Hakan Forsell; Property, Tenancy and Urban Growth in Stockholm and Berlin,
1860-1920. Historical Urban Studies series. Burlington: Ashgate, 2006. 303
pp. Table of contents, bibliography, index. $99.95
(cloth), ISBN 978-0-7546-5507-7.
Reviewed for H-German by Parker Everett, Department of History, University of Chicago
Hakan Forsell's book admirably tries to bring together middle-class urban
politics, the financing of urban development, and legal attempts to mediate
urban growth. With regard to Berlin, this volume covers terrain similar to
that explored in Christoph Bernhadt's _Bauplatz Gross-Berlin: Wohnungsmärkte,
Terraingewerbe und Kommunalpolitik im Städtetwachstumder Hochindustrialisierung
(1871-1918)_ (1998) and Karl Christian Führer's _Mieter, Hausbesitzer,
Staat und Wohnungsmarkt: Wohnungsmangel und Wohnungszwangswirtschaft in Deutschland
1914-1960_ (1995). Forsell attempts to expand on this previous literature
about Berlin housing with his use of Karl Polanyi's theory of European development
and by comparing Berlin to Stockholm. The study focuses on residential real
estate private property and its centrality to nineteenth-century _Bürgerlichkeit_.
For Forsell, urban development in European cities can largely be attributed
to "private and property investments" and he traces this development
from a "decentralized and fairly unregulated process" to a process
subject to significant regulation after the First World War (p. 1). Forsell's
study engages the development of European towns in a "transformational
period" (p. 2) during which the rise of market capitalism exerted strong
pressure for
private ownership rights to become the basis of influence in society, political
legitimacy, and law. Forsell places the ownership of property at the heart
of liberal social and economic life, but he is interested in a particular
form of it when he uses the term "property owner": that is, residential
real estate private property. As he argues, the
development of private property soon drew criticism as did the individualism
that it implied, in favor of the health of the collective. The social conflicts
that developed out of private property, he argues, led to a situation where
"freedom of ownership needed to be ordered in a system of obligations
to society" (p. 2) in order to keep property ownership sufficiently widespread.
In light of this deduction, he traces the transformation of European towns
along the axis of private ownership of residential real estate and concepts
of collective well-being.
Forsell compares two distinct "towns": Berlin and Stockholm. Given
their divergent proportions--in 1860, Berlin's population was five times the
size of Stockholm's, and in 1920 more than ten times Stockholm's--Forsell
argues for a different basis for comparison. He argues that since both were
political capitals and major industrial
"towns," they enjoyed similarly diverse industrial bases, prominent
banks, and large numbers of bureaucrats, factors that made each city the focus
of a national discourse on urbanity, modernity, and industrial development.
Forsell bases his study on documents of the residential real estate property
owners' associations: newspapers, meeting minutes, reports, petitions, letters,
and associational journals. His source base is excellent for demonstrating
the self-understanding and practice of the associations from the inside, although
sometimes his sympathetic reading of these materials coincides too closely
with that of his subjects.
Forsell divides his study into three sections--politics, housing production,
and housing regulation--each with three chapters. The first of these sections,
"Property and Urban Politics," deals with the role of residential
real estate owners within city administration. Its first chapter offers a
prehistory of Forsell's research problem by examining
the role of property ownership in nineteenth-century municipal reform, emphasizing
the power that property owners obtained from financing the city budget. In
Stockholm, greater equality in the franchise freed property owners from infrastructural
concerns, while in Berlin, tax and governmental structure tied property owners
to further urban development through financing of infrastructural development,
which in turn continued to justify their administrative control. In the next
chapter, Forsell uses the origins, motivations, and development of property
owners' associations "to determine the social position of property owners
and the political and ideological positioning ... in the last three decades
of the nineteenth century" (p. 47). The third chapter argues that urbanization
and industrialization stretched municipal government beyond its earlier tasks
of economic management. These pressures led to increased intervention into
social and economic life, especially into housing questions. As calls for
greater intervention on the part of the municipal administration grew, property
owners adopted the ideological intransigence of those committed to traditional
self-governance.
The second section, "Building and Lending," begins with a fourth
chapter on building finance in Berlin and Stockholm. Forsell takes the two
1860s-era city development plans as a starting point. The primary feature
of urban development in the creation, fulfillment, and abandonment of these
plans was accelerating urban growth and the emergence of a privatized city
with specialized production of land into component parts--parceling, building
infrastructure, and the construction of dwellings--conducted by separate corporations
at separate times. Chapter 5 pursues the finances of property owners further.
Here Forsell examines the tenement as a historical development and as the
focus of a broader critique of urban life. This chapter addresses attempted
solutions to escalating credit difficulties, real estate property owners'
responses to state intervention in housing credit, and the effects of increasing
intervention on property owners' political influence. Forsell argues that
real estate has a tendency to require significant capital investment and be
subject to speculation. Because of speculation and bank financing a residential
real estate property owner no longer needed to practice thrift and "save
up the necessary money himself," because, as Forsell argues, "[p]roperty
had become a commodity" (p. 158). Chapter 6 also focuses on the tenement,
though this time on the form of housing, the cyclical character of housing
production, the relationship of production to housing shortages and rent increases,
and perceptions of real estate property owners. Urban growth was recognized
as potentially profitable, attracting larger companies with more capital.
The nominal--often deeply indebted--property owner was subsumed into the larger
economy, becoming
merely "the final link" in a complex dynamic of urban growth (p.
183).
The third section, "Under One Roof," focuses on housing regulation
in later-nineteenth-century Stockholm and Berlin. In Chapter 7, Forsell examines
the quotidian dimension of the landlord-tenant relationship. Forsell argues
that liberal law made it possible for the market to determine the price of
commodities and that market-centered liberalism was a working-out of particular
state imperatives. In an age when, according to Forsell, the economy came
to dominate society, market-centered liberalism depended on positing an abstract
and ultimately false equality between concretely different people, such as
workers and capitalists. Forsell sees this liberal equality of the worker
and capitalist as an illusion, although he does not make clear how this illusion
is upheld. Forsell criticizes abstract contractual equality for the ways it
masks concrete inequality. In both cities, within certain parameters, the
landlord and tenant enjoyed "unrestricted contractual freedom" (pp.
194-95). Chapter 8 focuses on the emergence of German and Swedish legal codes
that affected the "housing question." Here, Forsell argues that
fin-de-siècle legal reforms sought to aid the weaker party and integrate
tenants into liberal society in order to
stabilize it. Forsell suggests that these legal codes enforced the middle
class's responsibility to a general social good and enshrined corporatist
concern for community welfare. Forsell argues that while real estate property
owners believed themselves weakened by the new codes, in fact they retained
their power: landlords' freedom of contract remained sacrosanct above all
concrete or political concerns and landlords found ways to avoid the new regulations.
In Chapter 9, Forsell demonstrates the changes that the First World War brought
to residential
real estate property and landlord/tenant relations. The war made tenancy a
central factor in state intervention in housing markets. Forsell probes the
steps the state took in intervening, which institutions did the job, and the
extent to which both sides of the issue were taken into account. He also seeks
to understand how politicians and reformists explained the housing crisis
and the general impact of this intervention on private property after the
war. Generally, legislation moved from mediating between contractual partners
to protecting tenants. Forsell
notes that the primary concern of the legislation in both cities was speculation
and indebted property owners and "not the 'firmly rooted' property owners
who had used their own saved capital to acquire property" (pp. 256-57).
The final chapter summarizes the argument and attempts to grasp the similar
yet not identical transformations in the practice and self-understanding of
urban residential real estate property owners. In so doing, Forsell returns
to some theoretical considerations from the introduction. Forsell's theoretical
approach has its suggestive moments, but ultimately is fragmentary and under-theorized.
Drawing his argument from Fred Block and Michael Harloe's readings of Karl
Polanyi, Forsell considers economies to be always historically and culturally
specific in
practice. Through Polanyi, Forsell argues that the nineteenth-century liberated
the economy from its subordination to social ideals with devastating consequences,
but by the end of Forsell's study, society
seems to reasserted control. The mechanisms by which economy could be liberated
from society and then subdued by society again is never made clear. Additionally,
lingering behind a number of Forsell's arguments,
it seems, is Polanyi's idea that land, labor, and money are not true commodities.[1]
For example, Forsell argues that speculation and bank financing transformed
residential real estate property into a commodity, because owners no longer
needed to be thrifty and "save up the necessary money" themselves
(p. 158). The idea that an individual businessman is not selling commodities
because he provided his own capital is unconvincing.
Forsells's analysis here is similar to populist critiques of "bad"
finance capitalism from the standpoint of "good" productive, self-made
capitalism. Forsell echoes the approval of his sources when he writes that
turn-of-the-century legislation focused on speculation and indebted property
owners and "not the 'firmly rooted' property owners who had used their
own saved capital to acquire property" (pp. 256-57). This conclusion
seems to be a defense of "rooted" small-scale capitalists against
finance capital (even if his quotation marks vaguely problematize the word
"rooted"). It seems unlikely that Forsell would actually endorse
this critique and its more problematic adherents. Rather, his evidence pool
is one-dimensional enough that the problematic arguments his sources were
making might not have not become apparent and he was insufficiently critical
in his reading of land reformers, critics of speculation, and landlord's associations.
What Forsell seems to understand as property relations regaining their social
and moral ideals, seems to be, instead, the producerist side of an ideological
argument about the direction of capitalism.
Much of Forsell's discussion of commodities seems to suggest that he agrees
with Polanyi that land, labor, and money are not truly commodities. The claim
that land is a false or "unnatural" commodity makes difficult Forsell's
attempts to grasp the ideology of the property owners because it uggests that
landowners dealt in fictional commodities and were either deluded or knowingly
misleading society. If this is the case, then Forsell would need to convince
the reader of how this delusion came into existence or how the coordinated
set of lies functioned. Forsell might respond, as he writes early in his book,
that "every period in capitalist development creates a special set of
social conventions for retaining growth dynamism.... The effectiveness of
these social structures for growth is temporally limited. After a dramatic
political and economic downturn, forces are mobilized to
establish a new social growth structure" (p. 7). In other words, with
each period of capitalist expansion, a fundamental change in social organization
and social understandings helps to facilitate capitalist development. However,
this interesting and provocative claim only raises a further series of unanswered
questions about the reasons for such changes, explanations of the phases of
capitalism, and the relationship of the form of the new social organization
and its respective phase of capitalism.
Why does a particular regime of social organization take the form that it does? Forsell seems to suggest that the relationship between the economy and the social structure is random and determined pragmatically from the standpoint of the economy, according to whatever is "effective." This randomness is evident in the description of Berlin's development as a "heavyweight" as compared to Stockholm's position as a "lightweight". At least for me, Forsell's evidence militates against the idea that the relationship is merely contingent. Forsell's suggestion that in tenement houses one can see a complex interrelationship between commodity production, architecture, and social relations hints at a more determinate relationship between the economy and social structure (p. 161).
Ultimately, Forsell makes a familiar argument about multiple national paths
toward multiple versions of modernity. Given the remarkable similarities between
Berlin and Stockholm, it would have been interesting to see how such a commonality
could be explained. Furthermore, it would have been interesting to hear more
about how and
why these regimes of social organization became inadequate and about their
relationship to the economy. Ultimately, though, Forsell has written an informative,
well-researched study of urban development from
the perspective of the residential real estate property owner.
Note:
[1]. Fred Block and Karl Polanyi, "Karl Polanyi and the Writing of 'The
Great Transformation'," _Theory and Society_ 32 (2003), 281.
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