Introduction

Social mix becomes an issue not only in cases when a city's development has already led to pockets of social exclusion and thus to negative spatial context effects for households, which sometimes result in political attempts at ‘urban repair’, but also with respect to such neighbourhoods as that of our case study, HafenCity Hamburg, whose definition as a new city district in economic and social terms within the cityscape is not yet complete. In the first case, the social mix concept can be pursued by intervening to change the socioeconomic environment and institutional structure so that negative context effects at least – be they economic, physical or symbolic – are largely removed, and the neighbourhood context no longer leads to involuntary segregation. However, in the case of projects of ‘urban reinvention’, such as HafenCity Hamburg presented here, substantial problems arise in defining an operational and adequately founded model for determining a new social mix:

• • No theoretically founded model of social mix based on social theory exists that would lend itself to an operative process, regardless of which form of capitalist society is assumed. Even ambitious ideas of equitable urban development or the ‘right to the city’ have not been presented in sufficiently elaborate form to serve as a pre-structured concept or theory for the idea of social mix as a spatial model of an inclusive urban society, without relinquishing the benefits of voluntary segregation or the advantages of a differentiated city.

• • The political public – also in Germany – regularly calls for urban development policies to facilitate social mix, but a political framework of norms based on national political goals or far-reaching planning consensus is non-existent. Germany also lacks implementation-oriented national urban development policy goals, if only due to the municipalities’ predominant responsibility for their urban development, which fundamentally allows for clear differentiation in local strategies. Social mixing as a stipulation for planning is basically well received by the German public, yet it is not a focus of national urban policy; in comparison with the UK or the Netherlands, at least, fully fledged strategies for action exist only rarely.

• • Compared to the welfare state-driven, Fordist approach of 30 or 40 years ago, urban development today is to a far greater degree a process which follows market principles and is borne by private sector investments and protagonists, Germany being no exception.