

The subtitle of our study "Typical Darmstadt. A City Describes Itself" points to our goal of clarifying the intrinsic logical structures of the city on the basis of self-descriptions of the city – or of its inhabitants. We have developed a research design in which scientific knowledge and the empirical knowledge of the citizens intersect.

From a methodological point of view, we drew on the leitmotiv of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: "putting oneself in the place of the other." For the research process, this means applying the distancing methods of science in order to see and understand the social world from the perspective of respondents under conditions that are as controlled as possible. The plurality of standpoints from which the felt city can be perceived has to be taken into account. Methodologically, such a study thus confronts quite different or opposing world-views and rather than seeking to identify a dominant one. The aim of a qualitative study of this sort is to comprehend how cities shape people's identities, feelings, attitudes, and thinking.

Procedure.
These methodological aims required us to create open discussion situations in which the citizens of Darmstadt themselves could have their say.

Over the period of a year we organized a series of events under the heading Typical Darmstadt. Topics were put to discussion that were highly relevant in Darmstadt and which had attracted a great deal of attention in the local media and political debate: culture, nature, traffic/transport, integration/exclusion, security, the living together of generations. We could thus ensure that what participants had to say was drawn from their store of everyday knowledge.

The events were held at various venues associated with the given topic. We talked about culture in a free theatre, about transport in a tram depot, about nature in a baroque city park. In each instance this allowed us to reach quite different publics in various parts of the city. To get the discussion going, a panel was formed composed of a representative of the TU Darmstadt, a citizens' action group or association, the municipality, members of the public who were either affected by or involved in the issue. This panel initiated the discussion with brief statements, giving the floor as soon as possible to the public, who then gave their views on the topic. How do you experience everyday life? What continuities do you discover in Darmstadt, what strengths and weaknesses? As a rule, between 80 and 100 people participated in the lively public debates, a total of some 1000 local residents.

The discussions were recorded and transcribed. The resulting minutes provided the basis for the methodologically controlled social-scientific interpretation of discussions. This interpretation was then compared with and supplemented by research findings. The fourth step was to compare interpretations in search of recurring argumentation patterns, contradictions, and implicit presuppositions. The transcripts of discussions were included in the published study to give readers insight into how the residents of Darmstadt think and give voice to their everyday experience.

Not surprisingly, a wide range of feelings was expressed. Darmstadt was felt to be open, tolerant, harmonious, but also self-satisfied, hesitant, mediocre, provincial, and boring.

The common pattern than emerged was that "felt" Darmstadt was slow paced, moderate in behaviour, with a propensity for harmonization. Both visitors and residents saw the city as an "isle of the blessed," as an "intact world" with little "to get excited about." Darmstadt had a great deal to offer in its quiet way; major changes were, however, not to be expected. Local residents were for the most part satisfied with their "idyll" – without feeling they had been left behind by the rest of the world. On the contrary! They had the feeling that they were not doing much wrong, for otherwise they would not be doing so well economically, politically, and culturally.

Another pattern that emerged was that Darmstadt was felt to be open and tolerant, a place that offered scope for both economic and professional action and for cultural and subcultural interests.
Like many people, Darmstadt was also perceived by many residents to be hesitant about accepting new arrivals. To begin with, many often did not welcome the idea of moving to Darmstadt for work reasons, and many who had made the move found their circle of friends and acquaintances commiserating with them. Thus, Darmstadt did not give the outside world the impression of being an attractive city with a high quality of life. As a rule, however, the prejudices of new residents dissipated with time. But the feeling remained that being accepted in this city took a surprisingly long time.

The negatively charged feelings that Darmstadt evokes were boredom, mediocrity, philistinism, and provinciality. Overall, however, Darmstadt's aura was felt to be positive – even if not without ambivalence.

Let us take the liberty of attributing a temperament to a city as we do to a person. Temperaments are not properties of human beings or cities that actually exist: they are metaphorical condensations of a structure of feeling linked to the way in which practical solutions are tackled. Temperaments are cultural constructions for distinguishable speeds in practical action and priority setting. No-one – neither a city nor a person – is, for example, phlegmatic, but the four humours or types proposed by classical temperament theory – choleric, sanguine, melancholic, and phlegmatic – help in discussing modes of operation, definitions, and their emotional charge in urban negotiation processes.

People are called sanguine if they are sociable and imaginative, if at a party they circulate from group to group to say as much as possible and keep centre stage. This does not describe Darmstadt. Darmstadt is not a partying city where people like to make a night of it and hog the limelight. Darmstadt does not tend in sanguine manner to deck out its past with a great deal of fantasy. Choleric people, in turn, are characterized as dominant, sometimes also as belligerent and fanatical. They are leader personalities. This also does not fit Darmstadt. The image of the melancholic combines exact planning and perfect execution with self-critique and a slightly depressive basic attitude. This is joined by a tendency to be never satisfied with oneself and one's performance because nothing is good enough. Istanbul is often described as melancholic; so are Vienna and Lisbon. The discussions on Darmstadt showed the opposite: optimism, composure, and a dash of self-satisfaction. Darmstadt is best described as phlegmatic. Phlegmatic people are seen as peaceable, orderly, and diplomatic. The phlegmatic type tends to be satisfied with life as it is; he is calm and reliable, likes routine because he likes what he knows. Phlegmatic people are said to be good diplomats because they seek harmony.

So if Darmstadt were a human being, we could best describe its temperament as phlegmatic. This metaphorical treatment of affective attribution points to a a certain calm and composure. In Darmstadt people feel that the city does not get worked up. This is not to say that Darmstadt is experienced as indifferent. For, although Darmstadt is felt to lean towards inertia and inaction in the sense of "putting things off," the city is nevertheless characterized by a high degree of commitment, especially in social and cultural networks and in developing the location as a scientific and economic cluster. However, the predominant impression is that problems in this city are resolved pragmatically through conflict avoidance, protracted decision-making, communication, compromise building, negotiation, and the creation of a favourable atmosphere for getting to know one another.

This Darmstadt slowness, sometimes interpreted as weakness, proves from a pragmatic point of view to be a strength. Things move slowly, but (when they do) they move steadily. Perseverance appears to be a principle of the city. Sometimes the slow pace means that in the end nothing happens at all. There are those who find this good. A typical example was that the abandonment of plans for a controversial bypass road after 20 years because the planning was allegedly obsolete after such a long time.

What some saw as positive could for the political elite be seen as a "problem with the implementation of decisions." To "discuss at great length with passion and love" was typical of Darmstadt, according to the mayor, who acknowledged the problems that this "love" poses for practical action. The political and economic elite fears that such phlegmatic behaviour could delay or prevent a necessary fresh start or a change of direction in the city. The mayor accordingly admitted quite frankly that he would like to rouse the city to action by putting his foot down: "That's enough discussion! We must finally make our decision and get on with implementing it!"

Is Darmstadt irresolute? In the debate on what is typical of their city, Darmstadt residents prefer a different term: deceleration. Deceleration means that problems are resolved by slowing things down, not by inaction.

The structure of feeling in Darmstadt is marked by calm and self-satisfaction. Although decisions are delayed and sometimes never implemented, a civil society milieu has come to the fore that refuses to be flustered by fluctuations in society and sets the dynamics of the city on a middle course. In this context, boredom is experienced not as vexation about there not being enough going on in the way of entertainment and diversion but as an expression of the Darmstadt identity.

From a practical point of view, problems are dealt with above all by negotiation. For example, to promote the integration of foreigners, residents organize festivals at which "every culture can show off its particularity"; or they organize private invitations to meals for students from abroad to build bridges between mentalities and cultures, or, as one contributor put it: "to organize how we can live together."

Darmstadt's mode of action is geared to conflict avoidance. The pursuit of harmony and the avoidance of escalation guide the action of the city. A group of 10 to 15 wild-looking punks with dogs who had chosen a central city square to hang out in – provoking unease among city authorities, police, and local residents – induced Darmstadt to establish a "communication round with punks." The outcome was a truly Darmstadt-type solution: the local punks were allowed to stay to – as they put it themselves – indulge in their zest for life – having promised to invite punks from elsewhere to leave town. From then on there were no more police checks and the world was back in order for both punks and local residents.

Darmstadt is repeatedly claimed to show "no lack of civil courage." Many groupings and networks pursue social and cultural interests. (Civic engagement ... statistics). Darmstadt has been said to "live by its citizens." Many cities sail under this flag – but the impression in Darmstadt is that it means something there. Every fourth Darmstadt resident engages in volunteer activities (Department of the Economy and Urban Development 2007). Value is placed on ensuring access to art, culture and parks not only for "elitist minorities" but for all social strata, "especially for people who have no chance of taking a holiday on Majorca or anywhere else." There is open discussion about the danger of violating individual rights through surveillance in public places, of the homeless and punks being driven out and begging restricted. "Really great interplay between the forces of order and this subjective feeling" was how the women's commissioner of the city judged the position during one of the Typically Darmstadt discussions. Indeed, the quality of cooperation between citizenry and municipal authorities was repeatedly stressed in discussions. The Darmstadt municipality gives a great deal of scope to civic self-organization, even in difficult constellations. The head of the Malteser-Hilfsdienst, which provides medical care for illegal immigrants, reported that he had received a "friendly welcome" from the police, the integration office, and the social welfare office when presenting his project. "We had the feeling that we were really welcome," he said.

Darmstadt Doesn't Hurt

The essence of the Darmstadt "structure of feeling" that emerged in the course of discussions can be summed up as a high regard for cleanliness and order (order covering such components as regularity, as well as self-organisation), social integration and participation, and tradition coupled with moderate, unruffled composure.
Darmstadt is shaped by conflict between the different groupings that claim to speak in the name of the city. They often have little to do with one another. On the one hand, the self-confident, self-organised, middle-class conservative "we," whose taste is formed by what is immediately familiar, responds to "what doesn't hurt." This "we" determines style and shapes habitus. Identification with one's own city develops in this structure. The integration of new arrivals is a goal, but one understood only in terms of assimilation, not as an opportunity for change: "I was integrated, I was accepted." Tension arises when this "we" comes up against politically unwelcome decisions, for "politics is good when you don't feel it." Major prestige projects always meet with a great deal of criticism in Darmstadt. One such "pomp and circumstance" project was the new congress centre, which bears the name of the element discovered in Darmstadt: Darmstadtium. Whereas the residents of the city do not consider this major project important and make fun of the architecture, the economic and political elites praise the congress centre as unique in Europe. A "thing of the future" ... "not for now and next year, for the coming ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, and fifty years." Darmstadt does not get worked up on the subject and reacts calmly to such notions.

5. The Practical Importance of the "Soul" of a City for the Urban Consultant.

From the point of view of a city's intrinsic logic, its soul can be a key element in urban consultancy. The underlying question of how a city "ticks" and how it deals with problems as a matter of course throws light on established routines. No global solution can be sought, no more or less universal strategy under the heading "one size fits all." Solutions have to be tailor-made to fit the specific situation and concrete knowledge of a city. To the extent that cities recognize local "common sense" about what is intrinsic to them, they will be able to take successful action internally and externally. Thinking about the intrinsic logic of the city and discussion of the subject among the public at large and expert circles allow specific ways to be sought for strengthening the dynamics of how people relate to the city and develop a sense of belonging.

The results of our study have been extensively discussed in the media and among the Darmstadt population. It has traced out intrinsically logical structures of the city that can hamper or help the development of Darmstadt. It has therefore not only helped Darmstadt to think about itself and its self-image but has also pointed to the possibilities for change.



11