Urban Claims: Migrants, Their Businesses, and Urban Citizenship in Berlin

In 2015, as Berliners took to the streets to welcome refugees after the outbreak of the Civil War in Syria, the Code Enforcement Offices in certain Berlin neighborhoods started to enforce a previously ignored law that forbade Berlin’s migrant-run corner shops (spätis) from opening on Sundays. A German writer organized a petition to protect these shops, which are managed mostly by Turks. The petition text, which was signed by more than 38,000 people, suggested that these shops needed to be saved because they were a microcosm of Berlin’s neighborhood culture. These were welcoming spaces where diverse people including “young and old, locals and travelers” met daily. If these shops were closed, Berlin would become “the new Munich,” supposedly a boring, dull and conservative city. Why did Berliners think of these small migrant businesses as quintessentially Berliner spaces to be protected? Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin, including interviews as well as participant observation by living in two different migrant neighborhoods and working in a corner shop, I read Berliners’ support for these migrant businesses as claims to urban citizenship. I analyze the commercial and noncommercial exchanges that take place in these shops as key to people’s cultivation of a sense of belonging to their neighborhoods and Berlin. In this way, I establish migrant businesses as sites of claims to neighborhood cultures, the city, and urban citizenship both for migrants and for natives.