Blockupy Fights Back: Global City Formation in

Frankfurt am Main after the Financial Crisis

Sebastian Schipper, Lucas Pohl, Tino Petzold, Daniel Mullis, Bernd Belina

In 2012 and 2013 Frankfurt am Main witnessed major social protests under the name of Blockupy

against the European crisis management and its devastating impacts on the livelihoods of people all

over Europe. The city was chosen as the site of protest by a national coalition of radical and as well

as more modest civil society groups due to its economic, political and symbolic functions as

Germany’s most important global city, the capital of continental European financial industries and

the location of the European Central Bank (ECB) which is one of the key European institutions

executing neoliberal austerity politics. The slogan for the 2013 protests was chosen accordingly:

“Resistance in the heart of the European crisis regime” (Blockupy 2013).

The Blockupy coalition’s most visible activities so far were the ‘days of action’ organized in

Frankfurt in May 2012 and again in May 2013 that aimed at shutting down the CBD in the form of

a social strike. The days of action included mass rallies in the CBD with about 30,000

demonstrators in the first year and about 20,000 in 2013 as well as smaller and decentralized

actions directed at specific sites that stand for various aspects of neoliberal capitalism and the

European austerity regime (see below). In 2013, Blockupy also included a protest camp where at its

peak over 1,000 activists from all over Germany and Europe spent three days living in tents,

discussing a plethora of aspects of the current European conjuncture in workshops as well as tactics

and strategies in plenary sessions.

Compared to earlier and similar protests in Germany, Blockupy was surprisingly successful in

getting its message across: that crises are endemic to capitalism, that austerity politics in ‘crisis

states’ and elsewhere serve to secure the wealth of some at the expense of many, that German

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export oriented and financial capital have profited from the Euro and are profiting from the crisis

and its political regulation, that racist (anti-) immigration policies, the further deterioration of

working conditions and the new housing question in Germany are closely linked to the crisis, and,

finally, that there are forces in Germany that stand in solidarity with protestors in Greece, Ireland,

Portugal, Spain and elsewhere. Paradoxically, the fact that the protests were met with massive

police repression has not silenced them but has indeed contributed to the movement’s success in

contradictory ways.

Blockupy as a social movement is not easily classified. It is an urban social movement in the sense

that its visible actions are concentrated in Frankfurt, using the symbols and the functions of this

global city for mobilization and as the site of an urban social strike. Blockupy is, however, not

primarily concerned with specifically urban issues and grievances – the defining aspect of urban

social movements (Castells 1983, Mayer 2013). While urban issues like gentrification and the

housing question became part of Blockupy’s agenda over time, the movement is centrally

concerned with the more abstract, less immediately urban issues of financialized neoliberal

capitalism and the European austerity regime. In this it resembles the alter-globalisation movement

of the 1990s and 2000s that mobilized huge mass rallies in the cities and places where summits of

transnational organisations were held (Geneva 1998, Seattle 1999, Washington DC 2000, Prague,

Gothenburg & Genoa 2001). But in contrast to this ‘summit hopping’, Blockupy’s choice of

locating is less reactive to the elites’ travel schedules. Blockupy does not follow the symbols and

control functions of neoliberal capitalist globalisation, but attacks them where they are fixed in

place: in the CBD of the global city of Frankfurt. In addition, Blockupy was also able to use social

movement infrastructures in place in Frankfurt after decades of urban social struggles and

reinvigorated this local tradition.

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Based on debates about the strategic relevance of the urban for both social movements and policing

(Uitermark 2004) this book chapter discusses how Blockupy has articulated its protest with the

pre-existing global city formation in Frankfurt. We argue that the strategy to use Germany’s

international banking center as a local anchor point to challenge globalized, finance-market driven

capitalism and the European crisis regime is a major explanation for the specific way in which

Blockupy was able to confront the stunningly stable neoliberal hegemony in Germany (cf. Belina

2013).

Why Frankfurt? The strategic relevance of the urban

By looking on the dialectic of control and contention, urban scholars demonstrate that cities

function as strategic sites for both politicization and policing (Uitermark 2004). With regard to

politicization, Uitermark et al. (2012) argue, for instance, that urban centers are constitutive for

counter-hegemonic social movements and are particularly robust spaces for driving mobilizations

for at least three reasons. First, cities are privileged for breeding contention because contradictions

within capitalist urbanization tend to produce a wide variety of grievances among its inhabitants.

Cities are, second, due to their density, size, and diversity more likely to become laboratories where

new ties between a broad and diverse range of activists and political groups are forged. As cities

also concentrate (immobile symbols of) power relations, they represent, third, “a privileged point

of attack” (ibid.: 2550) as social movements can claim public space exactly where key institutions

of political and economic power are located. Especially in the case of global cities where a set of

powerful institutions are spatially fixed and where symbols of power and prestige are concentrated

permanently, movements have the opportunity to address global issues by confronting their

concrete, local expressions.

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Building on this framework and having the specific urban social movement character of Blockupy

in mind, we argue that the three following aspects help to understand the strategic relevance of

Frankfurt for the Blockupy protests: First, the emergence of Frankfurt as Germany’s leading

international banking center and global city during the early 1980s resulted in a high concentration

of powerful financial institutions including the headquarters of private banks like Deutsche Bank

and Commerzbank as well as the German Central Bank and the ECB (Keil 2011; Schipper 2014).

Due to the global city formation, Frankfurt is, second, nowadays faced with a relative high degree

of socio-economic inequality (Bock, Belina 2012; Keil, Ronneberger 2000; Klagge 2005)

accompanied by ongoing gentrification processes (Schipper 2013) that have fuelled considerable

grievances among the local population in recent years. Beyond that, Frankfurt has, third, a

long-lasting tradition of urban based social struggles that could, at least temporarily, overcome the

frequently witnessed ‘othering’ and criminalization of radical protests by successfully establishing

alliances of a broad range of political actors across civil society (Mullis, Schipper 2013;

Ronneberger 2012; Roth 1991). This tradition enables local (Blockupy) activists today to build on

already established ties and to enter broader coalitions with ‘respectable’ civil society actors. In the

following, we briefly explain how these three aspects are historically interwoven.

The foundations for becoming Germany’s leading banking center were laid after WWII when

Frankfurt was selected as the location for the predecessor of the German Central Bank. The

subsequent concentration of national financial institutions in Frankfurt and the resulting growth of

the Central Business District (CBD) led to a radical transformation of the urban socio-spatial

structure and planted the seeds for the following globalizing process that started in the early 1980s

(Grote 2003; Ronneberger, Keil 1995). However, the early state-led expansion of the CBD and the

resulting partial demolition of the centrally located residential neighborhood Westend were met

with fierce resistance. During the 1970s, lower and middle class tenants, migrant workers, and
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radical students joined forces to protest against ruthless urban development projects in the interest

of real estate speculators and the growing financial industries. With strong support among the local

population, the militant movement organized rent strikes and mass rallies, and squatted, for the first

time in German post-war history, a number of residential buildings that were supposed to be

demolished in order to construct high-rise office towers. For several years, regular clashes with the

police, mostly in the context of forceful evictions of squatted real estates, grew into severe, violent,

and, up until then, unprecedented street riots (Stracke 1980).

With regard to the globalizing of Frankfurt, the final qualitative shift from a national to an

international financial center occurred during the 1980s. During this decade, Frankfurt’s

transformation into a global city was reflected in the further expansion of financial and producer

service industries that materialized in new generations of high-rise buildings and an airport

extension pushed through aggressively against local resistance. This resistance directed against the

plan to build a third runway called Startbahn-West came out of the newly emerging environmental

movement and was overwhelmingly supported by the local population including both respected

citizens and leftwing radicals. After all juridical complaints had been rejected by 1980, the

emerging mass movement changed its strategies to more direct actions. From May 1980 onwards,

they organized mass rallies with up to 120,000 people, erected an informal village in the woods

close to the airport, tried to occupy the construction site several times, erected barricades on the

adjacent highway, and used different other tactics of sabotage and civil disobedience. Although the

inauguration of the runway in 1984 weakened the dynamic, the protest continued for several years

until it ended abruptly when two police officers were shot during a demonstration in November

1987 (Ronneberger, Keil 1995: 295).

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In addition to protests against the airport expansion, struggles against gentrification and the

destruction of housing by the growth of the office economy continued throughout the 1980s as well

(for instance in centrally located neighborhoods like Bockenheim, Gallus, and Gutleut). However,

social conflicts over housing issues dominated by leftwing radicals, working class activists, and

squatters lost force during the 1990s as “neighborhood-based defensive activism [...], based on left

wing ideologies and working-class neighborhood cultures, became increasingly irrelevant

politically” (Keil, Ronneberger 2000: 243).

Yet, local resistance against the disadvantages of growth for the resident population pursued – but

in a socially and spatially different way: The new wave of social protests 1) shifted from the center

of the city to the (northern) periphery which has evolved into a prime location for the post-Fordist

economy; and 2) became a more populist, partly neorural endeavor supported also by conservative

farmers and middle class suburbanites (Ronneberger, Keil 1994). These new types of turmoil

against large scale urban infrastructure and mass housing projects are, however, harder to classify

in terms of their ideological background as they represent “a clear departure from the notion that

urban social movements in Frankfurt were hegemonized by the left wing or green milieu alone”

(ibid.: 245). Since the 1990s, this populist kind of (partly NIMBY-) anti-growth protest has

continued in different forms until today. One of the most remarkable mass protests erupted, for

instance, over the opening of another runway called Nordwestbahn at the Frankfurt airport in 2011

since the aircraft noise of the new flight path now also affects upper and middle class

neighborhoods mainly in the south of Frankfurt. While the airport expansion had for years been

proclaimed as a vital strategy for increasing the global competitiveness of the city by political elites

from conservative, green, and social democratic parties, its realization led after all to strong

anti-growth unrest heavily supported by traditionally more conservative parts of the local

population.
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In terms of being Germany’s primary international banking center, the globalizing process made

another important leap forward as Frankfurt was selected as the location for the newly established

ECB in 1998.This decision reflects, first of all, the leading position of Frankfurt for European

continental financial industries achieved during the earlier globalizing phases but is, secondly, also

the result of aggressive lobbying activities organized by the national and local governments. In

2014/15, the ECB has relocated its current headquarters into a newly built high-rise in the eastern

part of the city called Ostend, putting it under further heavy gentrification pressure. Already since

the 1990s, the City of Frankfurt has successfully initiated a number of large scale luxurious urban

redevelopment projects to gentrify this working-class neighborhood and the surrounding old

industrial areas located along the axis of the Main River (for instance parts of the East Harbour and

the former slaughter house area) (Ronneberger, Keil 1995: 328pp; Schipper 2013: 196pp). Against

the background of this long-term redevelopment strategy, the political decision to permit the ECB

the construction of a high-rise building outside of any city-master-plan can be interpreted as

another step that will accelerate the pressure on the housing market for working class families. As

the ECB employs more than 1,500 high-wage professionals often looking for upscale, centrally

located housing, it is more than likely that the relocation will, intended or not, lead to the further

displacement of low-income household from one of the last remaining affordable and centrally

located areas within the city.

As an effect of the global city formation based on financial industries and an international airport

economy (Keil, Ronneberger 2000; Schamp 2002), the social polarization in Frankfurt increased

significantly. A rapid deindustrialization process since the early 1990s, resulting from increasing

land values, and a substantial loss of unionized blue-collar employment opportunities went along

with the growth of high paid jobs in the financial industries on the one side and low wage jobs in

the service sector on the other one (Schipper 2014: 241). Therefore, the metropolitan region of
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Frankfurt is, compared to most other German urban centers, faced with a disproportionally high

social inequality (Bock, Belina 2012; Klagge 2005). Furthermore, this polarized income structure

is, nowadays, confronted with a return of the housing question and a new wave of state-led and

crisis-induced gentrification processes (Schipper 2013). Between 2010 and 2013, average housing

prices increased by 35% (City of Frankfurt 2014: 22), while the closely linked rent level rose by

20%. As centrally located, former working-class neighborhoods face most severe rises of rents and

housing prices, low-income and also middle-class households are displaced and pushed further to

the periphery of the metropolitan region (Heeg, Holm 2012). As a result, a new wave of urban

social protests, in many ways similar to the leftwing housing struggles of the 1980s, has emerged,

protesting against rising rents, escalating housing prices, and the gentrification of centrally located

neighborhoods. These anti-gentrification protests are organized and carried out by grassroots

networks of trade unionists, tenants associations, local leftwing politicians, neighborhood

initiatives, and more radical housing activists including a lively squatter movement that has

occupied more than ten vacant buildings during the last three years – all of them subsequently

evicted by the police – in protest against the severe housing crisis.

All the social movements illustrated above are examples of politicization that emanated not least

from the global city formation of Frankfurt. As Frankfurt is a place where the contradictions of the

capitalist economy are concentrated, growth periods have, during the last fifty years, “always been

linked to forms of local resistance” whereby “[u]rban social conflicts usually erupted where the

new phase of expansion manifested itself most visibly” (Keil, Ronneberger 2000: 242). So far the

struggles tackled processes primarily on the local (anti-gentrification, squatter movement,

anti-growth protests) and regional (airport expansions: Startbahn-West, Nordwestbahn) scales. In

contrast, Blockupy is the first attempt to not only articulate opposition to the processes evoked by

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the global city formation but to use Frankfurt as a local anchor point to challenge globalized,

finance-market driven capitalism and the European crisis regime.

The Blockupy protests in Frankfurt 2012 & 2013

Blockupy is a broad national political alliance with transnational network ties that was founded in

reaction to the German and European crisis management in early 2012. The alliance consists of

activists from leftwing parties, trade unions, the Occupy movement, associations of the

unemployed, the environmental and peace movements, anti-racist and anti-fascist initiatives, and

different other groups of the radical and more moderate Left. Inspired by the Arab spring, the

US-Occupy-movement and the wave of mobilizations in Spain and Greece (Tejerina et al. 2013),

the idea was born to organize five days of protest in the financial district of Frankfurt in May 2012

including several demonstrations, more than one hundred workshops and lectures in public places

all over the city, and a number of creative, non-violent actions of civil disobedience. Part of the

latter was the strategy to block and shut down the financial district and the ECB for several days by

setting up protest camps in the city center and by peacefully blocking the main entrance routes with

thousands of people. In contrast to in some ways similar ‘summit hopping’ protests against

neoliberal capitalism, Blockupy could freely and self-determined choose when and where to

mobilize. While Frankfurt was, in the beginning, only one of several possible options, the city was

selected due to its global city functions as well as its long-standing tradition of social struggles. For

instance, the Blockupy Call for Action for 2013 states: “We carry our protest, our civil

disobedience and resistance to the residence of the profiteers of the European crisis regime to

Frankfurt am Main.” (Blockupy 2013)

However, in contrast to the expectations of the organizers and in contrast to former experiences

with similar forms of protest in Germany, the City of Frankfurt legally prohibited all
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demonstrations, camps, public lectures and workshops and banned any kind of protest for the

whole week. Arguing that the Blockupy protests could be used by militant radicals to riot in the city,

the local government legally produced a space of exception where basic democratic rights were

superseded (Petzold, Pichl 2013). Supported by a panic discourse that “our city” was “threatened”,

shops and banks in the city center were closed and boarded up, and subway stations and public

institutions like the Goethe University were shut down. The banks turned off all ATMs in the city

center and with them the access to cash money in Germany’s financial capital and the region’s

most important commercial district. Further stirring the panic, the local police as well as several

businesses advised employees to take a day off or to wear casual clothes instead of suits due to the

alleged threat of being identified as bankers.

Although any protest had been legally banned, the aim of shutting down the financial district was

surprisingly successful – yet not in the way the organizers had imagined. In order to prevent

protesters from entering the city center, an overwhelming force of 5,000 police officers including

hundreds of cruisers, mounted police, water cannons and even armored vehicles blocked the CBD

of Frankfurt for several days. The police legally produced a space of exception by closing all

entrances to the financial district for everybody and by transforming the CBD into a fenced fortress

(see image 1 & 2).

Image 1: Police closing an entrance to the financial district in May 2012 (Boykin Reynolds)

Image 2: The headquarters of the ECB encircled by a barbed wire fence in May 2012 (Stefan

Rudersdorf)

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However, the police also detained more than 1,400 people who tried to gather in small groups to

demonstrate against neoliberal capitalism or, in face of the police repression, for democracy and

free speech (ibid.: 224). In sum, this dialectic of control and contestation resulted in an urban space

in which everyday life was thoroughly disturbed and through which the CBD was shut down in a

much more efficient way than any blockades by protesters could have ever achieved. Setting a

strong symbol against this authoritarian state of emergency, 30,000 people joined the

demonstration on the final day of the Blockupy mobilisation – which was the only protest event

that had been legalized by court order in a last-minute decision (see image 3).

Image 3: Main demonstration on the final day of the Blockupy protests in 2012 (Boykin Reynolds)

One year later, in May 2013, the Blockupy alliance mobilized again for days of action in Frankfurt.

Like in 2012, it was agreed to perform mass actions of civil disobedience combined with a larger

demonstration at the end to disturb the regular business flows within the global city. The

non-violent but consistent resistance against the repression in 2012 had subverted the legitimacy

and possibilities of state authorities to follow a similar strategy of criminalization. Albeit thousands

of police-officers were concentrated in the CBD once more, they received, this time, the order to

act much more reserved and let the protest take its course. On the morning of Friday, May 31,

around 3,000 activists gathered in front of the ECB in order to block its entrances. The blockades

were held until noon when a ‘second wave’ of protest was launched. These more decentralized

actions of civil disobedience took place at the Frankfurt International Airport to challenge its role

of being Germany’s main hub for the deportation of refugees; at the entry of the Deutsche Bank

headquarters to protest against land grabbing and financial speculation on food prices; in front of

11
real estate investors to claim the right to the city which has increasingly been denied to the urban

poor due to escalating rents and housing prices; and on the main city center shopping street where

several malls and multinational retailers were blocked to protest the working conditions in textile

industries in the Global South. In sharp contrast to the situation in 2012, the days of action in 2013

could take place more or less without being attacked by the police. While in 2012 the dialectic of

control and contention resulted in an authoritarian shut down of the city center, this time around

protesters were in the driver’s seat. Summing up this day, a spokesperson of the Italian delegation

described its achievement at the general assembly as a successful social strike in the city (see image

4). However, on the following day the final demonstration of around 20,000 people would not get

far. After about 800 meters, police forces in full riot gear stopped the peaceful demonstration, cut

off and encircled the first 1,000 participants for more than nine hours, and injured another several

hundred with tear gas and batons (Steven 2014, see image 5). The reason given by the police for

ending the legal demonstration was that some demonstrators had “masked” themselves with sun

glasses and umbrellas. It is important to notice that the police was not able to legitimize its strategy

and to win the battle for public opinion during the following weeks. Both Frankfurt based national

newspapers (the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the liberal Frankfurter

Rundschau) as well as almost all other journalists condemned the police strategy and the

unjustified violence against a peaceful and legal demonstration. The public media outrage

culminated in a tumultuous press conference of the Minister of the Interior of Hessen and the local

police president, when mainstream journalists publicly denounced the police strategy as “a shame

for Frankfurt”. As a result, over 10,000 local citizens took to the streets a week later to demonstrate

against police-violence and the second attempt to criminalize social protests against the European

crisis management.

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 Image 4: Police in front of the ECB during Blockupy 2013 (timmy_lichtbild)

Image 5: Police using tear gas against protesters on June 1st 2013 (strassenstriche)

Conclusion

Since 2012, Blockupy has, even if not primarily focusing on urban issues and grievances, become

part of Frankfurt’s long-lasting tradition of urban based social movements by using the historical

and ongoing global city formation to articulate its protest against the German and European

austerity regime. In line with Uitermark’s (2004: 710) argument that „some points in space are

obviously more vulnerable than others”, the ECB within the global city of Frankfurt has in

particular become a symbol to challenge neoliberal capitalism, austerity politics, and European

power relations. By using the ECB as a symbol, Blockupy opened up for the first time a path to

connect transnational social struggles against the German and European crisis management with

local protests against the neoliberal urban restructuring within the global city of Frankfurt (Mullis

2014). This place-based and cross-scalar networking was made possible by and turned against the

very networks that formed the global city Frankfurt in the first place. The global city, one might

conclude, in peculiar ways produced the possibilities to attack the root causes of its devastating

social, economic and political realities.

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