Berlin: The Metropolis as a Production Space

Metropolitan regions can be regarded as economic areas comprising various sub-economies with different forms of economic and spatial organization. The purpose of this article is to undertake a critical appraisal of the vision of Berlin as a 'service metropolis' through empirical observation of sectoral trends and locational patterns in the city, and to establish that Berlin's urban area is a major production space with a complex fabric of specialized production districts. This spatial organization will be examined in terms of the level of agglomeration of various sub-economies with special reference to the formation of local enterprise clusters in the Berlin economic area. Berlin's specialization profile and the employment trend in the city compared with other metropolitan cities in Germany make it clear that the metropolis of Berlin is under threat as a production space, and this threat partly stems from the way in which the real estate business has developed in the Berlin area.     

The Meaning and Value of Freedom: Berlin contra Arendt

This essay considers the theoretical disagreement between Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt on the meaning and value of freedom. Berlin thinks that negative liberty as non-interference is commendable because it is attuned to the implication of value pluralism that man is a choice-making creature and cannot be otherwise. By contrast, the political freedom to act is in Arendt’s view a more fulfilling ideal because it is only in political action that man’s potentiality is actualised, his unique identity manifested and his being-in-the-world-with-others reaffirmed. What lies beneath the two thinkers’ dispute over the most satisfactory meaning of freedom, I argue, is a deeper disagreement over human nature itself. The implication of this analysis for the contemporary debate between pluralist liberals and their agonistic critics is briefly discussed in conclusion.     

After the Exception: HIV/AIDS Beyond Salvation and Scarcity

Abstract: Access to treatment for HIV/AIDS became a flashpoint for global justice struggles in the late 1990s. An expanding international response, premised to a significant extent on the idea of HIV/AIDS as an exceptional global problem, has since delivered treatment, care and prevention to growing numbers of people. HIV/AIDS exceptionalism, however, has increasingly been questioned, many aspects of the response have been critiqued and donor funding has started to decline. I argue that, having been framed as an exceptional humanitarian emergency, the question of HIV/AIDS as a global problem is increasingly located within a discourse of scarcity. Tracking the growing entanglement of global HIV/AIDS relief with neoliberal governmentality and the emergence of something I term therapeutic neoliberalism, I argue that the shift from a rationality of salvation to one of administration poses new challenges for global health activism. Questioning the discourse of scarcity remains essential to an alternative global health agenda.     

The politics of commemorative street renaming: Berlin 1945–1948

Commemorative street names belong to the ideological foundations of the socio-political order. The process of renaming streets figures prominently in a stage of regime change. As a measure of historical revision, renaming the past is a twofold procedure that involves both the de-commemoration of the version of history associated with and supportive of the old regime and the commemoration of heroes and events that represent the new regime and its version of history. This paper examines political processes and commemorative priorities and strategies that directed the renaming of streets in post-World War II Berlin during two successive municipal administrations. The first part of the article explores the failed project promoted by the unelected communist administration that ruled Berlin between May 1945 and October 1946 aimed to achieve a comprehensive odonymic reform that went beyond a mere purge of explicit Nazi street names. The second part examines the substantially downscaled purge of Berlin’s register of street names accomplished by the SPD-led city government that took office after the October 1946 democratic election.     

Intimate Indulgences: Salvation and Local Religion in Eighteenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala

Most studies of pious foundations in colonial Spanish America examine an elite spiritual economy that was headed primarily by noble patriarchs whose substantial endowments sponsored the ecclesiastical careers of descendants and reinforced ties between elite families and the clergy. This analysis takes a different approach and examines modest perpetual mass foundations funded by a broader array of benefactors. These perpetual mass foundations illuminate an alternative spiritual economy in eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala marked by the active participation of sacred images and spaces, priests and monastic communities, and single and widowed laywomen. This analysis offers a new lens onto local religion in a colonial Spanish American urban center and reveals the complex web of relationships that framed death and salvation.