I live in Steglitz. Not the part of Berlin that anyone means when they talk about the “problem in the Stadtbild.” Not Neukölln or Wedding or Kreuzberg—the neighborhoods where the so-called issue apparently lives.
Which means I’m thinking about this controversy from a position of remove. I’m not watching my own street get turned into evidence. I’m reading about other people’s neighbourhoods being marked as problems.
And there’s something about that distance that keeps bothering me.
In one of the last weeks Chancellor Merz said there’s still a “problem in the cityscape” that needs addressing—through “removing” that what disturbs the Stadtbild he means. Within 24 hours, ten thousands of people signed a petition. Protests erupted with signs reading “Wir sind das Stadtbild”—”We are the cityscape.”
I’ve been trying to understand what “problem in the cityscape” means as a description of what’s actually there versus what someone thinks should be there. And I keep coming back to the question of who gets to not-notice.
Because here’s the thing: I don’t think about the “look” of Steglitz very much. It’s just where I live. The streets are familiar to the point of invisibility. I know which bakery has better bread, which café has the window seat I like, where the U-Bahn entrance is that’s slightly closer to my flat.
None of this registers as a “cityscape” to me. It’s just the unremarkable ordinary of daily life.
There’s a concept in anthropology—Bourdieu, I think—about how habituation makes the social world feel natural. You stop seeing the constructed nature of things because familiarity renders them invisible. What’s around you just becomes background, the taken-for-granted texture of existence.
But habituation is never neutral. What you get to stop noticing depends entirely on your position.
I get to experience Steglitz as just where I live, unmarked and unremarkable, because neighbourhoods that look like mine aren’t the ones being discussed when people talk about problems in the cityscape. The visual field of my daily life—the shop signs, the languages in cafés, the people on the street—apparently codes as “normal” in whatever framework produces the category “problem.”
I didn’t choose this. I’m not claiming credit for it. But I benefit from it. My neighbourhood gets to be invisible in the sense that matters: it’s not being marked as evidence of anything wrong with Germany (except for high rents maybe).
Meanwhile, people in Neukölln or Wedding—neighbourhoods I rarely go to compared to Kreuzberg, Schöneberg or Charlottenburg, if I’m being honest—are living in spaces that someone in government has decided to name as visual problems. Their daily ordinary has been turned into a crisis requiring state intervention.
And I’m sitting here in Steglitz trying to think through what that means.
There’s something about distance that feels both necessary and suspect. Necessary because I need some remove to think clearly, to not just react emotionally. Suspect because thinking clearly from a position of safety is itself a kind of privilege. The people whose neighbourhoods are being marked as problems don’t easily get the luxury of intellectual (and physical) distance.
I keep trying to imagine what it would feel like if someone in government looked at Steglitz and said it had a “problem” that required—well, let’s name it more bluntly—deportation. If my unremarkable ordinary—the bakery, the café, the familiar streets—suddenly became evidence of something wrong.
But I can’t quite get there. Because the framework that produces the Stadtbild as a “problem” isn’t aimed at neighbourhoods that look like mine. It’s aimed at visibility of a particular kind: Turkish script, Arabic conversations, the aesthetic presence of people marked as somehow not-quite-German-enough in the ideas of Merz.
This is what I keep getting stuck on: the politics of what becomes background and what stays foreground.
In visual perception studies they track eye movements to see what people actually look at in an image. What registers as important, what gets skipped over, how long attention rests on different elements. And it turns out people trained in different ways literally see different things in the same visual field.
But those are productive forms of trained attention. They help you notice what matters for your work, your discipline, your purposes.
What happens when the trained attention is aimed at deciding who belongs? When the framework is designed not to understand but to mark certain presences as disruptions?
I think this is what Stadtbild as a political term does. It creates a particular way of seeing urban space. It makes some things hypervisible (Turkish shops, Arabic conversations, headscarves) while rendering other things invisible (the economic structures producing gentrification, the history of guest worker programmes, the reality that Berlin has always been multiple cities layered over each other).
And once that framework exists, once someone has named certain neighbourhoods as having a “problem,” you can’t unhear it. The category persists. It shapes how people see, how they talk, what solutions seem reasonable.
From here in Steglitz, I can think about this somewhat abstractly. I can read about protests in other neighbourhoods. I can try to analyse the frameworks and the politics and the differential distribution of whose presence gets marked as normal versus problematic.
But I’m also aware that my ability to think about it abstractly is itself produced by distance. I’m not (usually) the one being looked at. My neighbourhood isn’t the one being turned into evidence. I get to be the one analysing rather than the one being analysed.
And I don’t know what to do with that asymmetry except notice it.
There’s something Marx said about ideology—that it makes the historical appear natural, the constructed seem inevitable. The framework that produces “Stadtbild problems” works the same way. It treats a particular vision of what Berlin should look like as if it’s just describing what’s normal, what’s proper, what belongs. As if saying “there’s a problem in the cityscape” is a neutral observation rather than a strong political claim.
But neutrality is always someone’s particular position claiming to be universal.
My neighbourhood gets to be neutral. Gets to be unmarked. Gets to just exist without justification or explanation or defense. Other neighbourhoods don’t have that luxury. They’re marked, noticed, turned into sites where the question of belonging gets fought over.
I wonder sometimes what it would take for Steglitz to become a “problem” in someone’s framework. What would have to change—or what shift in political rhetoric, what new way of seeing—for my unremarkable ordinary to suddenly become evidence requiring intervention.
But that’s probably the wrong question. Because the framework isn’t really about what’s actually there in any neighbourhood. It’s about power. About who gets to define normal, who gets to mark deviation, who gets to decide what counts as the proper look of a city.
The protests said “Wir sind das Stadtbild”—we ARE the cityscape. Present tense. Not asking for inclusion, but refusing the framework that treats their presence as a problem requiring solutions.
And I’m here in Steglitz, not in those protests, not in those neighbourhoods, trying to figure out what my relationship is to all of this. What it means to be the one whose neighbourhood gets to be invisible, unremarkable, unproblematic. What responsibility comes with that particular form of habituation.
I don’t think the answer is guilt. That’s too easy, too self-focused. And I don’t think the answer is just being a good ally or showing up at protests, though maybe that’s part of it.
I think maybe the answer—if there is one—is about learning to see your own seeing. Recognising that what feels neutral to you is produced by a particular framework. Noticing that your habituation, your ability to not-notice, is itself political.
And then—this is the harder part—figuring out what to do with that knowledge.
I’m still living in Steglitz. Still experiencing it as just where I live, unremarkable and ordinary. I can’t stop that habituation through force of will. Can’t make myself constantly notice the privilege of being unmarked.
But I can notice when someone marks other neighbourhoods as problems. I can notice the framework being deployed. I can refuse to treat that framework as neutral description rather than political claim.
Maybe that’s all there is. Maybe that’s where the work starts: in the gap between frameworks, in the moment when you realise your normal is produced by the same system that marks someone else’s normal as crisis.
I don’t know if that’s enough. Probably it isn’t. But it’s what I have from here, from this position, from this particular distance.
The view from Steglitz. Unmarked, unremarkable, complicit.