Crisis in Göttingen’s Corona High‐Rises: Rethinking Urban Justice amid the Pandemic

Association. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12336. (Correction added on 20 August 2020, after first online publication: Projekt Deal funding statement has been added. Figure placements were updated.) City & Society


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third of its population is made up of students, graduate workers, and administrative staff. Hence, it was quite a surprise when Göttingen made it to international news in mid-June, and not just once, but on two accounts. Both were related to the pandemic, and have to do with virus outbreaks in the city's two prominent high rises.

The Corona High-Rises
The first case took place in late May in a housing complex known as Iduna-Zentrum. An 18story apartment which hosts approximately 700 residents living across 407 flats, Iduna was originally built in 1975 as a "Prestige-bau," that is, a luxury complex with balconies, a swimming pool and two bridges connecting it to the university's main campus and the city center. It was even featured in postcards, which displayed it as if to attest to the city's luxurious housing opportunities. Iduna was initially owned by the Iduna Gruppe, a private insurance company, who, over time, sold the flats to private owners. Today, the high-rise has over 200 landlords who rent the rooms to the city, which, in return, rents them out to the recipients of Hartz IV, the lowest level of unemployed benefit offered by the German state. Initially built to accommodate the young scholars attending the University of Göttingen, the high-rise became a residence known for its low-income residents. In a lengthy piece published in the German weekly, Stern, it is referred as "das Hotel zur lockeren Schraube," the hotel for people who have loose screws (Stern 2019).

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I first heard of Iduna in Hemingway, a kneipe (bar) in Iduna's vicinity, which was also a few hundred meters from my flat. My drinking buddy, an ex-punk German man in his early 50s, has told me of its horrendous living conditions-broken or unlocked doors, dirty mattresses, accumulating garbage, and prevalence of meth and flakka users-and advised me against renting a flat there. I later learned that some students did actually live there. And their narratives seemed to corroborate the stories I listened to in the kneipe. Elisabeth, a graduate student, moved into Iduna in early March primarily due to its low rent (500 Euros per month). Her flat was clean, but the outer hallways were dirty. She was not bothered by groups of people-mostly foreign children-gathering in the apartment front to play games. But when she found out that one of the  flats on her floor served as the headquarters for what she thinks was a drug-trafficking ring, she was worried.
A few months after she moved in, the first case of COVID-19 was spotted in the high-rise. In the last week of May, one of its residents, a middle-aged resident of Albanian origin, gathered with 30 friends in a shisha bar for the Ramadan festivities (Tagesspiel 2020). When he returned to his flat, he infected 60 others. The housing complex was put under lockdown a few days later, making a name as a "Corona-Hochhaus," a Corona high-rise (Stern 2020). A day before the police secured the perimeter, Elisabeth had evacuated her flat per her department's orders, and was forced to take a COVID-19 test (for which she tested negative).
Left: Iduna-Zentrum, pictured from Weender Landstraße. 3 August 2020. Right: Groner Landstraße 9 (high-rise to the back), pictured from Groner Landstraße the day of the demonstration. Photo Credit: Oğuz Alyanak The second case took place in Groner Landstraße 9. Although this high-rise lies close to the city center, it took me a few months to come across it. I encountered it during one of my walks around the city with a German colleague. Its grey façade was made up of several hundred windows stacked on top of each other. Most were open, and had laundry hanging from them-an 7 unlikely scene for German residences, but a likely one for migrant dwellings such as this one, where apartments are at a maximum 37 square meters, and occupied by families with several children. My friend described it as "the worst place in Göttingen." "Iduna," she asserted, "at least has balconies." Like Iduna, Groner Landstraße 9 was put under isolation after the first case of COVID-19 was discovered. But unlike Iduna, the residents of Groner Landstraße 9 fought against the isolation measures, which led to the demonstration a few days later. Up until then, I was not aware of a housing crisis in Göttingen, other than having heard students complain about not finding affordable housing options. Nor was I aware of the city's urban poor or the precarious living conditions that the demonstrators brought to my attention. The story, as I came to realize, was a typical urban transformation tale, where affordable housing options were cut down to make room for fancy hotels. The city capitalized on one of its main assets-tourism-which came at the expense of those already living in precarious conditions. Why was not the money allocated to them, and instead put into new infrastructural projects? That this question was raised amid a pandemic was further intriguing, helping me realize that COVID-19 was not just a public health crisis, but also an urban crisis. In an attempt to overcome my own ignorance, I grabbed my notebook and camera, and headed to Groner Landstraße.
Soon after, music started to blast from the loudspeakers set up on a van a few meters before the police barrier. "1-3-1-2. Fick die Polizei. Mittelfinger high. Die ganze clique ist mit dabei," sang the Kurdish-German hip hop artist, Ebow. Fuck the police, the whole gang is here with their middle fingers up in the air.
There we were. The 400 or so protestors who had gathered by FREIGeist were enough of a presence to force the police to cut off traffic. Slowly, we moved towards the high rise, which was After a few brief remarks explaining the purpose of the demonstration, and clarifying that the organizers had intended to gather in front of the Sparkasse bank by the high-rise-the city forbid them from doing so-they shared a cautionary remark. "There may be civil police among us. In case you need legal help, please call the following number: 05517708000." Given that Antifa organizations would be in attendance, and eight police officers were injured in the clash two days prior, friends had warned me that things could get violent. The demonstration, however, proved to be anything but violent. In fact, with the exception of two slogans-"Alle zusammen gegen den Faschismus" (All together against fascism), which was chanted as a representative from the Free Workers Union of Göttingen took the microphone, and "Fa, anti, antikapitaliste, fa, anti, antikapitaliste," following the speech by an Antifa representative-the crowd was calm.
The demonstration continued with a representative from the city's Roma center, who briefed us on the Center's position on the lockdown. Given that a large number of residents of the high-rise were of Roma background, the representative was a key player. His speech focused on the struggles of the Roma people in obtaining accommodation with better living conditions and highlighting the precarity of foreigners in Germany as evident in "Corona Landstraße." His depiction of the high-rise as a Corona hotspot was apt given the conditions in the high-rise-a point that became clear as we listened to pre-recorded interviews with residents. "Crowded, pest 12 Then came another announcement, this time reminding us that the police would intervene unless we kept our distance from each other as part of the city's Corona mandate. This announcement was followed by boos and chants. A couple of more speeches later, the demonstration came to an end.

COVID-19 as a Crisis in Urban Justice
Lockdown. Quarantine. Stay-at-home. We have familiarized ourselves with these terms in recent months as more than half of the world's population has been requested or forced to stay put amid the pandemic. For those who have the means, staying at or working from home may be a

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The calls to stay home and self-isolate, which, we are told, are necessary measures to slow down the spread of the virus, bring to fore problems with precarious living conditions of immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers who are usually placed in crumbling housing units. That it is foreigners who have to face the burden, moreover, bring to our attention the underlying racist and xenophobic attitudes, which, to this day, are part and parcel of the German society. On the one hand, there is the long-standing Orientalist fear that the unruly foreigners would not selfisolate, and should therefore be forced to do. And on the other, there is the reality that most of the hotspots, such as the high-rises, or workplaces such as slaughterhouses, are inhabited by foreign/migrant workers, who are living or working in decrepit conditions not out of will, but simply due to lack of better alternatives.
COVID-19 is a not just crisis in public health. As the Groner Landstraße demonstration makes clear, it also makes visible problems pertaining to urban life, which have as much to do with urban justice as with racialized accounts dominating public conversations.