Last friday LAKATLAN spent a few days in Berlin. We had a really nice and thoughtful conversation with Stefanie Raab, the founder and director of Coopolis about temporary use, civil engagement, gentrification and urban development strategies.
Coopolis started it’s operation in the Reuterkiez district more than 10 years ago, establishing vacancy management projects, mediating between users and property owners in the spirit of sustainable city development. They invented the expression of Zwischennutzungsagentur and were pioneers in introducing and consolidating this approach in Germany, as a possible answer to the problem of shrinking cities and vacancy in the city.
LAKATLAN: You have a three step sheme that helps you to establish contact and cooperation between potential users and property owners. Please, tell us a bit more about it! How do you coordinate all these actors, how do you handle this amount of information?
STEFANIE RAAB: We have a genious database structure that collects information on the empty spaces, the interested people and the informal contacts to politics etc. We created ourselves our own program for it, because there was no good softver on the market for what we do. We make our own research as well, walking around the city, taking pictures, finding out who is the owner and so on.
After this, you begin to talk to the owner, to open the owner, until the owner says: what do you imagine we could be here? At this moment you need well prepared users, with a proper concept. So you have two processes that you have to manage: you have to prepare the user and the property owner for another.
After this you have a first get-to-know moment, we make these meetings on our Moderierte Objektbegehungen (Moderated Property Inspection), where we have 5 or 6 or 10 properties, after another, and a group of “marriable” owners and users – who’s concepst are so good that you can present them to an owner, because an owner always expects an economic very well concepted project. And the user only sees his creative idea, so you have to prepare them for another, so that they talk similar language, so that they can understand another. So we are the transporters between them. And this is the clue of “Zwischennutzungsagentur”, this is how it functions.
L: So you organize a marriage between the owners and the users – how can you calculate the proper timeframe?
S.R.: You can’t calculate it at all. You can have successful processes in a few days, but in a few years as well. For instance, we had a migrant kurdish woman who wanted to make a bilingual Kindergarten and she needed three years to clear up her concept. Then we needed half more year to create a good contract for her.
In an other case there was a woman who makes ceramics and she knew totally precise what she needed. We had a databank, with more then 1000 empty shops, we went through this databank and we found the only possible setting within three hours. She made a perfect little concept with photos of her very nice ceramics and she also said: “I can guarantee 3 euro/sm, but I can never pay significanly more. I will live there and I will work there. In exchange, I will make a very nice area with a nice little shop window.” And she made her concept so convincing, that two days later she had her contract. Because she was a very experienced woman, who knew exactly that she will never earn much money, but she wants to do this – so she really went for it. She was so clear with her goals that we could help her within a few days.
L: What can you offer the owner, so that he decreases the price?
S.R.: Advice and experience in a special area – this is very important, you always have to be very local. If we have project in different places, we always have a project manager for each one of them. So that the contact between the owners and the users is enriched by the local knowledge of this person.
In fifty percent of the cases neither the users nor the owners know what they need in the beginning. So we have an open door once a week, a consultation process with the users and also the owners of the real estates. If they [the owners] would know what the wanted with it, it wouldn’t be empty. You have to find it out and give them advice.
And if you have you have an owner who imagines 10 eu/sm rent, we tell him, that this is a very poor district here, there will be no activity that can bring so much money. So you have to talk to him, that he can also feel that his goals are irrealistic, because the only reason of emtiness, that there is no market for a product, so you have to create a market and bring someone who creates this product and also someone who needs this product.
L: Is there any instrument of the city or the state to tax vacant properties, or is there any pressure on owners to make use of them?
S.R.: No. Our whole work is based on convincing, nothing else.
L: In Berlin there are lot of houses with one owner. How do you work in these cases?
S.R.: When you have more users and one owner, you have to find the so called intellectual Hausmeister (groundskeeper). Someone who can repair a lamp, but who also understands what an artist needs. Someone who creates an atmosphere there…It works always on an informal level. You always find the right people if you communicate what you are looking for.
In case of houses, you have to find out, if it’s the owner itself who drives such a complex project with many different users. Then you have to organize a managment function and refinance it within the rent. This is what Beta Haus and all these coworking organizations do. We are not self drivers of the houses. Last year we had a house in Oranienburg, where we coached a Hausmeister, we developed the management process and gave it to him. This person studied town development and also worked as an artist for years, so understands very good what artists need.
L: Is the Hausmeister who chooses the users? Who creates the composition?
S.R.: We did it together. We started the process: we made the first internet page, the first PR, the firts concept of rent system, the first model lease, logo…etc. We also organized the first architectural planning processes together with an architecture studio. After this, there were so much interest on the place, that we said, from now on the Hausmeister has to take it on and we went out from the process in a few steps.
L: How did the organization change during this ten years?
S.R.: At the beginning it was not clear if this is gonna be an NGO or a private office. But we had to learn, that we have to be a private office, because all the property owners drive their own business. If there is someone who drives their own business, you are on the same level. If someone comes from an NGO with very nice idealistic goals, he doesn’t take you seriously.
Then our name was used by the Zwischennutzunsagentur Wuppertal. It has become a a fixed expression. And there was also a discussion deriving from the Gängeviertel in Hamburg [you can read about our visit to Gängeviertel and about the Leerstansmelder soon] and the connotation of Zwischennutzunsagentur changed. Before that it was a good way of using unused land. But today it has the connotation of abusing creative industries to gentrificate places. This change in discussions was the reason for us to say, okay, our name is old now and we have to declare that our vision is to cooperate with the town development processes. So we rename ourselves to Coopolis. In the game Monopoly, you can learn how to be a capitalist, and I said, hey if you want to develop the town, you shouldn’t teach the children Monopoly, but Coopoly.
L: Do you work only with private owners or with public owners as well?
S.R.: You could say this was the birth defect [Geburtsschäden] of Zwischennutzunsagentur. We brought the concept of it in 2002. That time fifty percent of the properties were public in Berlin. And in this fifty percent there were a lot of empty properties. And we said that people driven town develpoment processes are the best ones. So let’s reinvent the participation process here in Berlin and give a forth dimension to it! The dimension of real space. Make an agency that helps the public hand to manage public land driven by the public interest. But then Berlin was bankrupt. The state said – we give you a credit, but you have to sell all of your public land. So Berlin had to sell its own land so we could not realize this idea anymore and we concentrated on private property.
L: Do you charge the users any fee for your service?
STEFANIE RAAB: The people come to us because they have no chance in the normal market, so it would be absurd to charge fee. The service for the users cost them only their own power.
L: So basically you are still a publicly financed organization.
S.R.: Yes, but not institutionally. By project to project. Many of our projects are financed by the Soziale Stadt programme. There are some projects that are developed out of the concept of Soziale Stadt, like the lokal.leben (Aktionsraume Plus) or the KreativNetzNeukölln (BIWAQ). The biggest part of subsidies derives from the Städtabaufördermittel (Subsidies for Town Develpoment).
Last year I changed Coopolis from GbR to GmbH, which is a really capitalistic form of organization. The subsidy programmes of the European Union changed so much that today there is an enormous risk that you have to give the money back. So I had to find the way to separate private risk from business risk.
L: How was your work affected by the changes of global economy or the changes of real estate market in Berlin?
S.R.: What we didn’t expect was the global financial crisis. In follow-up of the crisis the whole world wanted to buy a house in Berlin, because the prices of the real estate went very low. And this was also a reason why we could work very successful, because the chances to earn real money with a house in Berlin were not so high. So you could convince the owners very easily to give their properties for different kinds of uses. So we had a very thin line between the owners interest and the users interest and we could manage successful cooperations.
We settled in 200 new shops in Neukölln during the years. And this really changed the character of the area. It is a very poor area and it is culturally rich in the perspective of different cultures, but it was not rich in the perspective of people who are interested in culture. And now it is culturally rich in two perspectives, and this richness of culture is also a compensation for economical poorness. So you can have a high life quality in this area – without having much money.
But now the global real estate market has recognized this and that people are interested in living here and that they could pay a little more money for it. So the rent prices have risen very fast in the last three years. And this is a success of our project, that we didn’t see in this dimension, because when we did our work there was no financial crisis. And this follow-up of our project is not what we wanted with it. And I think it is really important to always differentiate your goal and what is the follow-up of it.
But you can’t stop develop poor areas only because the private driven real estate economy parasites these processes. This is absurd. You can’t stop developing the cities, only because you have a sort of parasite. Then you have to do something against the parasite. And this is very important, because there is a very big gentrification discourse at the moment and it ends up with doing nothing, leaving everything in an ugly state, only that the real estate economy doesn’t get the area. This is really not the right direction of the discussions. The right question would be: how you can empower the users? But then you are away from the discourses of temporary use. And then you are in the empowerment discourse. And this is the right discourse.
Real estate economy’s tool is for instance price non-transparency, to say there is not so many empty office place in the center of Budapest so I can count high price for it. But if you know at the same time, there are ten office towers empty, and if you could open them, the prices would all go down, then you could also ask: is it allowed to leave it empty? Isn’t there also public money in these buildings? And now they try to privatize the profit, because this is what happens at the moment: the public property becomes smaller and smaller and the public richness becomes smaller and smaller and the private property becomes richer and richer and tries to dominate. And this you always have to look very critically, it is so fast and so dynamic, and we all have seen what banks can do. Because on the level of real estate there are the same cultures of self-enrichment that are in the banking sector.
L: Do you have the capacity to diversify the development, to anticipate some negative consequences of gentrification processes, to distribute space for a variety of people?
S.R.: Real estate management can be a business, but it can be a cultural behaviour as well, because real estate is not only a form of capital. It is also a form of resource, so it is also a common good. Even if the right to use is privatized at this moment, it stays a common good, like water and air. And with common goods you always have to be very sensitive. In a way it is good that there is private use, because we also saw what happens when everything is common good, like in the former GDR. You have no reason to invest in a house, if it is not your house. So it makes really sence that a house is owned by a private person, this is a good way of property management, but only if the private owner is a cultivated person and not a parasite. This is a very crucial question at the moment, and I think it will be also become a subject of laws also in a european level.
We have now in Berlin for 3 days the first law that goes into this direction. There was a big movement to change dwelling into holiday apartments, so there were not enough space and you couldn’t move within your own quarter. For example if your family became smaller and you had to find a smaller apartment and wanted to stay in the same area, you could not find one anymore. The tourists were drunk and loud at night, and the inhabitants of the houses were nerved about the situation and they moved also – the Berliners are very mobile they move every three years. So at the end you had entire empty houses that they changed to condominiums, they bought it and few years later they sold the apartments for a price that was 8 to 10 higher then before. They could buy a whole house for 500 to 800 euros /sm and they sold it a few years later for 3500-4000 euros/sm. This was the strategy how you could make a lot of money with holiday apartments. And these are the things that make no sense for the town development, for local development. Now there is a new low that forbids to turn dwellings into holiday apartments, you have to ask for a permission if you want to do this.
L: Do you think your model is adaptable to other cities as well?
S.R.: We had a big advice project in a little town in Hessen, in Spangenberg and we tried out if the model of Zwischennutzungsagentur would be copyable to the town. At the end of the project you had at least not more empty spaces then before. Despite the town is really small, we didn’t solved the whole empty space problem. But we started a sort of empowerment and encouragement process. A few people who drove a shop in the center said that they need a butcher shop where they can sell hunted meat. And they organized it themselves. While we were there, we didn’t succeed, but they managed self driven. At the end they really were much more active then before. The main subject there was to teach the people and empower the people, to make them conscious of the problem of shrinking cities and that no one will solve the problem besides yourself.
