"Once upon a time, there was a lively community in the Barmerviertel area of Cologne's Deutz district, best known today for the trade fair's mega-complex… "

It might be a bit early for such an obituary, but the demolition crews have already reduced an apartment block, with 121 units on 20,000 square meters (215,278 square feet) of prime property between the fairgrounds and the railroad, into a pile of rubble. Now 260 more flats in pre-war art deco buildings, some formerly under landmark preservation, are slated for destruction by the end of June.

The 1,000 former tenants, who were banded together in a cooperative, a form of shared ownership for lower income groups, were bought out by the city in 2003 and relocated. Some resisted being forcibly uprooted, but the last stragglers moved out by January this year. 

Evicted squatters left peacefully

Since then, transient urban squatters have inhabited the abandoned buildings. "Why should it be forbidden to use an empty building for shelter?" asked Sabine M. Last week, the police stormed the Barmerviertel in the middle of the night and evicted 50 or so squatters, who left peacefully. The block is now barricaded and under police patrol.

The militant West German squatter movement of the 1980s, a youthful rebellion against nuclear waste and bourgeois capitalism that often led to violent clashes with police squads, lost steam some time ago as did the similarly anti-capitalist East German squatter movement of the initial post-Berlin Wall era.

"Squatters today tend to be young runaways from the lower middle classes, youths in danger of falling into the drug scene, drifters and punks who cannot identify with the system, but they lack the political conviction of a previous generation, who came from the intellectual classes," said Hans-Georg Soeffner, a sociologist at the University of Konstanz.  

Politically minded squatters focus on housing issues

Those squatters, if they have any political agenda at all, now tend to focus on real estate issues, such as protesting urban renewal schemes that gentrify run-down neighborhoods and drive out the poor.  

Rainer Kippe, a social worker and former squatter turned renter, has spearheaded the Barmer Initiative, a campaign to stop the city from tearing down the block.

"We want to buy back the block from the city, and create a new cooperative that combines normal and very low rents with high-rent retail space for pizzerias, cafes and shops that cater to fair visitors," he said.

The city maintains that the Barmerviertel's prime location is needed for commercial purposes, but UNESCO thwarted plans to build high rises that would have blocked a view of the famed Cologne Cathedral, which is on the list of World Heritage sites. Now the city wants to create a logistic transportation center for the fairgrounds.

Differences between Cologne and Berlin movements

"There is a chronic shortage of cheap housing in Cologne's inner city. The truly needy do not have to resort to squatting, but they need affordable, low-rent apartments," said Hartmut Häusermann, a professor of urban affairs at Berlin's Humboldt University, who highlighted the differences between the squatter movements in Cologne and Berlin.

"In Berlin, there has always been strong political backing from the Greens and in part from the Social Democrats, whereas the squatter movement in Cologne has no political context. Without the Greens as partners applying political pressure, the Barmer Initiative has no chance," added Häusermann.

Rainer Kippe too realizes that he is fighting a losing battle with lukewarm support from a splintered Green party in the city government.

"We have plenty of support from fellow citizens and have collected thousands of signatures against the demolition," he said. "We needed to raise this point: Does the expansion of the fairgrounds justify the removal of a viable residential community?"

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