https://doi.org/10.1177/09697764221087644
European Urban and Regional Studies
2023, Vol. 30(3) 221 –234
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/09697764221087644
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European Urban
and Regional
Studies
Introduction
Over 1.3 million people born in the United Kingdom
reside in the European Union (EU; UKICE, 2021),
yet research examining the everyday lives of British
migrants in European cities is limited (although see
Piekut, 2013; Scott, 2006) – particularly regarding
how processes of classification and border drawing
work across European nation-states. While there is a
large body of literature on British lifestyle migrants
within Europe, this focuses primarily on rural loca-
tions (Benson, 2011; Hardill et al., 2005; O’Reilly,
2000) or Britons living in former British colonies
(Knowles and Harper, 2010) or the Global South
(Botterill, 2016). British migrants in European
cities seldom feature as a topic of research, yet
interrogating their everyday lives highlights how
intersectional borders of belonging function across
European space. This article draws on qualitative
research with British migrants living in Germany’s
capital to examine how situated bordering practices
relate to the production of translocational, intersec-
tional positionalities. These positions shift through
space and time, with ‘some processes leading to
more complex, contradictory and at times dialogical
positionalities than others’ (Anthias, 2002: 502). By
Spaces of the local, spaces of the
nation: Intersectional bordering
practices in post-Brexit Berlin
Christy Kulz
Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin
Abstract
This article examines the relationship between bordering practices and processes of situated intersectionality by
exploring how British migrants encounter and erect borders as they move through Berlin. Through exploring how
research participants conceptualise and orientate themselves towards Berlin’s city spaces and how this relates to
transnational and translocal processes of classification, I interrogate how processes of racialisation and classification
move across European contexts to manifest within localised spaces. The research explores how these intersections
work to minimise, accentuate or transfigure one another as inequalities come into being through urban space by
placing feminist intersectional approaches in conversation with border studies. By uniquely focusing on a migrant group
infrequently considered in European migration literatures, and often regarded as invisible or unproblematic, we can
examine how race, class and gender intersect with nationality and how racialised exclusions from European belonging
function through everyday processes. I highlight how classification processes have transnational portability and carry
intra-European similarities, yetalso assuming context-specific features.
Keywords
Berlin, Brexit, British migrants, bordering, class, intersectionality, racialization
Corresponding author:
Christy Kulz, Institut für Soziologie, Fakultät VI: Planen Bauen
Umwelt, Technische Universität Berlin, Fraunhoferstraße 33-36,
Sekretariatszeichen FH 9-1, 10587 Berlin, Germany.
Emails: [email protected]; [email protected]
1087644EUR0010.1177/09697764221087644European Urban and Regional StudiesKulz
research-article2022
Article
222 European Urban and Regional Studies 30(3)
directly approaching processes of racialisation and
classification that are often only implicitly addressed
in migration literatures, the article foregrounds how
intersectional processes differentially position
British migrants. Understanding these positionalities
through a postcolonial lens is fruitful as historical
power relations underpin present-day inequalities.
Bhambra (2007) describes how colonial relations are
integral to the social sciences’ current sites of inquiry,
yet these enduring relations often remain beyond the
sociologist’s vantage point (p. 16). Mayblin and
Turner (2021) have highlighted how this limited
field of sociological vision impacts on migration
studies, which is rarely considered in tandem with
colonialism, despite the legacies and continuities of
colonialism shaping how contemporary migration is
governed and experienced (p. 1). Focusing on British
migrants as a group also works to unsettles assump-
tions that migration inherently infers movement
from the Global South to the Global North.
Casaglia (2020: 28) has called for a border stud-
ies focused on understanding the border as a technol-
ogy reproducing inequalities; this manifests not only
through hyper-visibility and immobilisation, but also
the absence of borders for others. While ‘strangers’
are often subjected to ‘head counts’ (Van Houtum
and Van Naerssen, 2001: 129), many British migrants
are not counted as ‘strange’. Since the Brexit refer-
endum, 31,600 British citizens have acquired
German citizenship. This number rose by about
2300 per cent when comparing pre-Brexit 2015 and
2019 statistics (Oltermann, 2020). The relatively
unremarkable naturalisation of this large population
points to the easy acceptability of Britons as fellow
Europeans. White Britons’ assumed cultural compat-
ibility and shared Europeanness frequently renders
them unremarkable additions to the nation, tying to
how whiteness continues to act as a key indicator of
European and German belonging (Beaman, 2015).
An uncomplicated embrace of Britishness in
Germany, however, was disrupted by the Britons of
colour in the research as they rarely enjoyed an easy
acceptance; their easy acceptance was often also
missing in Britain.
While many of my participants could be classi-
fied as affluent migrants (Knowles and Harper,
2010), this monolithic understanding obscures how
complex situated intersections of race, class and
gender or nationality have on their daily practices
that produce irreducible social divisions (Yuval-
Davis, 2015: 94). Differing border regimes create
hierarchies of mobility that result in ‘forms of ine-
quality in terms of possibility of movement and
access to space which directly connects with differ-
ent and uneven positioning’ (Casaglia, 2020: 32).
Leonard and Walsh (2019: 6) point out that British
migrants are continually researched as a homogene-
ously white group and urge a departure from this
perspective that my research addresses (see Benson
and Lewis, 2019; Kulz, 2011). Despite growing
numbers of Britons moving to Berlin, there is little
research examining how they shape and are shaped
by the city (although see Griffiths and Maile, 2014).
This article makes a novel contribution to migration
and border studies by placing the complex, situated
intersectionalities of British migrants in Berlin and
their local spatial practices in conversation with
racialised national and European discourses and how
these manifest in urban space.
Bordering practices across
urban space meet situated
intersectionality
The literatures on bordering and intersectionality act
as a valuable starting points to explore how classifi-
cations and boundaries work. There is a complemen-
tary synergy between border studies and
intersectional approaches, as ‘this encounter gener-
ates awareness of the co-implications of space and
identity, and the significance of space in processes of
subject formation’ (Casaglia, 2020: 37). By under-
standing how British migrants draw and come up
against borders, we can better understand how pro-
cesses of classification are not given, but take hold in
and through spatial practices. As Massey (1994)
states, ‘what is at issue is not social phenomenon in
space, but both social phenomena and space as con-
stituted out of social relations’ (p. 2). A relational
dynamic exists between how migrants negotiate bor-
ders and how they become positioned by them
through the spatial nature of everyday ‘bordering
and ordering’ (Yuval-Davis et al., 2019), where bor-
dering is a social process of spatial differentiation
Kulz 223
(Van Houtum and Van Naerssen, 2001: 126). All of
my participants hold a British passport that has ena-
bled them to cross Germany’s national border, yet
this does not mean they are similarly positioned
through this crossing or have a shared experience of
the city. Less formalised yet substantive bordering
practices are continually unfolding within everyday
life. Löw (2012) emphasises how practices and
structures come into being and are regenerated in
city-specific ways; this highlights the role of history
and how it fits against the spatial. The historical
post-war occupation of Berlin by the British worked
to shape the place-making practices of some British
migrants, while the British migrant is associated
with a different set of meanings in Berlin than they
might be in other European cities.
Borders have played a particular role in Berlin, its
division producing borderlands that have been rec-
alibrated in the post-reunification period. This move-
ment and remaking of urban space has impacted on
the placement of British migrants who arrived before
the fall of the wall or shortly thereafter, as the centre
of the city slowly shifted. Past crude, analogue forms
of bisection now encounter more malleable, mobile
and diffuse forms of boundary-drawing across the
city, as borders are not only present at the edge of
boundaries (Scott and Sohn, 2018). Scott (2020)
calls for putting more political understandings of
borders in conversation with their ontological impor-
tance (p. 5); discursive border politics shape the
nature of who, how and where one can be. These
ontological boundaries relate to the neo-colonial
nature of international power relations, where the
classic colonial conditions of oppression become
reconstituted in new ways (Casaglia, 2020: 32).
Borders and migrant positionalities emerge as
relationally constituted; Yuval-Davis employs trans-
locality to understand how particular social divisions
can have different meanings and power within differ-
ent spaces. Exploring conflictual positionings is also
key; Anthias (2002: 108) argues for a more thorough
mapping of the processes resulting in contradictory
social positions within intersectionality. Her notion of
translocational positionality ‘recognises the impor-
tance of the context, the situated nature of claims and
attributions and their production in complex and shift-
ing locales and the contradictory processes in play’
(Anthias, 2002: 107). Here inequalities and differ-
ences are not individual characteristics, but rather a
set of processes that can result in multiple contradic-
tory and simultaneously held positions that migrants
move between. Anthias (2008: 7) urges researchers to
move away from identity-based questions like ‘who
are you’ to questions like ‘what and how have you’
focusing on process; I would like to add ‘where are/
can you be’ to highlight spatial context as a key aspect
of translocality (Anthias, 2008: 7). While the fortifi-
cation of European borders shows that territorialisa-
tion is not past-tense, opposing movements can be
simultaneously unfolding as ‘the de-hierarchisation,
networking and permeability of borders meets hierar-
chisation, centralisation, and closure’ (Löw, 2021:
503). These perspectives highlight how both subjec-
tivities and spatial forms are capable of dynamic,
shifting and often paradoxical positions.
Berlin: a national outlier with
particular spatial and social
histories
As a key site in the Shoah, a city divided by the Cold
War, and an urban space where racism is both per-
petuated and protested against, Berlin provides a
saturated landscape from which to consider intersec-
tional bordering processes. For most of my partici-
pants, the Second World War was treated as a distant
memory that had been more or less adequately
addressed within Germany. Racisms of the present
were disconnected from those of the past, highlight-
ing how the post-war banishment of race and preva-
lent use of xenophobia within German discourses
has effectively worked to position anti-Semitism and
Islamophobia as unrelated phenomena. Participants
more readily referred to Berlin’s Cold War division
as this was in living memory for many.
Berlin’s tumultuous 20th-century history and
subsequent attempts to restyle itself as a global city
comprise a particular social and spatial milieu navi-
gated by the British migrant. Despite the rising costs
of housing, the contested nature of urban redevelop-
ment since reunification, and struggles over the right
to urban space (Colomb, 2012; Holm and Kuhn,
2011), Berlin’s romanticised ‘poor but sexy’ image
still holds appeal for new generations of Britons.
224 European Urban and Regional Studies 30(3)
Berlin’s reputation as a haven for artists and queer
culture was cemented before the fall of the wall in
1989, with musicians, writers and painters frequently
calling the city home. Between 2000 and 2016, there
was a 79 per cent increase in British citizens regis-
tered as Berlin residents (Amt für Statistik Berlin-
Brandenburg (ASBB), 2018). According to 2020
statistics, over 20,655 Britons live in Berlin, repre-
senting the most concentrated population in Germany
(Destatis, 2019). Bolstered by the United Kingdom’s
growing housing costs and falling living standards,
Berlin has been frequently advertised in the UK
press as an appealing alternative. Several partici-
pants had lived in other German cities, but felt Berlin
was more relaxed and less rule-bound than these
locales. Berlin was imagined as freer and more per-
missive regarding alternative practices while provid-
ing a high quality of life with plenty of green spaces.
Mapping spatial narratives
This article draws on empirical material from an
ongoing research project conducted at the Technische
Universität Berlin. The project has used spatial map-
ping exercises, 35 semi-structured interviews and
participant observation within spaces of British soci-
ality to gauge how migrants are shaping and are
being shaped by the city. This research has been in
progress since September 2019, with a long pause
due to the Corona pandemic. As a section of a more
comprehensive project, it explores how people both
produce space and are produced by it (Lefebvre,
1974). Hence, mapping and participant observation
feature as critical methodological tools. Using a map
of Berlin, participants were asked to mark spaces
they were fond of, that they used daily or that they
actively avoided, as well as areas where they had
lived and worked. The ‘place-images’ of particular
spaces of the city related to how processes of situ-
ated intersectionality operated (Shields, 1991).
Interview narratives unpacked how and why particu-
lar spaces were occupied and inhabited and what dis-
courses were employed. A narrative method of data
analysis involved an inductive process of listening
and re-listening to the interviews, transcription and
identifying emergent themes. It views the interview
as a collaborative process whereby people make and
use stories to interpret the world; the interview is,
therefore, a social product created within a specific
time and social context (Rapley, 2001).
At times I occupied a shared position with my
research participants as a new migrant to Berlin from
London. However, my experience of Berlin as a
white, middle-class British-American woman was
markedly different from that of many British migrants
of colour and migrants from different class back-
grounds or political orientations. I felt that I was
learning from and with my research partners about
Berlin, as they shared reflections on their lives in the
city. While some were recent arrivals like me, others
had lived in Berlin for decades. Although interviews
generally lasted 1.5–2 hours, some were 3 hours long,
and I met twice with several interviewees. These
interviews often took place in their local café, a
favourite pub or a nearby park; I preferred to travel to
their local area to walk around before and afterwards,
taking ethnographic notes on either side of the inter-
view. Several interviews took place in participants’
homes, whereas a few participants preferred to visit
my office. These encounters often involved showing
mementoes or photos of loved ones, pointing out
aspects of their neighbourhood, and occasionally
exchanging messages after the interview. All partici-
pants gave informed consent to participate and have
been given a pseudonym to protect their anonymity.
Situated intersections and
borders to migrant reception
Many predominately white1 British migrants
described receiving an unproblematic or positive
reception in Berlin, something they connected to a
fondness for British culture. Gordon grew up in
Tooting, London. He has lived in Germany since
1977 and in Berlin since 1992. Now semi-retired,
Gordon still has a café-cum-shop selling British food
in Brandenburg. He felt he had never been discrimi-
nated against as an Auslander ‘. . . except in a very
positive way as they want to practice their English.
People come into the shop, and they love to chat
with us. We have been to England, we have been to
Cornwall’. Jacqueline, a woman in her fifties, has
lived in both Stuttgart and Berlin and shares a simi-
lar experience, asserting that she has never felt
Kulz 225
unwelcome in Berlin. However, she admits that their
response might be different if she were Syrian.
Developing Jacqueline’s reflexivity regarding her
privileged position, David recognises his placement
as a white British migrant in the hierarchy of national
and local belonging in Germany. The majority of
those who describe fitting with relatively ease in
Berlin were over 50 years old, heterosexual, white
and worked in professional occupations. David, a
58-year-old man from London, who initially visited
Berlin for its liberating gay scene, comments,
I am a migrant, like all other migrants . . . Clearly, I am
not a brown or a black migrant; I am European. I am
British. I am not even Spanish. I think they see it in
degradations, and I am on the top rank when it comes
to different. Not too different . . . I feel quite privileged.
Nevertheless, we have demoted ourselves through
Brexit to 28th place below the Lithuanians.
David recognises his ‘top rank’ position as a
British man. His use of ‘European’ and ‘British’
infers whiteness and is positioned as valuable within
European hierarchies of whiteness. In contrast, with
its mixture of cultural influences and proximity to
the African continent, Spain is orientalised by
Western Europe and occupies a more subordinate
position (Tofiño-Quesada, 2003). The level of differ-
ence between David and white Germans is assessed
as comfortable; he is different, but not too different.
British whiteness is also positioned as preferable to
eastern European whiteness, namely that presented
by Lithuanians whom David positions at the bottom
of the EU hierarchy. This denigration shows how the
value of whiteness is intersected by different politi-
cal and economic histories (Rzepnikowska, 2019).
The valued form of whiteness that Britishness pre-
sents shows how whiteness is not only formed in
relation to blackness, but other forms of whiteness
(Nayak, 2003). David’s differences, like being a
native English speaker, also hold value; as Stokowski
(2019: 151) points out, being bilingual in Germany
infers speaking English or French at home – not den-
igrated languages like Polish or Turkish. While some
researchers have posited that EU citizenship pro-
vides a default form of integration by opening coun-
tries’ entry doors (Mügge and Van Der Haar, 2016),
EU citizenships do not carry equal value (Benson
and Lewis, 2019) and are shaped by their proximity
to uncontaminated forms of whiteness and Western
capitalism.
We can note a certain anxiety in David’s inter-
view that Brexit has damaged the currency of
Britishness. This takes on an added dimension for
Britons of colour like Sarah, who feels her British
nationality helped legitimate her being in Germany
despite racism. Brexit signalled a double-loss:
‘Especially already feeling like I am already not
really wanted here and on top of that being British –
it is like losing another piece of my right to be here’.
Sarah feels that Britain leaving the EU diminishes
her tenuous right to be in Germany as a black woman,
signalling the vulnerability of British migrants of
colour despite their citizenship status. Here the rela-
tionship between current migrations and colonial
pasts surfaces; the British colonisation of Sierra
Leone lead to Sarah’s UK childhood, her British citi-
zenship and mobility across the EU, yet this mark-
er’s value is eroded through racialisation and Brexit.
Brexit has not simply enacted new forms of inequal-
ity, but deepened or rearranged pre-existent social
fissures (Benson and Lewis, 2019). David ‘feels’ his
privilege through his experience in Berlin compared
with other migrants, despite their shared migrant sta-
tus. Meanwhile, some Britons like Richard could not
recognise themselves as migrants. A white 53-year-
old man from Southampton, Richard had lived in
Germany since 1998. When I asked him about being
a migrant, Richard reinterpreted the question as
being about someone else and mentioned Berlin’s
large Turkish population.
Alongside positive stories of welcome from white
Britons, several less positive responses highlighted
how localised struggles for spatial justice in Berlin
could become aligned with xenophobic impulses.
International capital’s influx into post-reunification
Berlin instigated staggering increases in the once-
affordable housing market, with property prices ris-
ing 200 per cent over the past decade (Guthmann,
2021). The graffiti scrawled on a Kreuzberg shop:
‘Berlin hates you; if you want to speak English go to
New York’ speaks to an anti-gentrification, anti-
English language sentiment common to some areas
of Berlin (Lisiak et al., 2021). Anger in relation to
English-speaking becomes aligned with anger over
226 European Urban and Regional Studies 30(3)
the arrival of tourists and international capital, as
‘English is clearly identified as the language of gen-
trifiers and also adopted as a tool of opposition to
gentrification’ (Lisiak et al., 2021: 8). Derek and
Tara are both white British migrants who describe
how people had shouted at them to stop speaking
English. Derek is 41 years old and was with his
German wife and children on the pavement in
Schöneberg when a passer-by screamed at them to
‘speak German’. Tara is 32 years old and speaks four
languages, including German; but was speaking
English one day with her British friend when a man
shouted at them to speak German. Tara quickly
retorted in German that English was their mother
tongue; why should they speak German together?
Using the English language in Berlin occupies a
complex position, with some of my participants
highlighting how some fellow British migrants’
refusal to learn German signalled a colonial attitude
whereby the world should adapt to them.
Berlin’s leftist anti-capitalist, anti-tourist move-
ments have frequently slipped into xenophobic terri-
tory through the application and ‘normalisation of
right-wing rhetoric beyond nationalist parties and
movements’ (Lisiak et al., 2021: 3). A fear of foreign
sounds, or xenophonophobia, as Lisiak and her col-
leagues explore is also implicitly addressed by Anne,
a 68-year-old white migrant who speaks flawless
German and self-defines as European. Anne escapes
being associated with these gentrification and touris-
tification discourses and the subsequent hostility
they can incite by speaking German in public – even
with her British husband. She describes how they
become invisible when they are on the tram; no one
notices their foreignness as they become both visu-
ally and audibly unremarkable. Anne proudly
explains how she was frequently mistaken for being
German and felt really ‘at home here’. For Anne,
integration becomes possible through both her bod-
ily appearance and the sounds it omits.
‘How are you from London?’:
bordered receptions to British
migrants of colour
The reception of British migrants of colour in Berlin
was substantially different from their white British
counterparts. While value is accorded to Britishness,
British migrants of colour did not enjoy easy access
to this valued position, despite their citizenship sta-
tus. They were continually positioned as not belong-
ing to Britain or Europe (Hall, 1991). Samira
describes this intersection: ‘I mean, when I speak to
my white British friends about their experiences in
Germany there are definitely stark differences, it is
not just that we are both British, we have different
skin colours’. All British migrants of colour describe
the classic question of being asked where they were
‘really from’. black British Sarah describes a con-
versation with a white German man at a party: ‘. . .
he was saying, “How are you from London?” and I
was like, “What is wrong with you?”’ Sarah is
25 years old and is completing a Masters in chemis-
try. She has also been asked if she was a refugee;
while Sarah asserts there is nothing wrong with
being a refugee, she points to the difficulty of people
of colour being regarded as an everyday part of
Berlin life. Reluctance to recognise the long-term
presence of multiculture in Europe is a problem not
only in Germany, as evidenced by the #vonhier2
campaign, but also across Europe. This highlights
the pervasive alignment of Europeanness with white-
ness which acts as a perpetual bar to belonging
(El-Tayeb, 2011). Sarah notes the role that her black-
ness plays in interactions, citing her experience of
moving to Berlin as radically different from her
blond and blue-eyed American boyfriend. Like
Anne, Sarah describes how ‘He can completely
assimilate’. Assimilation is not an option for her
because of her blackness and highlights the ham-
strung folly of assimilationist and linear integration
paradigms: racialised others cannot assimilate when
the nation operates as a racialised construct
(Topolski, 2020).
Spatialised constrictions:
encountering and erecting
borders in Berlin
A key focal point or seam along which British
migrants spatially orientated themselves to Berlin
remains the border formerly dividing the city. Areas
of the city and their proximity to the former border
and histories of migration and political orientation
Kulz 227
heavily influenced where British migrants felt com-
fortable. However, these affective responses and
bordering practices do not neatly adhere to the geo-
graphical line of the former border, but have become
shaped by the respective histories, migration pat-
terns, place-images and practices within these areas.
The formerly undesirable areas bordering the west-
ern side of the wall like Neukölln, Kreuzberg and
Wedding became affordable areas for Turkish ‘guest
workers’ arriving from the 1950s; these guest work-
ers have primarily stayed, and Berlin has the largest
Turkish population outside of Turkey (Yurdakul,
2009). Meanwhile, crumbling housing stock in the
former eastern sections of Prenzlauerberg and
Friedrichshain have been renovated and feature as
popular, expensive areas of the city. While once at
the wall’s edge, reunification recentred these areas.
Keeping inside the ring: safer spaces for
Britons of colour
British migrants of colour described staying inside
the S-Bahn that circles Berlin, commonly referred to
as ‘the ring’, most particularly spending time in the
areas of Neukölln, Kreuzberg, Prenzlauer Berg or
Friedrichshain. Samira describes these areas with
substantial ethnic minority populations as places of
refuge and solidarity for people of colour. As a
British Asian migrant, she also feels more comfort-
able in these areas. Contrastingly, particular areas in
East Berlin were regarded as off-limits spaces due to
the danger of racism and violence. For many partici-
pants, Friedrichshain at the east side of the S-Bahn
ring formed the constitutive boundary of safety.
black British Abeo describes Lichtenberg,
Weissensee and Marzahn as ‘off-limits spaces’
which his colleagues had forewarned him about:
‘When I first moved here my colleague was like “do
not go there”. And I was like, “Ah, it’s fine” and they
were like, “No, really DO NOT rent an apartment
near there”. So I have never gone there either’, mark-
ing these areas on his map with large Xs during our
interview. Aaron also marked Marzahn with a large
hazard sign. Samira was warned by several people of
colour to give Marzahn a ‘wide berth’ and has taken
their advice after feeling odd in Lichtenberg, an area
between where she lives in Friedrichshain and
Marzhan. black British Xanthe describes how she
avoided places like Lichtenberg and Marzhan ‘for
obvious reasons’, adding that ‘I don’t think there are
many people with brown skin there and lots of peo-
ple with bald heads’. She had visited once 7 years
ago, and due to the looks she received, that had been
her last visit.
Jamaican British Clarice moved to Berlin in 2017
after growing up in Birmingham; after visiting for
2 days, ‘I fell in love with the city straight away’.
Clarice describes how most of her friends live inside
the ring or in West Berlin; straying too far from the
area enclosed by the ring made Clarice nervous. She
describes her affective experience of unease when
she travelled past Frankfurter Alle further east into
Marzahn to register her apartment. Residents are
required to register their residence within 14 days of
moving to a new flat. These appointments can be
hard to find, propelling Clarice to accept an appoint-
ment in Marzahn despite her misgivings:
Literally, as soon as it [the train] goes past Frankfurter
Alle, it feels different. Even though it is not far. I just
felt weird. I had never been there but heard many
stories, and your mind can run away. I got out of the
station; pretty built up with lots of apartments. I don’t
know if it is social housing . . . I went in and did what
I needed to do and just left straight away. When I got on
the train, I was like, okay, I am going home now. It’s in
Berlin, but it did not feel like it . . . As soon as I got
closer to the city, okay, I feel a lot calmer now because
that was when I started to see more people like me –
brown people – okay, I feel way more relaxed.
The presence of more people of colour entering
the S-Bahn provides Clarice with an affective sensa-
tion of relief; the more monolithic presence of white-
ness was a cause for disquiet. Clarice also describes
cycling near the legendary nightclub Sisyphos where
she cleans a house. At 6 ft 1 in., Clarice says she is
used to standing out, but felt uneasy as construction
workers stared at her riding her bike on a back street.
As she was cleaning, the next-door neighbour repeat-
edly peered into the flat, walking back and forth.
Clarice was exasperated as she felt they suspected
she might be stealing things. Clarice describes feel-
ing ‘constantly watched’ in these spaces, adding that
Berlin was not as cosmopolitan as it liked to think.
228 European Urban and Regional Studies 30(3)
Here, she is a ‘space invader’ or body out of place,
viewed with heightened racialised optics (Puwar,
2004). These spatial considerations provoked con-
siderable anxiety, requiring continual energy and
forethought from Britons of colour when navigat-
ing the city.
While Britons of colour restricted their move-
ments by erecting defensive borders for safety, white
Britons infrequently worried about their personal
safety. Certain places were more preferred than oth-
ers, but strategies were seldom required to negate
potential harm. Possessing phenotypical whiteness
allowed British migrants to fit into the nation, and
more easily circulate across urban space. Unlike
migrants of colour, Anne had ‘never seen a problem’
when visiting or living in Lichtenberg and felt there
were a lot of ‘stereotypical ideas about the East’.
While Anne was unaware of her privilege to move
comfortably through the city, her comments high-
light enduring inequalities since reunification. East
Berlin and East Germany are frequently marked as
homogenously racist spaces, despite evidence of
similarly racist attitudes across Germany (Lewicki,
2018). Several of my participants problematised this
stigmatisation, highlighting continuing power imbal-
ances between east and west while also recognising
the real threat of racism. Construction of this binary
works to geographically locate racism in the east,
while displacing it from the west of Germany. Yet
the racially motivated mass murder of nine migrants
or descendants of migrants in the western city of
Hanau in 2020 highlights that racism is not simply
an East German problem (Hänel, 2021).
Embodied global space and intersectional
subjectivities
Görlitzer Park features as a particular space to be
negotiated by black British men like Abeo and Aaron,
as formations of race, class, nationality and gender
emerged through this space. ‘Görli’ is both infamous
and loved in Berlin. It is known through a variety of
representations: a lively social space; a site where
black African men often stand along the pathways
selling drugs; a space of heavy-handed police action;
a space with playgrounds and a small animal farm.
While some men may sell drugs to passers-by, others
are looking to meet and socialise with other recent
migrants; some of these men seek asylum while oth-
ers have a Duldung or ‘toleration permit’ that makes
working initially impossible. Görlitzer Park’s desig-
nation as a Kriminalitätsbelasteter Ort, or crime-bur-
dened location, suspends normal policing guidelines
to create a ‘zone of exception’ and space of informal-
ity where police can operate outside of the law (Haid,
2017: 7). The creation of this space of informality
shapes the encounters that both Abeo and Aaron have
through the park.
Abeo describes trying to navigate Görlitzer Park
during his first months in Berlin, as it lay directly
between his flat and his office. Initially, he actively
avoided crossing it due to the group of men congre-
gating around the entrance. He recounted cautiously
navigating groups of young men gathered on London
street corners and applied this optics to his new situ-
ation. Instead Abeo took a long detour around the
park; however, he became irritated by this routine
and decided to meet some of these men. Once he had
said hello a few times, he felt more comfortable in
the park and no longer took a detour. Still, Abeo
expressed his continual displeasure at being continu-
ally misrecognised by people in the street as a drug
dealer. British Ugandan writer and Berliner Musa
Okwonga also describes being asked for drugs, add-
ing that, ‘People sell drugs because they are poor,
not because they are black’ (Gopalakrishnan, 2021).
Here class’ mediating effects are highlighted; rather
than being a poor African struggling to survive in
Berlin, Abeo’s story was rather different. He was the
son of Nigerian foreign-service staff who spent
much of his youth in a British boarding school before
attending university and working in the City of
London. He spoke several languages and had worked
at an energy tech start-up in Berlin. Despite their
shared blackness, Abeo’s relatively privileged life as
a British national stood in contrast to the men in
Görlitzer Park, yet he was continually assumed to
inhabit a shared space of subjectivity through his
blackness.
Aaron also grappled with complex intersections
that surfaced through his relationship to Görli. While
Aaron felt his experience as a black Briton in Berlin
was markedly different than that of his white British
friends, his interaction with African migrants in the
Kulz 229
park shifted his understanding of the intersectional
relationships between race, class and citizenship. In
an act of transnational solidarity across blackness,
Aaron describes letting some of these men sit in the
café that he managed near the park when the police
were harassing them. Through their struggles, he
recognises how his own privileged position as a
British national and café manager in comparison to
these migrants’ precarious positions:
Some of the things they [men in Görlitzer Park] told me
just really woke me up, because if it was me I would
just be able to get my British passport out say well, and
they [the police] would be like ‘Oh okay, we are going
to leave you alone’. So even though I am black, I still
understand that there are certain privileges and certain
things that are afforded to me here because of my
nationality and my citizenship and that would not be to
other people and that is part of a class thing as well . . .
and that really woke me up actually because I had
never really thought about it that deeply until literally I
was like confronted with it.
Aaron is confronted with this contradictory trans-
locational positioning through his encounter with
this space. While Aaron and these men shared black-
ness and experiences of racism, Aaron received a
permit legally entitling him to stay in Germany
10 years, whereas the men in the park must seek asy-
lum or take whatever work they could find. Although
from a modest background, Aaron had a university
education and recognised the privileges his elevated
position afforded. Abeo and Aaron actively negoti-
ated the space of Görlitzer park as they were both
positioned through it and positioned themselves
against it. As Löw (2016) argues, ‘it is through
embodied space that the global is integrated into the
inscribed spaces of everyday life where attachment,
emotion, and morality come into play’ (p. 22).
Aaron’s interview recalls the emotion of realising his
position through an embodied ‘confrontation’ of
Görli’s space and the social dynamics within it.
Aaron describes always being partly a foreigner in
the United Kingdom, despite being born there. By
moving to Berlin he felt he would become a ‘real’
foreigner; however, this incites unexpected position-
alities, as Aaron grappled with his middle-class posi-
tion as a black man:
I think a lot of the experience of black people who
move to Berlin, especially from the UK and the US as
well, are quite bourgeois . . . But it is not like that for
everybody here. It is not like that for them [men in
Görlitzer]. And I am always quite mindful about that.
So in that sense we [black migrants from UK and US]
are also gentrifying Berlin a bit, kind of . . . but we are
also diversifying it, so maybe it is not that bad? But it
is complicated. It is a nuanced thing . . . both things
can be true at the same time right? It’s something I
think is lacking in discourse, particularly in social
media – two things can be true at once.
Aaron assesses his contradictory position as a
black gentrifier, yet also someone who endures rac-
ism. We see the translocational position Anthias
highlights, as several conflicting positions are simul-
taneously true. Aaron feels in Berlin he will be a
‘real’ foreigner, yet his Britishness – which was only
partially recognised in the United Kingdom – fol-
lows him and can be mobilised to a different effect
outside of the United Kingdom. It is only through
dislocation from Britain that his Britishness has
more purchase or power, yet, due to racism, this
power is always contingent and in question.
Colonialism’s shadow stalks these men through their
continual potential equation with the frequently
criminalised Africans in park. Assertion of their
Britishness gives them additional value and places
them on a different temporal footing. They are
regarded as somewhat assimilated descendants of
post-war migrants, yet they are still not in receipt of
the benefits of whiteness. We can see how Aaron’s
movement from Britain to Berlin incites new ways
of understanding himself and his placement in the
world via everyday practices.
Local articulations, transnational racisms:
bordering through whiteness, class and
religion
While several Britons of colour and many younger
white British migrants describe more multicultural
areas like Kreuzberg, Neukölln or Friedrichshain as
desirable spaces to live or visit, this feeling was not
shared by a small group of older, white migrants.
They describe actively distancing themselves from
ethnic others within Berlin, yet these racialisation
230 European Urban and Regional Studies 30(3)
processes worked closely alongside class and age.
Richard’s morning commute between his home in a
prosperous section of Reinickendorf and his work-
place in Mitte passed through the more working-
class, multicultural area of Wedding. Richard
recounts: ‘I don’t enjoy driving through Wedding
particularly on the way to work, because it is very
Turkish and it is like Istanbul or something like that’.
Richard presents the Turkish in Berlin as a ‘certain
type of Turk’; he feels this diaspora does not repre-
sent modern Turkey as too many women wore a
headscarf. Recounting a work trip to Ankara several
years ago, Richard describes how the city’s architec-
ture, from its plazas to its restaurants and the people
within them, were as modern as Berlin or London.
Richard sarcastically remarked that there were more
headscarves in Germany than in Turkey. He auto-
matically reduces the headscarf to gendered oppres-
sion, despite research highlighting alternative
motivations for wearing the hijab ignored by over-
simplified readings (Sadar, 2014). He poses as a pro-
gressive, feminist Western male critical not simply
of Turks, but Muslim Turks as religion, race and
gender become intertwined. Here, Islam represents a
series of lacks that include freedom and equality for
women (Goldberg, 2006: 345); this lack extends to
Wedding through its contamination by Istanbul.
Richard’s rejection or censure of Islam presents
Germany as a secular state unfit for religious sym-
bols, yet the basis of his rejection of Islamic symbols
as being outside of Europeanness is rooted in the
‘exclusionary “religious” binary’ underpinning the
Westphalian nation state. This constellation’s foun-
dation melding race and religion are obscured by
secularist discourses that Richard employs (Topolski,
2020: 267). Islamophobia becomes justified through
valorising a Western secularism that is ironically
built on the foundations of a Westphalian race-reli-
gion nation state configuration. Elsewhere in our
interview, Richard describes how Pakistani migrants
in the United Kingdom were misogynistic and unin-
tegrated, a framing that shifts onto his view of
Turkish people in Berlin. Richard adopts a localised,
contextualised form of raced and classed bordering
directed at Turks and rooted in the urban space that
they occupy, yet this discourse has purchase across
Europe.
Denise, a white woman from Glasgow, also
adopts localised forms of raced and classed demar-
cation when discussing Turkish and Arabic popu-
lations in Berlin. She describes how her teenage
daughter can tell where people live by how they
speak German. Poor German and ‘not nice people’
were aligned with places like Marzahn, while more
correctly spoken German was aligned with
Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, a relatively affluent
area of West Berlin where Denise and her daughter
live. Denise feels that class becomes manifest in
Germany through race, namely the inability of
racialised minority populations to speak ‘proper
German’. While Denise describes how her daugh-
ter Sara can speak slang German, she hopes that
she does not ‘show me up by using Kanake lan-
guage’ in public. Denise employs the racial slur
‘Kanake’ primarily directed at Turkish people to
adopt context-specific racialised boundary prac-
tices. This racialised insult also implies class; her
daughter speaking like this would shame her as a
parent. Denise still identifies as working class, yet
through her migration to Berlin she has in many
ways become middle class. Denise describes her
old neighbourhood in Glasgow as now unrecognis-
able. When they visited, she and her daughter
stood outside Tesco, a supermarket chain, listening
and watching people with ‘mad names’ like
Shantal, Dynasty or Mercedes. Denise asserts that
no one was named that when she was growing up
there. She remembers her own family as ‘normal’
and ‘cringes now to go back’; her daughter finds it
funny that Denise grew up there. Denise signals
both race and class by mentioning names derided
in British popular culture as common and racial-
ised (Wykes, 2017). She describes the fake tan and
low-cut outfits her sister and old friends wore,
musing that she would probably look like this if
she still lived in Glasgow. Denise inhabits a com-
plex positionality – while she is critical of ‘shabby’
German spoken by racialised migrants in Berlin,
she also describes how she used to have a strong
Glaswegian accent which she lost over the years.
Her family criticised her accent now as being ‘too
posh’, and Denise concedes that her speech and
sensibilities of self-presentation have altered
through migration.
Kulz 231
Denigration of spaces of Berlin through raced,
classed associations becomes a way of drawing bor-
ders and accruing value for some white British
migrants as they dislocate from their working-class
backgrounds (Lawler, 1999; Skeggs, 2004).
Racialisation processes become connected to pro-
cesses of spatial classification, as areas become rated
as second-class via the presence of ethnic minorities
(see Hesse, 2007). Denise and Stephen can draw
new borders against racialised and working-class
others both in Berlin and when returning to the
United Kingdom. Living in a prosperous area of
Berlin assigns value to her and her daughter in a way
that would be more difficult to achieve in urban
Britain. Yet these border-drawing practices trans-
mute to take on distinctly localised, spatialised
shapes within Berlin, as migrants adopt local forms
of classification and racialisation.
Massey critics the notion of space-time com-
pression – or the idea that the world is speeding up
and spreading out – by urging us to consider power
geometries at play here. It is not just about who
moves and who does not move, but about ‘power
in relation to the flows and the movement’ which
varies across social groups (Massey, 1994: 150).
While some people can direct or initiate move-
ment, others are forced to move, while others
become immobilised through the movements of
others (Massey, 1994: 150). This results in highly
complex degrees of control and initiation: while
relatively privileged Denise can initiate move-
ment as a white British women with a university
education, she feels it would be hard to return to
Glasgow due to the social displacement under-
gone through her mobility. Her practices would
have to shift to ‘fit back in’ and she would need
more economic capital to maintain a similar life-
style in Glasgow. As a working-class female
migrant, she is not free to simply ‘fit’ anywhere;
reconciling disparate positionalities evokes dis-
junctures. This shows how place is a process that
these migrants are shaping and shaped through
(Massey, 1994: 155). Although there is no room to
explore these narratives here, it is essential to note
that several older white and many younger white
Britons did not enact racialised border practices
and took a more open approach to Berlin’s spaces.
Conclusion
This article contributes to an intersectional under-
standing of how European border practices work by
exploring how an under-researched group of
migrants navigate spaces of Berlin. The research
highlights how individuals’ social positionings result
in differently erected and experienced borders; these
processes are dynamically and relationally enacted
through space. While the political border between
Germany and the United Kingdom remains highly
permeable despite Brexit, borders reemerge through
subjective everyday processes in Berlin. Border
crossing is legitimate for British passport holders,
yet this does not mean that all British nationals have
the same or similar subjective experiences moving
through the everyday urban. The value of British
nationality is upended through racialised borders to
European belonging for migrants of colour, yet
simultaneously their British nationality provides a
layer of protection and status inaccessible to black
migrants without passports from the Global North.
Restrictions to national belonging correspond to
restrictions on spatial movement for British migrants
of colour, while admittance to the nation and Europe
correspond to whiteness and a more free-range sense
of urban mobility. Borders are enacted from different
positions of power; while white Britons can either
transcend borders or enact them against raced and
classed others to fortify their positions and accrue
value, Britons of colour impose self-defensive bor-
ders to ensure their safety. For white Britons from
working-class backgrounds, living in affluent
spaces of Berlin acts as a mechanism for social
mobility. This mobility trades on whiteness and the
adoption of localised forms of classification; how-
ever, their dislocation from the United Kingdom
and relocation to Berlin incites conflicting and
often uncomfortable positionalities. Spatial
arrangements shape how classificatory mechanisms
come into play and take hold, defying simple bina-
ries of blackness or whiteness. We can see the resi-
dues of colonialism marking the lives of British
migrants through the experience of Britons navi-
gating their black Britishness in relation to black
migrants and in relation to Görlitzer Park. A colo-
nial attitude is also highlighted by white migrants
232 European Urban and Regional Studies 30(3)
like Stephen who cannot recognise themselves as
migrants or those who refuse to learn any German.
These complex situated intersections tie to city
space as fluctuating, dynamic and often contradictory
(Lafazani, 2021). This article shows how social pro-
cesses relate to spatial forms (Tonkiss, 2005), while
daily life and the intimate spaces of the everyday are
connected with the geopolitical (Pain, 2015). We see
these national and geopolitical inequalities come
together through the designation of spaces like
Marzahn as undesirable from a variety of angles.
While Britons of colour draw a border against Marzahn
due to the potential of racism or violence, white
migrants draw borders against Marzahn as an area
with too many refugees, ethnic others, or racist work-
ing-class white people. Marzahn becomes imagined as
a catch-all repository for a spectrum of undesirables.
This boundary-drawing reflects both local and national
inequalities, and causes us to reflect on how the rela-
tive mobility and the power of British migrants to
direct their mobility may work to ‘entrench the spatial
imprisonment of other groups’ (Massey, 1994: 151).
The tension or gap between urban and national politics
and within urban spaces themselves (Yiftachel and
Rokem, 2021) requires further exploration through
empirical investigations of everyday practices.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Martina Löw, Martin Lundsteen,
Ismini Nikoleta Mathioudaki, the Nylum writing group,
and the anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful
feedback.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest
with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication
of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial
support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article: I received an International Postdoctoral
Fellowship (IPODI) from the TU Berlin to complete this
research.
ORCID iD
Christy Kulz https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5664-716X
Notes
1. The ethnic descriptors used within the text were
selected by the research participants, rather than the
researcher defining the participants.
2. The Twitter intervention #vonhier seeks to highlight
that issue that Germans with ethnic minority herit-
age are continually asked where they are from – when
they were often born and grew up in Germany.
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