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Park Patrol: Urban Securitisation, Racialised Policing, and the Everyday Struggle for Görlitzer Park

Patrouille des parcs : la sécurisation urbaine, contrôle racialisé et la lutte quotidienne pour le parc Görlitzer
Katharina Ciax

Résumés

Cet article étudie la manière dont les pratiques de sécurité quotidiennes − telles que les patrouilles, les contrôles d’identité et le profilage racial − modifient l’espace et les réalités ressenties dans le parc Görlitzer à Berlin, qui impactent de façon disproportionnée les groupes marginalisés, favorisant les sentiments d’insécurité et d’exclusion. L’étude se concentre sur la manière dont les mesures de sécurité institutionnelles − qui englobent les modifications discursives, pratiques et infrastructurelles − ont transformé le parc en un espace caractérisé par un contrôle accru. L’étude ethnographique révèle que les stratégies d’aménagement urbain axées sur la sécurité, telles que l’introduction de technologies de surveillance et les interventions spatio-matérielles, exacerbent l’exclusion et la marginalisation, en particulier par le biais d’un maintien de l’ordre racialisé et d’affective atmospheres de peur et de contrôle. Malgré la résistance civique et les initiatives participatives en faveur d’un accès équitable, ces pratiques de sécurité institutionnelle persistent, reflétant des tendances plus larges dans la gouvernance des espaces urbains. En reliant la sécurisation à la théorie de l’affect et à l’analyse spatiale, cette recherche contribue à comprendre comment les dynamiques sociopolitiques façonnent l’accessibilité des espaces (verts) urbains et leur rôle dans la production d’affective atmospheres d’exclusion urbaines.

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1. Introduction

1This paper studies the security strategies employed in the reorganisation and redevelopment of Görlitzer Park. As a powerful example of citizen participation and co-creation in development and design in the early days of Berlin’s Görlitzer Park, it has become a highly contested space, politically, discursively and spatially, over the years. Embedded in a secluded space during the years of the Berlin Wall, confronted with the surrounding neighbourhood’s changing demographics in the 1990s, and the ongoing gentrification of the district, Görlitzer Park has been the arena for spatial alterations and contestations. The audience, usage and security politics of Görlitzer Park have become a contentious matter that is dividing neighbours, politicians and security personnel. Faced with issues of drug trading and consumption, above-average criminality and diverse groups and needs of users, the park has been repeatedly on the agenda of the Berlin Senate and district (Bürk et al., 2016). The contestation of the park has recently culminated in an attempt by the Senate to fence off the park, which has been met with a response from many activists fighting the implementation of such security measures and usage restrictions.

2This paper examines the gradual evolution of security measures and control within the park. Taking the (historic) socio-spatial context of Görlitzer Park and its neighbourhood into account, it traces the rationalities of institutional security deployed in the park. It therefore analyses how the strategies of security contribute to the further securitisation of Görlitzer Park. By focusing on measures of urban securitisation, surveillance and policing, this analysis is divided into three subsections. It will study three dimensions of securitisation: the discursive construction of security, the everyday practices of security, and the infrastructures of security. It will detail the space’s dynamic production (Lefebvre, 1992), policing practices and material manifestations.

3Görlitzer Park has become the German “symbol of an exclusionary migration regime […] in public spaces, the centre of internationalisation, touristification, gentrification and the associated leisure cultures” (Westerheide & Michel, 2024, translated by the author). Rent prices have skyrocketed, and the municipality and district are attempting to expel unwanted people and avert unwanted behaviour with severe security measures (Künkel, 2017). These debates have resulted in an ever-increasing accumulation of security infrastructure and policing bodies. Especially after a sexual assault and a security summit in 2023, coupled with the election of a new mayor, flourishing debates on migration in Germany, a general climate of uncertainty and (in-)security within Europe, Görlitzer Park experienced a new degree of (in-)visible securitisation. The (newly) implemented spatial measures and deployed policing practices diminished the accessibility of the recreational public park. As the most densely populated district (Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg, 2023), the spatial and atmospheric restriction, control and inaccessibility to one of Kreuzberg’s larger public green spaces affect many.

4Advancing theories of gentrification, urban development, and the making of safe spaces, this paper illuminates the relationship between security, affect and the spatial (Anderson, 2009). What institutional techniques and strategies of security were employed in the reorganisation and redevelopment of Görlitzer Park? And how do affective atmospheres contribute to the ongoing securitisation of such urban green spaces? To comprehend such multilayered dynamics, an analysis is used that maps the spatial alterations, security infrastructure and practices as they reflect the spatial production and affective negotiation (Thrift, 2004) in the park. This shift enables an understanding of the implementation of new policies and norms, as well as the discursive and practice-based construction and instrumentalisation of crises on an everyday, affective level. To trace the versatile perspectives and the dynamic fabrication of spatialised emotions of danger, threat and security, this analysis is based on an archive of spatial ethnographic methods such as interviews, walk-alongs as well as ride-alongs, participant observations, and a collection of written artifacts such as newspaper articles and policy reports. While the affective embodiment of security has been researched (Anderson, 2015) in relation to counterterrorism (Laketa, 2021; Pettinger, 2023) and urban protest (Gillespie, 2023; Juris, 2008), this paper undertakes an innovative analysis. Firstly, the paper examines the discursive construction of (in-)security by analysing the implemented policies and security measures over time. Secondly, everyday security practices are studied using spatial and affective ethnographic methods. Thirdly, the analysis incorporates the spatial and infrastructural changes as well as the (im-)material shifts in the park. The discussion will further integrate elements of protest and the point of view of activists opposing the institutional take on Görlitzer Park. In doing so, the paper develops an understanding of the visibility-security nexus in the park, examining it on the discursive, atmospheric and infrastructural levels.

2. Contesting Public Urban Green Spaces

5While urban public parks play a key role in city dwellers’ wellbeing (Wu et al., 2020) and sense of belonging, they are “spaces subjected to continual struggle over who and what belongs in public space” (Cook & Laing, 2011, p. 3). Parks, therefore, have been widely discussed as contested spaces in which the right to the city (Lefebvre, 2016 [1968]) and, by extension, the right to the park are exercised. At the same time, it is threatened by (green) gentrification, urban redevelopment (Anguelovski et al., 2019), and privatisation (Madden, 2010). Krarup (2022) highlights the classed geography of parks. Others accentuate how predominantly low-income elderly and minority children suffer from insufficient access to urban parks in Poland (Sikorska et al., 2020), the US (Rigolon & Flohr, 2014) and Germany (Kabisch & Haase, 2014), and how this unequal accessibility to urban space affects psychological wellbeing (Claßen & Kistemann, 2017) and health (Maas et al., 2006), presenting itself as an inherent spatial and environmental inequality (Satcher, 2022). Such environmental inequalities often link back to structural dimensions of racism (Heard-Garris et al., 2021) due to unequal spatial distribution (De Sousa Silva et al., 2018), non-participatory development of public urban green spaces (Smiley et al., 2016), and a process of dispossession and displacement (Bonds & Holifield, 2023) that can affect social cohesion (Peters, 2010) and feelings of (dis-)comfort and fear (Sreetheran & van den Bosch, 2014).

6Scholarly analysis has shown that even in parks that seem geographically accessible, affective measures can hamper the accessibility and usage for certain social groups. A typical example is the unequal policing and securing of public parks in ascribed ‘migrant neighbourhoods’ (Williams, 2021). Mitchell (1995) illustrates the contestations along the fault lines of transformation and gentrification processes in his work on the People’s Park in Berkeley. He describes the visions of public spaces and public parks as “taken and remade by political actors; it is political at its very core; and it tolerates the risk of disorder [that is opposed by] the second vision, public space is planned orderly and safe.” The urban sociologist William H. Whyte arrives at a similar conclusion in his in-depth analysis of city centres, noting that the claim of accessibility, order and security decreases the number of users (Whyte, 2009), resulting in a counteracting effect. Such practices, which create and maintain a hegemonic order and security, have been further explored in numerous scholarly analyses. Cook and Laing (2011) highlight the impact of public and private policing in urban parks, reassuring those who reflect normative behaviours while deterring behaviours and bodies that are construed as suspicious or criminal and do not align with the hegemonic construction of norm and order. Brown (2015) illustrates how such (spatialised) policing is primarily targeting the racialised and marginalised citizens (see also Nguyen, 2019; Suhaiymah, 2022), not only rendering them invisible but removing and displacing them from public spaces by (im-)materially designing out particular behaviours and bodies (Forbes & Clarke, 2023).

7Besides policing practices, the spatial conditions and perception of public space in European cities have become increasingly entangled with institutional discourses on securing and making safe, tied to corporate and state interests (Koskela, 2000; Nishiyama, 2018). This is stoked by current debates on how (counter-)terrorism (Sundoko et al., 2018) and threat perceptions (Masco, 2014) affect how urban spaces’ security measures are designed and how they feel. Scholars have contemplated security-by-design approaches that depict imagined threat scenarios and the deployment of professional actors, which remain invisible to the general audience (Maguire & Westbrook, 2020), yet are practical in their ability to prevent, hinder and mitigate impact. While such approaches remain invisible, “they attempt to transmit feelings of safety and security through the built environment” (Coaffee, 2021, p. 131), affectively impacting city users. To date, such security interventions have been widely normalised in European urban spaces, navigating between “architectures of reassurance” and “architectures of dis-assurance” (Boddy, 2007). While Boddy mainly includes architectures in his analysis, affect theorists (Ahmed, 2012; Brighenti & Pavoni, 2019) have expanded the scope to encompass the affective realm of re- and dis-assurance. Their analysis considers how (im-)materialities can alter feelings towards spaces, how affects and emotions change the perception of spaces, and how emotions shape the contours of social and physical space (Ahmed, 2007, p. 13).

8Especially noteworthy is Ben Anderson’s treatment of affective atmospheres that consider “affective qualities that emanate from the assembling of human bodies, discursive bodies, non-human bodies, and all the other bodies that make up everyday situations” (2009, p. 80), shedding light on the spatial discharge of such affective qualities. In line with that, theories of sensorial and affective design in (urban) spaces have developed, with attention to the reciprocal relation between spaces and emotions. Young (2014) highlights the connection between affective encounters and the visual in her study on people’s perception of graffiti, underlining how visual perception can evoke (negative) feelings and emotionally charge spaces. Christian Borch (2011) further emphasises the potential to intentionally shape atmospheres through material and infrastructural arrangements, such as sounds, colours and objects, to guide bodies and govern the politics of affect and atmospheres (see also Griffiths, 2024; Vrabiescu and Anderson, 2024). As such, the theorisation of “spatially discharged affective qualities that are autonomous from the bodies that they emerge from, enable and perish with” (Anderson, 2009, p. 80) provides an analytical lens that examines the felt perceptions of subjects and objects, with a heightened engagement with their (im-)material environments. Building on this understanding, feminist affect theorists, especially Ahmed, have emphasised the need to acknowledge the angle of arrival – the personal and socio-political histories that bodies carry and bring into spaces because “it is always felt from a specific point” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 37). She is highlighting the different orientations towards objects and subjects that are also connected to societal power relations and positions, since “bodies can get stuck on what feeling they are associated with” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 39).

9Rua Illan Wall expands on this by discussing policing practices and techniques as atmotechnics that are intended to produce, manage or alter the affective atmospheres (2019). While recognising the contingency of atmospheres, Wall argues, in line with Ahmed, that although atmospheres may be deliberately shaped or “[t]he tone of a space may be conducted by the design of the space or by actors” (Wall, 2019, p. 6), they cannot be fully controlled and emerge due to a dynamic relation between perceptions, practices, bodies and spaces.

10This paper seeks to build upon this scholarly context by extending the analysis of (im-)material security measures and altered perception and (in)accessibility of space towards an analysis of the shifted spatial and affective qualities of Görlitzer Park. In focusing on this specific urban park, this paper argues for a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of spatial inequalities, racialised policing, and affective securing in everyday urban spaces.

3. Securing The Görli: A Spatial Ethnography

11Considering the park’s complexity of (non-)human elements, this paper sheds light on the discursive construction, everyday practices and infrastructures of security. The analysis is based on two primary data archives. First, ethnographic research was conducted in the early spring and summer of 2022 (sections two and three). Underlying the ethnographic methods that were employed is an understanding of ethnography and ethnographic methods that considers the spatiality in which participants’ perceptions, knowledge and experiences intersect and unfold. I wish to connect to Massey’s understanding of the throwntogetherness of place, the “coming together of the previously unrelated, a constellation of processes rather than a thing” (2005, p. 141), which underlines how this study acknowledges and traces the present material, infrastructural and practice-based elements that exist dynamically within a specific constellation of power in “the wider topographies of spaces.” While ethnographic research on specific spatial contexts produces a particular place of research, such wider topographies – the intertwining with global complexities, entanglements and relations – are to be recognised (Massey, 2005; Pink, 2015) to allow the interactions and reflections between the local and global that come together in the place under research. The spatial ethnographic archive has been collected through ethnographic conversations with neighbours and users of Görlitzer Park, as well as social workers in neighbourhood centres surrounding the park. Furthermore, atmospheric observations of the park and its users, with a specific focus on the interactions between people and the park’s spatiality and materiality, as well as their relation to security and visibility (Pink, 2015), have been employed.

12Additionally, participant observations of protests and political actions in and around the park have been conducted. In addition, vignettes and minutes of ride-alongs, Kusenbach (2003) with the Public Order Office (POO) of Berlin Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, and walk-along conversations with police officers and social workers are included in the analysis (Low & Maguire, 2019). Such walk-alongs enabled me to observe the participants’ spatial practices in situ, to access and understand their experiences and interpretations of everyday (work) routines and spaces (Kusenbach, 2003, p. 463).

13The second ethnographic mainstay of this paper is a selection of gathered newspaper articles, available parliamentary minutes, and policy reports of the Berlin senate and the district government, published since 2014 (sections one and three), with a focus on outputs after the summer of 2023 that marked a turning point in the debate around the park’s security. The analysis includes all articles, minutes and reports that thematised the security of Görlitzer Park, the conflicts of use, current problems and activist contestations. This artefactual sampling functioned as an extension to the ethnographically collected data within and around the park, enabling an analysis of the park’s gradual increase in security measures and control over time. Since most of the collected data is in German, the empirical quotes from conversations and documents have been translated.

14The following analysis is divided into three sections. The first section details how policy contributed to a discursive and legal construction of a dangerous place in need of securitisation. The second – everyday practices of security – involves diving deeper into the impressions and insights gained from ride-alongs and conversations in and around the park. The third step of the subchapter – infrastructures of securitisation – examines the material shifts in the park, focusing on visible alterations and their impact on the park’s perception. Simultaneously with the process of writing this paper, the implementation of new security measures is about to be undertaken amid ongoing protests from civil rights movements, neighbourhood initiatives and federal anti-securitisation movements. Snapshots of this ongoing process were integrated as much as possible in the following analysis.

3.1. Discursive Construction of Security

15To better understand the emergence of insecurity construction and the security measures employed in the park, it is essential to examine the social and spatial context in which the park and its securitisation developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is in the centre of Kreuzberg, historically a workers’ district in the late nineteenth century (Flakin, 2022; Zscharnack, 2018). Due to its somewhat peripheral location during Berlin’s divided years (the Berlin Wall surrounded Kreuzberg on three sides) and its low-quality housing infrastructure (Siemer & Matthews-Hunter, 2017), those able to afford it left Kreuzberg in the 1960s (Flakin, 2022; Lang, 1994). In the following years, so-called Gastarbeiter [guest workers] (Hochmuth, 2021), other economically marginalised groups (Pichler, 2013), students and local artists filled this vacuum in the eastern part of Kreuzberg (Fleig, Lüthjohann & Maatz, 2022). Lang (1994) describes these years as the foundation of Kreuzberg’s diverse and alternative image of a neighbourhood that attracted many seeking alternative ways of living and those hiding from the Federal Republic’s military draft in the officially demilitarised West Berlin. Urban innovation plans and modernisation in the late 1970s and 1980s triggered an increase in activist practices. The park’s foundation developed in line with the tensions between speculators modernising and inhabitants conserving the alternative character of the district. Neighbours, local initiatives like Verein Görlitzer Park around Irmgard Klette or the Kinderbauernhof auf dem Görlitzer e.V., together with the district government of Kreuzberg, developed plans to convert the wasteland of the former freight railway station Görlitzer Bahnhof into a public park. Redevelopment plans included the creation of green spaces, pathways and playgrounds. Besides several playgrounds, a petting zoo, a meadow orchard, a barbecue area, sporting and seating facilities, and public toilets were created to provide unrestricted and versatile options for visitors (Peters, 2010). Many were attracted by the park, bringing diverse needs and expectations to the space.

  • 1 In the following ethnographic data is referenced by using FN (field note), FP (field protocol), PKS (...)

16Opened in the 1990s, Görlitzer Park slowly developed into one of the most contested parks in Berlin. This prominence, however, was not only the result of its successful development, which attracted neighbours and tourists, and contributed to the rise of Kreuzberg as a gentrified cultural district (Hochmuth, 2017; Langhorst, 2013), but also the consequence of severe spatial conflicts arising from a new socioeconomic constellation (Polat, 2020). It was increasingly subjected to multiple phases of territorial stigmatisation (Kadıoğlu, 2024), as well as securing and policing (Westerheide & Michel, 2024). Like other parks in Berlin, Görlitzer Park and its neighbourhood soon faced problems with drug dealing and drug use that resulted in major security interventions in the park. Notably, the spatial dimension of policing and securing was increasingly introduced, diminishing the open and diverse spatiality of the park. Neighbourhood initiatives such as Anwohnerinitiative Görlitzer Park and the public were pleading for a solution to the increasing drug crime, while at the same time emphasising their wish to keep the right to the park for everyone, including those selling and using drugs. A social worker summarises the situation of Görlitzer Park as “[…] difficult. Of course, we don’t want to chase away the drug users – they all have their place here – but something must change. […] It’s dangerous” (FN 12‑09‑2022)1. This perspective, which I have heard repeatedly from neighbours, highlights the difficulties of negotiating a solution to the spatial conflicts in place, considering everybody’s right to the park. The primary political response was not aligned. While there had already been daily police patrols since May 2014, the then Senator of the Interior (from the CDU party) established a so-called task force for the containment of drug-based criminality, which also involved the immigration office (Ausländerbehörde) in the rapid and rigorous control of drug dealing and drug use. This linking of the fight against criminality with the immigration office, responsible for carrying out expulsions and deportations, fostered the framing and criminalisation of the Other (Whitehead, 2018). While Stokes’ (2023) historical analysis was already tracing racial profiling in Berlin in 1970, for instance, through the targeted foreigners surveillance division, King (2018) elaborates on the racial dynamics and profiling of Germany’s police today, emphasising the production of dangerous Others of Colour through discourse and police practice after much-dicsussed events such as the Cologne New Year’s Eve attack or the uprising of PEGIDA. The data collected in the Chronicles (2000‑2023) on Racist Police Violence by the Campaign for Victims of Racist Police Violence (Kampagne für Opfer rassistischer Polizeigewalt, KOP), which is a systematic documentation of the entanglement of police practice and racialised criminalisation, underlines the racialised violence enacted by linking blackness with drug criminality, with the recording of repeated incidents every year in Görlitzer Park (Bhimji, 2025).

17With the establishment of the task force, raids, examinations and identity checks became routine within the park’s geography. Further to this, the park was designated as a dangerous place (gefährlicher Ort) in 2015, enabling police measures without concrete suspicion of a crime (Belina & Wehrheim, 2011) and establishing norms and defining deviance. Such designations limit citizens’ rights and enable even more restrictive controlling measures to be undertaken by the police and the state (Choplin & Redon, 2014; Schmincke, 2015). In this context, easier police control of these locations also aims to uphold this intended use and minimise the potential for criminal offences, but also for simple nuisances, even if this means driving unwanted users away to other areas. A so-called zero-tolerance zone was characterised by large-scale raids and an increased police presence until 2017. A collateral and unwished-for extrusion of incidents into the surrounding district was eventually one of the reasons that the new Senate of the Interior decided to terminate the “unnecessarily hard” (PP19/36, 05.10.23) zero-tolerance zone in October 2016. As a result of zoning and the socio-spatial demarcation of (in-)security, the park increasingly became a space of accumulated visible and (im-)material security (Autorinnenkollektiv Gras & Beton, 2018). The erection of such zones of exception, in which the execution of security is expanded while the legal rights of citizens are diminished, has become a common practice in controlling and surveilling public urban spaces within European cities (Behr, 2019; Dikeç, 2013). Such zones of exception define spatial norms of order and conformity and simultaneously determine spaces of deviance and otherness. Further, they shift the practice of policing such Otherness towards the spatial, while still targeting subjects (Belina & Wehrheim, 2011, p. 211).

3.2. Everyday Practices of Security

18My first embodied encounter with the park was when I met members of the POO in Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain to prepare for a ride-along with a patrol shift. Guiding me through the route for the next day, they had already framed their patrol, telling me “it will be exciting. […] The Görli is high on the agenda” (FN 23‑09‑2022). They introduced me to the changed socioeconomic fabric and the present gentrification, where more middle-class families are now living around Görlitzer Park, often in conflict with the former residents. Public spaces would be the first point of contact for different social groups, and such conflicts of use would arise regularly in their interactions with city dwellers. Even before entering the park, my affective perception was framed and swayed towards the conflict-laden nature of Görlitzer Park, foregrounding a complex societal constellation and the presence of security and juridical measures.

Figure 1. Raiding Görlitzer Park

Figure 1. Raiding Görlitzer Park

Own image, 2022

19On entering the park, I note the following regarding the outward appearance and the manufactured affective atmosphere:

We arrive at Görli and drive through one of the few entrances accessible by car. We are accompanied by three police cars, another car of the POO, and a towing service. A vehicle from the Parks and Green Spaces department is also approaching. The cars are lined up in a circle in the Görli near the old Pamukkale fountain. The park is normally inaccessible to cars. For this reason alone, the presence of the seven cars is disruptive and deviates from the park’s usual appearance. All eyes are on us (FN 23‑09‑2022).

20In total, fifteen people, along with seven cars, occupy half of the central circus (Figure 1); cyclists and pedestrians must give way to the vehicles in this notionally car-free space. Everyone in the park registers the arrival of the convoy, slowly finding its way to the centre; everyone is looking. A “cyclist grumbles to the police and POO that they are blocking the way. He says, ironically, ‘Well, you’re clearly doing a great job of keeping order’” (FN 23‑09‑2022). The mere presence of police cars disrupts the spatial constellation of the park, which is unambiguous. The observed security and policing practices in Görlitzer Park follow a distinct logic of bold presence and visibility as technologies of control and governance of urban space (Denman, 2020). Arriving in the park, I observe that the officers greet each other briefly, with little discussion (FN 23‑09‑2022).

Groups of about four people quickly form. I find myself in a group with two young male police officers, a person from the parks and green spaces department, and the officers with whom I am doing the ride-along. (FN 23‑09‑2022)

21Patrolling Görlitzer Park is a daily business. The officers form groups of at least two police officers and two POO officers to patrol the park together. I learn that “the primary aim of the police is to safeguard the POO measures, as there is often a so-called ‘solidarity effect’ among people in the Görli neighbourhood, such as people questioning government measures” (FN 23‑09‑2022) and for “the event that a criminal offence is committed” (FN 23‑09‑2022). The employed police officers are part of the Brennpunkt- und Präsenzeinheit (BPE – Eng. hot spot and presence unit), a unit specifically established for crime-ridden areas such as Görlitzer Park (Ciax & Runkel, 2024). I note how they “stand in a tense posture around the POO officers” (FN 23‑09‑2022), wearing bulletproof vests, body cameras and gloves, radiating little approachability but high visibility.

22Observing the reactions of the park users, this space is not only taken up in a material sense. The convoy has the undivided attention of the park, followed by many eyes, becoming the point of interest for many bystanders, which shifts the present spatiality and people’s ability to move freely. The atmosphere shifts to a heightened awareness of both the security workers and park users. Anderson (2009, p. 80) writes “an atmosphere is taken not only to occupy a space but to permeate it. [It] is spherical, but it is […] a dyadic space of resonance – atmospheres ‘radiate’ from an individual to another”. In line with that, the police officer explains that they enjoy being a member of the BPE since “here you have to keep your eyes open all the time” (FN 23‑09‑2022). This seeing and being seen – the reciprocal visibility of those surveilling and those being surveilled – is at the heart of the controlling logics in the park, which is altering and increasingly dominating the affective experience. Paperman (2003, p. 410) writes “[v]isibility is not a dummy variable […] something put on and off like the uniform. Visibility, an artfully managed aspect of occupational identity, reaches more subtly and pervasively into the routines of police work.” This repertoire of socio-spatial practices, the spatial production of (in-)security through the label of a kriminalitätsbelasteter Ort (kbO) [crime-ridden area] & establishment of the BPE unit, and the daily performance of state control, visibility and presence in this everyday space is hence shifting the affective spatial condition.

23Here, policing strategies aim at maintaining and producing a social order and become tools of spatial governance (Denman, 2020). The way in which such policing practices are affectively encountered is dependent on the societal positionality of the park users, interlinking matters of ethnicity, race, and economic and social status. The displaying of patrolling POO and police officers as “uniformed reassurance beacons […] is hoped to offer reassurance to the ‘well-behaved’, whilst deterring those thinking about, or actually misbehaving and at the same time visibly demonstrating the value of the policing provided” (Cook & Laing, 2011, p. 7). While the president of the Berlin police understands the performance of state control as a spatial measure to increase feelings of safety (PKSG, Spranger 08‑09‑2023), many respondents from adjacent social centres, citizen initiatives and activist groups unanimously expressed how the heightened presence of state control and private security heightens their insecurity and uncertainty. This contestation of Görlitzer Park aligns with Parkinson’s work (2012) on sites of democratic performance, which highlights the specific role of squares and central urban spaces as sites of democratic practice and protest. Here, political, ideological and symbolic meaning is attributed to the space, and spatial ordering is particularly employed to restrict such democratic practices.

24As a result, activists continue to problematise socio-spatial policing measures. Many have thematised the racialised policing and profiling in the park (see Wrangelkiez United & Ihr Seid Keine Sicherheit), claiming that such practices are “controlling the inside and outside, manifesting borders on an everyday basis” (ihrseidkeinesicherheit.org), especially for bodies marked as unwanted–arguments in line with scholarly literature on the increasing geopolitical control of (racialised) bodies in the urban arena (Christensen, Mynster & Albrecht, 2020; Ciax & Runkel, 2024). For years, activists have taken to the streets to protest the new measures, particularly after plans were announced to erect a fence and introduce nightly closing hours in 2024. Besides regular demonstrations, concerts and activities in the park during the day and night, the park’s aesthetics are also shaped by activist posters that challenge the state’s hegemonic production of the space.

Figure 2. “Achtung kbO” – Abolitionist posters in Gölritzer Park, 2022

Figure 2. “Achtung kbO” – Abolitionist posters in Gölritzer Park, 2022

Own image, 2022

25During my walk with one of the police officers in Görlitzer Park, we passed a wall with anti-police posters that expose racial profiling in the park (Figure 2). Looking at it, they explain that “the police cannot, of course, carry out checks based on people’s appearance or ethnic origin” (FN 23‑09‑2022). They describe that

behaviour, e.g., when people quickly hide something, look away, become nervous, or show body language that tends to lean away, is the main reason for checks and suspicion. Experience would unfortunately show that it is simply certain people. […] In the end, the phenotype is decisive. (FN 23‑09‑2022)

26They add that this would not constitute racial profiling and that all checks are based on behaviour or people’s back history and repeated offences. There are two aspects worth noting here. Firstly, their statement about the connection drawn between certain people and behaviours. This abstraction and decontextualisation of “[b]ehaviors and occurrences become generalized features of many rather than specific characteristics or specific responses to particular circumstances” (Krumer-Nevo & Sidi, 2012, p. 300). They project undesirable behaviours onto the Other and reassemble them as deterministic to the membership of a specific (racialised) group (Williams & Clarke, 2018). The use of the word ‘phenotype’ can be understood as an attempt to de-racialise highly racialised parameters, which are the reality of today’s policing strategies (in the park), fundamentally rooted in exclusionary and discriminatory practices (Brown, 2015; Thompson, 2021; Bhimji, 2025). Such practices structurally introduced deterring, stigmatising and controlling racialised communities into policy and practice, filtering, controlling and deploying inner migration control with everyday bordering (Fauser, 2024). Further, racialised bodies become framed as disruptive and intrusive to a hegemonic feeling of space. Secondly, the statement highlights how the decision to check someone is based on emotional and behavioural evaluations by the police officers. The officers are evaluating indicators of suspicion in the reactions of potential prospects to their presence in the park. Paperman observes similar practices: “the emergence of focused suspicion motivates and organizes the police attention that follows. The police perception of an emotional response to the presence of the police, which emits a call for a further reaction to self and colleagues” (2003, p. 406). In line with this, the police officer describes how the new Berlin Security Law (ASOG) would allow behaviour-related rather than incident-related checks. Hence, the behaviour, the reaction of a person to seeing the police, becomes a crucial part of Berlin’s policing logic, making the police’s visibility and the ability to be seen central.

27Emphasising how diverse bodies experience lived reality, react to specific signifiers of security and insecurity, and perceive the affective charge of such elements and spaces differently is crucial, especially with a scholarly sensitivity and reflection on how such measures and their affective qualities permeate marginalised and racialised bodies to varying degrees. The everyday security measures can be understood as forming not only physical, visual and practice-based barriers, but also “atmospheric walls” (Ahmed, 2014) that can render the experience of one’s own marginalised body one of dislocation. At the same time, there is much theoretical debate on whether affective atmospheres can be actively modulated (see Bille, Bjerregaard & Sørensen, 2015; Wall, 2019). The park’s example underlines that “atmospheres are always co‐produced by the subjects who sense them, their practices, and dispositions” (Paiva & Sánchez-Fuarros, 2021, p. 393). This highlights how different angles of arrival, attachment and expectation create distinct responses to past, present and emerging atmospheres (Bille & Simonsen, 2021; Ahmed, 2010). The employed measures can thus be seen as security measures for one side, and measures of insecurity for the other.

28In an attempt to mediate between park users and police officers, the security company thinkSI³ was involved with their park runner programme (Parkläufer*innen) by the district council. Intending to create a “comfortable environment in which people feel safe with the help of safety, social inclusion and social intelligence” (FP 12‑04‑2022), park runners, often employed from within the communities that use the park, are present in multilingual teams and without uniforms. They aim to convey approachability and openness to park users, with an awareness of both individual and structural problems faced by the users.

29Further, activists and neighbourhood initiatives have found a less repressive response to the present social issues in the park. Underlining the necessity to share the park with everyone, initiatives such as Fixpunkt e.V. have offered (mobile) drug consumption rooms since 2023, and WrangelkiezUnited organises public park assemblies and protests. They have developed poster campaigns addressing racial profiling, altering the park’s aesthetics, and reassigning space and emotional connection to the park for those targeted by policing practices. Furthermore, the social centres Kiezanker36 and Kreuzberger Stadtteilzentrum in the adjacent neighbourhoods strengthen social cohesion in and around the park by organising public events, which have, for example, resulted in open letters to the Senate and the organisation of the currently active protest against the fence. This urban place-making has drawn many more people to the park (Alzahrani, Borsi, & Jarman, 2017; Lebuhn, 2017), highlighting how community-led approaches can reshape such contested and undecided urban spaces “where different values and identities are confronted […] that are the result of radical place-making practices and a field of political and cultural confrontation and conflict. These spaces represent an opportunity for activists and local communities to construct and express values” (Le Xuan, 2023, p. 1697). Place-making underscores the intricate entanglement of more-than-human attachments, ownership, participation and urban transformation with affective relations of belonging in spaces (Pinkster & Loomans, 2025).

30The experience of such atmospheres of protest and the perception of the park’s spatiality, hence differ from the socio-spatial order to which the state aspires. In contrast to the securitised approach of the district and Senate, the observed place-making approaches centre on socio-spatial relations, feelings of belonging and the cultivation of a dialogue between the different user groups in Görlitzer Park. A central element is the provision of encounters during festivities, protests and events that revitalise the increasingly securitised park. Such affective spatial relations are dynamic and relational. They “emanate from the assembling of the human bodies, discursive bodies, non-human and all the other bodies that make up everyday situations” (Anderson, 2009, p. 80), and thus need to consider the sociopolitical position of all the bodies involved.

3.3. Infrastructures of Security

31In contrast to such community-based measures, and in addition to the patrolling practices, the district council’s securitisation approach also entailed infrastructural and spatial measures to create visibility and transparency in the space. The alteration of environmental design, such as cutting the greenery, is intended to hinder trading opportunities spatially and to create a clear vista. While some considered the eradication as the “removal of the dangerous thicket” (FN 23‑09‑2022), clearing spaces of fear, the intervention in the park’s greenery was negatively received by many inhabitants and became part of the history of Görlitzer Park, referred to as the Kahlschlag (‘deforestation’) (AG Görlitzer Park, 2016). The district government not only failed to make the discussion participatory, it also shifted the spatial and aesthetic characteristics of the formerly lush and green recreational space. Further, the clear-cutting increasingly hampered undesired actions and prevented certain practices in the protective thicket, especially problematising the trade and consumption of illegalised drugs. Such environmental design measures, therefore, filter out marginalised groups, leading to further marginalisation, and segregate specific practices from public spaces (England, 2008; Ullrich & Tullney, 2021). Suggestions by neighbourhood initiatives (e.g. Fixpunkt e.V.) to create drug consumption rooms in the neighbourhood to remove drug consumption from the park were not implemented. While drugs are illegalised in Germany, the framing of drug use and trade as out-of-place in the park is a political act, in line with the district’s gentrification process and the adaptation of urban spaces towards the needs of the middle class “because their mere presence may be sufficient to cause feelings of insecurity, discomfort and anxiety, which might infringe on consumption and so-called ‘quality of life’ of middle-class citizens” (Kammersgaard, 2020, p. 2). An increasingly sanitised, idealised image of public spaces is created that highlights spatial power relations, questions of citizenship and prohibits an essential pillar of democratic participation: cooperation and the accessibly and right to urban (green) spaces for everybody (Lefebvre, 2016).

32The changes in 2014 demarcated a decisive shift in how shrubs contribute to the perceived security, and their eradication and the creation of visual oversight became Görlitzer Park’s new normal. While an employee of the park committee states that “questions of security are certainly not considered in the logic of the bush and tree structure in Görli,” at the same time, they explain that “visual axes were created, and bushes were removed to obtain better oversight” (FN 23‑09‑2022). This spatial production of security, sometimes unnoticed, is increasingly taking over societal institutions and planning logics in urban spaces. During a security summit in 2023, Iris Spranger, the current Senator of the Interior of Berlin, announced another cutting of shrubs to create visual axes and remove opportunities for criminal offences. It was deployed in early 2024 under the eyes of the nature-preserving NGO BUND, which urged them to keep greenery in the park that is

“[c]ontrary to the exaggerated portrayal in the public debate, […] not a place characterised solely by the trade and consumption of drugs and downstream crime. It is also a special piece of Berlin’s urban nature, a place of recreation for residents from the densely built-up area and a space for children to experience nature” (BUND, 2024, translated by the author).

33Such alterations of the material and aesthetic conditions aimed at shifting citizens’ behaviours have affected their perception and sensory experience of space. This eradication of urban greenery has become a common strategy of crime and terrorism prevention in environmental design (Coaffee, O’Hare & Hawkesworth, 2009). Corresponding guidelines suggest a minimum height of 90 cm for shrubs to maintain the park’s middle plane and allow natural surveillance by park users and security personnel (Despard, 2012). The creation of natural surveillance and natural territorial reinforcement through spatial measures can also be linked to the Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) approaches in urban planning. Introduced in the 1970s by C. R. Jeffery and widely established in Europe’s urban spaces in the early 2000s by the EU, CPTED builds on the interrelationship between spatial environments and urban dwellers’ behaviours (Crowe & Fennelly, 2013). While early formulations take a rather physical-spatial determinist perspective, a situational approach has formed, acknowledging the assemblage of all the social and spatial elements present. Aimed at invoking citizens’ sensory experiences and affective perceptions, CPTED spatially manages the potentialities of activities played out in a space (Gooren, 2023) through both immaterial and material measures. During a ride-along, one of the POO officers explains that “less shrubbery in the urban space provides more visibility and more control, but sometimes a different form of architecture is also necessary” (FN 23‑09‑2022).

34Such diverse forms of architectural control (Sorkin, 2007; Spencer, 2016) have been implemented in abundance over the past few years. The park underwent several major and minor phases of spatial and material alteration. In 2019, a pedestrian tunnel located in the Kuhle of the park was closed, removing hiding spaces and further sanitising the aesthetics and possible activities in the park. In 2020, one of the entrances was renovated, including a new design and pilot phase for lighting facilities, which is still awaiting implementation across the entire park. In the same year, several playgrounds in the park and neighbourhood were fenced to enable nightly closure. The fence was replaced by two-metre-high railings three years later. The observed interventions in the material constitution of the park ultimately resulted in control and urban closure (Allen, 2006). The material condition of the park, including its light, fences, officers and shrubs, together with its immaterial constellations, constructs an atmospheric mode of experience (Adey et al., 2013) radiating from the multiplicity of (im-)material bodies employed to secure, surveil, and control (Barker, 2014; Coaffee, O’Hare & Hawkesworth, 2009). Once characterised by informal encounters and a degree of ambiguity and diversity in use, the new atmosphere in Görlitzer Park narrows the spectrum of legitimate behaviour. The visible presence of police, private security and security-oriented spatial design makes park users aware of control. Leisure is allowed, but under the watch of security logics. Such a securitisation of urban public spaces in European cities has been increasingly pushed forward, deeply intertwined with urban renewal and gentrification processes (Ullrich & Tullney, 2021).

35Considering trends in urban security, security-by-design approaches in particular have been progressively implemented in urban green spaces (Maguire & Westbrook, 2020; Tedeschi, 2019), alongside attempts to foster participatory solutions – a typical development of neoliberal governance (Rosol, 2012). In Görlitzer Park, the working group that developed a concept of action for the park in 2016 was established, simultaneously with the reassignment of the label as a crime-ridden space, a development that Westerheide and Michel had already described as the “double movement of punitive and caring moments” (2024, p. 189). This concept entailed establishing a right to public parks for everyone – including an objective accessibility to use the park, but more importantly, a subjective one that entails “everyone to be able to stay there undisturbed and without fear” (AG Görlitzer Park, 2016, p. 4). Even though the committee suggested opening the park toward the neighbouring district to

revitalise the peripheral zones of the park, the idea has arisen to remove the wall on Görlitzer Strasse between Skalitzer Strasse and Lübbener Strasse – possibly in part – also because there is a “dead” or less lively space on the north side of the buildings in the park, as well as on the street side. (AG Görlitzer Park, 2016, translated by the author).

36Closure, exclusion and control have dominated the park’s redevelopment since 2014, neither solving the existing social conflicts nor making the park an attractive, comfortable public space for urban leisure and recreation.

37After years of hard-fought debates on making the Görlitzer Park safe and secure, the newly elected mayor Kai Wegener and the coalition of the CDU and SPD parties paved the way for a – once again – heated parliamentary and public debate (PP42, S19‑17797, S19‑15948, S19‑12818). The aftermath of an incident of a sexual assault in late summer of 2023 brought forward debates on public safety and measures for ensuring women’s safety in urban spaces. At the security summit of the Berlin Senate in September 2023, which followed as a direct response to the assault, Görlitzer Park was designated as the “example par excellence” for security space by Wegner (PKSG). From now on, “both prevention and repression should be rearmed (aufgerüstet) […]” (PKSG, Wegner 08‑09‑2023) by “facing security multidisciplinary [with] strengthened cooperation between the police, fire department and medical rescuers” (PKSG, Spranger 08‑09‑2023). As another pillar of security logics within public spaces, the criminalisation of public spaces and the production of feelings of fear and discomfort, especially for women’s bodies, further legitimise the control and surveillance for the sake of women’s safety (Cubbage & Smith, 2009).

38Additionally, three policies were passed to enhance the state’s ability to surveil the park. The use of area-wide permanent video surveillance and a “mobile surveillance trailer that can be selectively deployed” (PKSG, Spranger 08‑09‑2023) was approved: a decision that must be understood in the context of the strict German data security laws and anti-surveillance culture. Furthermore, another 1,000 posts in the police force were created, despite police and POO patrols already being increased by up to 70,000 hours in 2022 (PKSG, 08‑09‑2023). In addition, the erection of fencing around the entirety of the park was discussed to allow night-time closure, since “such a pacification is necessary and would enable the use of the nightly deployment hours of the police to the surrounding streets and therefore create a strong police presence” (PKSG, Spranger 08‑09‑2023). This security accumulation, especially the nightly closure, has resulted in continuous resistance from neighbours and activists, sparking angry voices and neighbourhood solidarity. This strong resistance to the local government, on top of that, is “wondering […] how the senate wants to push the planned several million Euros in expenses for construction of a fence and locking system against the justified protest of residents and the will of the district government” (PP19/36, 05.10.23). This recently led to a takeover of the district government by the Berlin Senate. With the makeover of the fencing, the logic of heightened visibility and control, based on visual axes and significant spatial changes, and primarily the exclusion of certain citizens and practices, once again found its way into the (im-)materiality of the park. A similar development was already observed in Berkeley’s People’s Park in the 1990s, where an erected fence excluded “those who sought to use it” (Mitchell, 1995, p. 109). In the same vein, William H. Whyte notes that “places designed primarily for security worsen” (Whyte, 2009, p. 159), thereby limiting the accessibility of space and decreasing its overall use, both in terms of spatial accessibility and felt belonging, as well as user satisfaction.

4. Conclusion

39This paper has analysed the different strategies of policing and control in the context of Görlitzer Park’s increasing security, to understand the extensive affective and spatial implications of security in public (green) spaces. The park represents a contested space where diverse social, spatial and political dimensions come together. The analysis focused on the alterations of discursive, infrastructural and everyday practices concerning security over the last few decades, during which the park transformed from a community-driven urban development space to a secured and fortified area. This development reflects the interplay of gentrification, migration and securitisation, which collectively redefined the (im-)materiality and (affective) accessibility of the urban public park.

40The study illustrates that the park’s increase in security occurs on multiple levels. Everyday practice-based dimensions of security can be observed in the everyday actions of police and public order officers. Their techniques of policing and control, such as patrols, identity checks and joint deployments, increasingly create a security atmosphere in the park. The study shows how the affective management underlying such practices disproportionately affects marginalised groups and reinforces hierarchies of accessibility and belonging to the space. Such discriminatory policing strategies have increased the marginalisation and violence asserted against racialised users of urban spaces and have resulted in a decrease in the quality of stay for many visitors, and unequal accessibility. Ride-along and walk-along observations, as well as ethnographic interviews, have demonstrated how these practices shape the affective atmosphere of the park, creating a sense of surveillance and control that can alter users’ experiences of space. Furthermore, such everyday practices reinforce the contested nature of the park, as activist groups and neighbours question such interventions, highlighting the need for more social approaches in the park.

41In infrastructural terms, the material changes in Görlitzer Park foreground the embedded nature of security in urban planning and design. Over the years, the park has undergone significant spatial changes, including the removal of thicket, the installation of fences and lighting and the introduction of surveillance technologies such as body cameras and mobile video surveillance. These infrastructural interventions reflect an understanding of security that enhances visibility, control and deterrence. Such measures not only prevent criminality and improve order on a spatial level, but they can also limit and undermine the park’s role as a public space on an affective level. The study shows how, for example, the removal of bushes and shrubs, justified as a means of improving visibility, simultaneously removes the ecological, emotional and social functions of such spatial elements. The infrastructural changes not only alter the spatial but also become political acts that redefine the character of the park, privileging the norms and needs of particular groups over others.

42Underlying both is the discursive depiction and labelling of the park as a dangerous place that has played a central role in legitimising security measures in the first place. Such socio-spatial labels produce spaces of deviance and criminality, promoting a sense of fear and threat that ultimately legitimises increased surveillance and policing. Such affectively loaded narratives stigmatise not only certain users, particularly those of racialised and marginalised communities, but encompass the entire (im-)material space. The political association of the park with crime and disorder has perpetuated a cycle of marginalisation that intensifies existing social fragmentations and has rendered Görlitzer Park an increasingly exclusionary public space.

43Such discursive framings and implementations of security measures and practices reflect urban security developments in Germany and the European Union linked to crime, (counter-)terrorism, migration and social control. Spatialised security has become commonplace and has permeated everyday life, both in a material and immaterial manner. While Görlitzer Park is an especially illustrative example of the increase in everyday urban security, such spatial and legal zones of exceptions and the implementation of discursive, everyday and infrastructural security in public spaces have become a familiar and normalised practice in urban Europe, making public spaces progressively inaccessible, enclosed and undemocratic, particularly for those already at the margins of society. Expanding the analysis to the affective and felt dimensions, both as employed by the state and experienced by city dwellers, offers an understanding of all (im-)material, (non-)tangible, and (non-)human entities that co-create, produce and inhabit urban spaces.

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Notes

1 In the following ethnographic data is referenced by using FN (field note), FP (field protocol), PKSK (press conference security summit), PP (policy paper).

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1. Raiding Görlitzer Park
Crédits Own image, 2022
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ambiances/docannexe/image/5220/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 323k
Titre Figure 2. “Achtung kbO” – Abolitionist posters in Gölritzer Park, 2022
Crédits Own image, 2022
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ambiances/docannexe/image/5220/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 378k
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Katharina Ciax, « Park Patrol: Urban Securitisation, Racialised Policing, and the Everyday Struggle for Görlitzer Park »Ambiances [En ligne], Varia, mis en ligne le 27 octobre 2025, consulté le 12 juin 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ambiances/5220 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/151n1

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Auteur

Katharina Ciax

Social Geography, University of Jena, Germany
(katharina.ciax_AT_uni-jena.de)

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