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2018 Blockupy Fights Back Global City Fo
2018 Blockupy Fights Back Global City Fo
In 2012 and 2013 Frankfurt am Main witnessed major social protests under the name of Blockupy
against the European crisis management and its devastating impacts on the livelihoods of people all
over Europe. The city was chosen as the site of protest by a national coalition of radical and as well
as more modest civil society groups due to its economic, political and symbolic functions as
Germany’s most important global city, the capital of continental European financial industries and
the location of the European Central Bank (ECB) which is one of the key European institutions
executing neoliberal austerity politics. The slogan for the 2013 protests was chosen accordingly:
The Blockupy coalition’s most visible activities so far were the ‘days of action’ organized in
Frankfurt in May 2012 and again in May 2013 that aimed at shutting down the CBD in the form of
a social strike. The days of action included mass rallies in the CBD with about 30,000
demonstrators in the first year and about 20,000 in 2013 as well as smaller and decentralized
actions directed at specific sites that stand for various aspects of neoliberal capitalism and the
European austerity regime (see below). In 2013, Blockupy also included a protest camp where at its
peak over 1,000 activists from all over Germany and Europe spent three days living in tents,
discussing a plethora of aspects of the current European conjuncture in workshops as well as tactics
Compared to earlier and similar protests in Germany, Blockupy was surprisingly successful in
getting its message across: that crises are endemic to capitalism, that austerity politics in ‘crisis
states’ and elsewhere serve to secure the wealth of some at the expense of many, that German
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export oriented and financial capital have profited from the Euro and are profiting from the crisis
and its political regulation, that racist (anti-) immigration policies, the further deterioration of
working conditions and the new housing question in Germany are closely linked to the crisis, and,
finally, that there are forces in Germany that stand in solidarity with protestors in Greece, Ireland,
Portugal, Spain and elsewhere. Paradoxically, the fact that the protests were met with massive
police repression has not silenced them but has indeed contributed to the movement’s success in
contradictory ways.
Blockupy as a social movement is not easily classified. It is an urban social movement in the sense
that its visible actions are concentrated in Frankfurt, using the symbols and the functions of this
global city for mobilization and as the site of an urban social strike. Blockupy is, however, not
primarily concerned with specifically urban issues and grievances – the defining aspect of urban
social movements (Castells 1983, Mayer 2013). While urban issues like gentrification and the
housing question became part of Blockupy’s agenda over time, the movement is centrally
concerned with the more abstract, less immediately urban issues of financialized neoliberal
capitalism and the European austerity regime. In this it resembles the alter-globalisation movement
of the 1990s and 2000s that mobilized huge mass rallies in the cities and places where summits of
transnational organisations were held (Geneva 1998, Seattle 1999, Washington DC 2000, Prague,
Gothenburg & Genoa 2001). But in contrast to this ‘summit hopping’, Blockupy’s choice of
locating is less reactive to the elites’ travel schedules. Blockupy does not follow the symbols and
control functions of neoliberal capitalist globalisation, but attacks them where they are fixed in
place: in the CBD of the global city of Frankfurt. In addition, Blockupy was also able to use social
movement infrastructures in place in Frankfurt after decades of urban social struggles and
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Based on debates about the strategic relevance of the urban for both social movements and policing
(Uitermark 2004) this book chapter discusses how Blockupy has articulated its protest with the
pre-existing global city formation in Frankfurt. We argue that the strategy to use Germany’s
international banking center as a local anchor point to challenge globalized, finance-market driven
capitalism and the European crisis regime is a major explanation for the specific way in which
Blockupy was able to confront the stunningly stable neoliberal hegemony in Germany (cf. Belina
2013).
By looking on the dialectic of control and contention, urban scholars demonstrate that cities
function as strategic sites for both politicization and policing (Uitermark 2004). With regard to
politicization, Uitermark et al. (2012) argue, for instance, that urban centers are constitutive for
counter-hegemonic social movements and are particularly robust spaces for driving mobilizations
for at least three reasons. First, cities are privileged for breeding contention because contradictions
within capitalist urbanization tend to produce a wide variety of grievances among its inhabitants.
Cities are, second, due to their density, size, and diversity more likely to become laboratories where
new ties between a broad and diverse range of activists and political groups are forged. As cities
also concentrate (immobile symbols of) power relations, they represent, third, “a privileged point
of attack” (ibid.: 2550) as social movements can claim public space exactly where key institutions
of political and economic power are located. Especially in the case of global cities where a set of
powerful institutions are spatially fixed and where symbols of power and prestige are concentrated
permanently, movements have the opportunity to address global issues by confronting their
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Building on this framework and having the specific urban social movement character of Blockupy
in mind, we argue that the three following aspects help to understand the strategic relevance of
Frankfurt for the Blockupy protests: First, the emergence of Frankfurt as Germany’s leading
international banking center and global city during the early 1980s resulted in a high concentration
of powerful financial institutions including the headquarters of private banks like Deutsche Bank
and Commerzbank as well as the German Central Bank and the ECB (Keil 2011; Schipper 2014).
Due to the global city formation, Frankfurt is, second, nowadays faced with a relative high degree
of socio-economic inequality (Bock, Belina 2012; Keil, Ronneberger 2000; Klagge 2005)
accompanied by ongoing gentrification processes (Schipper 2013) that have fuelled considerable
grievances among the local population in recent years. Beyond that, Frankfurt has, third, a
long-lasting tradition of urban based social struggles that could, at least temporarily, overcome the
alliances of a broad range of political actors across civil society (Mullis, Schipper 2013;
Ronneberger 2012; Roth 1991). This tradition enables local (Blockupy) activists today to build on
already established ties and to enter broader coalitions with ‘respectable’ civil society actors. In the
following, we briefly explain how these three aspects are historically interwoven.
The foundations for becoming Germany’s leading banking center were laid after WWII when
Frankfurt was selected as the location for the predecessor of the German Central Bank. The
subsequent concentration of national financial institutions in Frankfurt and the resulting growth of
the Central Business District (CBD) led to a radical transformation of the urban socio-spatial
structure and planted the seeds for the following globalizing process that started in the early 1980s
(Grote 2003; Ronneberger, Keil 1995). However, the early state-led expansion of the CBD and the
resulting partial demolition of the centrally located residential neighborhood Westend were met
with fierce resistance. During the 1970s, lower and middle class tenants, migrant workers, and
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radical students joined forces to protest against ruthless urban development projects in the interest
of real estate speculators and the growing financial industries. With strong support among the local
population, the militant movement organized rent strikes and mass rallies, and squatted, for the first
time in German post-war history, a number of residential buildings that were supposed to be
demolished in order to construct high-rise office towers. For several years, regular clashes with the
police, mostly in the context of forceful evictions of squatted real estates, grew into severe, violent,
With regard to the globalizing of Frankfurt, the final qualitative shift from a national to an
international financial center occurred during the 1980s. During this decade, Frankfurt’s
transformation into a global city was reflected in the further expansion of financial and producer
service industries that materialized in new generations of high-rise buildings and an airport
extension pushed through aggressively against local resistance. This resistance directed against the
plan to build a third runway called Startbahn-West came out of the newly emerging environmental
movement and was overwhelmingly supported by the local population including both respected
citizens and leftwing radicals. After all juridical complaints had been rejected by 1980, the
emerging mass movement changed its strategies to more direct actions. From May 1980 onwards,
they organized mass rallies with up to 120,000 people, erected an informal village in the woods
close to the airport, tried to occupy the construction site several times, erected barricades on the
adjacent highway, and used different other tactics of sabotage and civil disobedience. Although the
inauguration of the runway in 1984 weakened the dynamic, the protest continued for several years
until it ended abruptly when two police officers were shot during a demonstration in November
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In addition to protests against the airport expansion, struggles against gentrification and the
destruction of housing by the growth of the office economy continued throughout the 1980s as well
(for instance in centrally located neighborhoods like Bockenheim, Gallus, and Gutleut). However,
social conflicts over housing issues dominated by leftwing radicals, working class activists, and
squatters lost force during the 1990s as “neighborhood-based defensive activism [...], based on left
Yet, local resistance against the disadvantages of growth for the resident population pursued – but
in a socially and spatially different way: The new wave of social protests 1) shifted from the center
of the city to the (northern) periphery which has evolved into a prime location for the post-Fordist
economy; and 2) became a more populist, partly neorural endeavor supported also by conservative
farmers and middle class suburbanites (Ronneberger, Keil 1994). These new types of turmoil
against large scale urban infrastructure and mass housing projects are, however, harder to classify
in terms of their ideological background as they represent “a clear departure from the notion that
urban social movements in Frankfurt were hegemonized by the left wing or green milieu alone”
(ibid.: 245). Since the 1990s, this populist kind of (partly NIMBY-) anti-growth protest has
continued in different forms until today. One of the most remarkable mass protests erupted, for
instance, over the opening of another runway called Nordwestbahn at the Frankfurt airport in 2011
since the aircraft noise of the new flight path now also affects upper and middle class
neighborhoods mainly in the south of Frankfurt. While the airport expansion had for years been
proclaimed as a vital strategy for increasing the global competitiveness of the city by political elites
from conservative, green, and social democratic parties, its realization led after all to strong
anti-growth unrest heavily supported by traditionally more conservative parts of the local
population.
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In terms of being Germany’s primary international banking center, the globalizing process made
another important leap forward as Frankfurt was selected as the location for the newly established
ECB in 1998.This decision reflects, first of all, the leading position of Frankfurt for European
continental financial industries achieved during the earlier globalizing phases but is, secondly, also
the result of aggressive lobbying activities organized by the national and local governments. In
2014/15, the ECB has relocated its current headquarters into a newly built high-rise in the eastern
part of the city called Ostend, putting it under further heavy gentrification pressure. Already since
the 1990s, the City of Frankfurt has successfully initiated a number of large scale luxurious urban
redevelopment projects to gentrify this working-class neighborhood and the surrounding old
industrial areas located along the axis of the Main River (for instance parts of the East Harbour and
the former slaughter house area) (Ronneberger, Keil 1995: 328pp; Schipper 2013: 196pp). Against
the background of this long-term redevelopment strategy, the political decision to permit the ECB
another step that will accelerate the pressure on the housing market for working class families. As
the ECB employs more than 1,500 high-wage professionals often looking for upscale, centrally
located housing, it is more than likely that the relocation will, intended or not, lead to the further
displacement of low-income household from one of the last remaining affordable and centrally
As an effect of the global city formation based on financial industries and an international airport
economy (Keil, Ronneberger 2000; Schamp 2002), the social polarization in Frankfurt increased
significantly. A rapid deindustrialization process since the early 1990s, resulting from increasing
land values, and a substantial loss of unionized blue-collar employment opportunities went along
with the growth of high paid jobs in the financial industries on the one side and low wage jobs in
the service sector on the other one (Schipper 2014: 241). Therefore, the metropolitan region of
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Frankfurt is, compared to most other German urban centers, faced with a disproportionally high
social inequality (Bock, Belina 2012; Klagge 2005). Furthermore, this polarized income structure
is, nowadays, confronted with a return of the housing question and a new wave of state-led and
crisis-induced gentrification processes (Schipper 2013). Between 2010 and 2013, average housing
prices increased by 35% (City of Frankfurt 2014: 22), while the closely linked rent level rose by
20%. As centrally located, former working-class neighborhoods face most severe rises of rents and
housing prices, low-income and also middle-class households are displaced and pushed further to
the periphery of the metropolitan region (Heeg, Holm 2012). As a result, a new wave of urban
social protests, in many ways similar to the leftwing housing struggles of the 1980s, has emerged,
protesting against rising rents, escalating housing prices, and the gentrification of centrally located
neighborhoods. These anti-gentrification protests are organized and carried out by grassroots
initiatives, and more radical housing activists including a lively squatter movement that has
occupied more than ten vacant buildings during the last three years – all of them subsequently
All the social movements illustrated above are examples of politicization that emanated not least
from the global city formation of Frankfurt. As Frankfurt is a place where the contradictions of the
capitalist economy are concentrated, growth periods have, during the last fifty years, “always been
linked to forms of local resistance” whereby “[u]rban social conflicts usually erupted where the
new phase of expansion manifested itself most visibly” (Keil, Ronneberger 2000: 242). So far the
contrast, Blockupy is the first attempt to not only articulate opposition to the processes evoked by
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the global city formation but to use Frankfurt as a local anchor point to challenge globalized,
Blockupy is a broad national political alliance with transnational network ties that was founded in
reaction to the German and European crisis management in early 2012. The alliance consists of
activists from leftwing parties, trade unions, the Occupy movement, associations of the
unemployed, the environmental and peace movements, anti-racist and anti-fascist initiatives, and
different other groups of the radical and more moderate Left. Inspired by the Arab spring, the
US-Occupy-movement and the wave of mobilizations in Spain and Greece (Tejerina et al. 2013),
the idea was born to organize five days of protest in the financial district of Frankfurt in May 2012
including several demonstrations, more than one hundred workshops and lectures in public places
all over the city, and a number of creative, non-violent actions of civil disobedience. Part of the
latter was the strategy to block and shut down the financial district and the ECB for several days by
setting up protest camps in the city center and by peacefully blocking the main entrance routes with
thousands of people. In contrast to in some ways similar ‘summit hopping’ protests against
neoliberal capitalism, Blockupy could freely and self-determined choose when and where to
mobilize. While Frankfurt was, in the beginning, only one of several possible options, the city was
selected due to its global city functions as well as its long-standing tradition of social struggles. For
instance, the Blockupy Call for Action for 2013 states: “We carry our protest, our civil
disobedience and resistance to the residence of the profiteers of the European crisis regime to
However, in contrast to the expectations of the organizers and in contrast to former experiences
with similar forms of protest in Germany, the City of Frankfurt legally prohibited all
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demonstrations, camps, public lectures and workshops and banned any kind of protest for the
whole week. Arguing that the Blockupy protests could be used by militant radicals to riot in the city,
the local government legally produced a space of exception where basic democratic rights were
superseded (Petzold, Pichl 2013). Supported by a panic discourse that “our city” was “threatened”,
shops and banks in the city center were closed and boarded up, and subway stations and public
institutions like the Goethe University were shut down. The banks turned off all ATMs in the city
center and with them the access to cash money in Germany’s financial capital and the region’s
most important commercial district. Further stirring the panic, the local police as well as several
businesses advised employees to take a day off or to wear casual clothes instead of suits due to the
Although any protest had been legally banned, the aim of shutting down the financial district was
surprisingly successful – yet not in the way the organizers had imagined. In order to prevent
protesters from entering the city center, an overwhelming force of 5,000 police officers including
hundreds of cruisers, mounted police, water cannons and even armored vehicles blocked the CBD
of Frankfurt for several days. The police legally produced a space of exception by closing all
entrances to the financial district for everybody and by transforming the CBD into a fenced fortress
Image 1: Police closing an entrance to the financial district in May 2012 (Boykin Reynolds)
Image 2: The headquarters of the ECB encircled by a barbed wire fence in May 2012 (Stefan
Rudersdorf)
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However, the police also detained more than 1,400 people who tried to gather in small groups to
demonstrate against neoliberal capitalism or, in face of the police repression, for democracy and
free speech (ibid.: 224). In sum, this dialectic of control and contestation resulted in an urban space
in which everyday life was thoroughly disturbed and through which the CBD was shut down in a
much more efficient way than any blockades by protesters could have ever achieved. Setting a
strong symbol against this authoritarian state of emergency, 30,000 people joined the
demonstration on the final day of the Blockupy mobilisation – which was the only protest event
that had been legalized by court order in a last-minute decision (see image 3).
Image 3: Main demonstration on the final day of the Blockupy protests in 2012 (Boykin Reynolds)
One year later, in May 2013, the Blockupy alliance mobilized again for days of action in Frankfurt.
Like in 2012, it was agreed to perform mass actions of civil disobedience combined with a larger
demonstration at the end to disturb the regular business flows within the global city. The
non-violent but consistent resistance against the repression in 2012 had subverted the legitimacy
and possibilities of state authorities to follow a similar strategy of criminalization. Albeit thousands
of police-officers were concentrated in the CBD once more, they received, this time, the order to
act much more reserved and let the protest take its course. On the morning of Friday, May 31,
around 3,000 activists gathered in front of the ECB in order to block its entrances. The blockades
were held until noon when a ‘second wave’ of protest was launched. These more decentralized
actions of civil disobedience took place at the Frankfurt International Airport to challenge its role
of being Germany’s main hub for the deportation of refugees; at the entry of the Deutsche Bank
headquarters to protest against land grabbing and financial speculation on food prices; in front of
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real estate investors to claim the right to the city which has increasingly been denied to the urban
poor due to escalating rents and housing prices; and on the main city center shopping street where
several malls and multinational retailers were blocked to protest the working conditions in textile
industries in the Global South. In sharp contrast to the situation in 2012, the days of action in 2013
could take place more or less without being attacked by the police. While in 2012 the dialectic of
control and contention resulted in an authoritarian shut down of the city center, this time around
protesters were in the driver’s seat. Summing up this day, a spokesperson of the Italian delegation
described its achievement at the general assembly as a successful social strike in the city (see image
4). However, on the following day the final demonstration of around 20,000 people would not get
far. After about 800 meters, police forces in full riot gear stopped the peaceful demonstration, cut
off and encircled the first 1,000 participants for more than nine hours, and injured another several
hundred with tear gas and batons (Steven 2014, see image 5). The reason given by the police for
ending the legal demonstration was that some demonstrators had “masked” themselves with sun
glasses and umbrellas. It is important to notice that the police was not able to legitimize its strategy
and to win the battle for public opinion during the following weeks. Both Frankfurt based national
newspapers (the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the liberal Frankfurter
Rundschau) as well as almost all other journalists condemned the police strategy and the
unjustified violence against a peaceful and legal demonstration. The public media outrage
culminated in a tumultuous press conference of the Minister of the Interior of Hessen and the local
police president, when mainstream journalists publicly denounced the police strategy as “a shame
for Frankfurt”. As a result, over 10,000 local citizens took to the streets a week later to demonstrate
against police-violence and the second attempt to criminalize social protests against the European
crisis management.
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Image 4: Police in front of the ECB during Blockupy 2013 (timmy_lichtbild)
Image 5: Police using tear gas against protesters on June 1st 2013 (strassenstriche)
Conclusion
Since 2012, Blockupy has, even if not primarily focusing on urban issues and grievances, become
part of Frankfurt’s long-lasting tradition of urban based social movements by using the historical
and ongoing global city formation to articulate its protest against the German and European
austerity regime. In line with Uitermark’s (2004: 710) argument that „some points in space are
obviously more vulnerable than others”, the ECB within the global city of Frankfurt has in
particular become a symbol to challenge neoliberal capitalism, austerity politics, and European
power relations. By using the ECB as a symbol, Blockupy opened up for the first time a path to
connect transnational social struggles against the German and European crisis management with
local protests against the neoliberal urban restructuring within the global city of Frankfurt (Mullis
2014). This place-based and cross-scalar networking was made possible by and turned against the
very networks that formed the global city Frankfurt in the first place. The global city, one might
conclude, in peculiar ways produced the possibilities to attack the root causes of its devastating
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