Property, Tenancy and Urban Growth in Stockholm and Berlin, 1860�1920

Håkan Forsell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351126007
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

From the middle of the nineteenth century, most European cities experienced a period of unrivalled growth and development that forever changed not only their physical characteristics, but also their social foundations. As the great industrial cites were forced to face the new and unprecedented challenges of rapid urbanisation and increased population, they had to rethink many of the concepts on which previous city institutions had been based. One of the most fundamental of these was the role of house ownership, and the rights and responsibilities it offered. Exploring the social and political meanings attributed to property - specifically home ownership - this study looks at how these changed during the course of the modern city building process between 1860 and 1920. Focussing on two northern European capital cities, Berlin and Stockholm, it provides a symmetrical investigation that helps illuminate the competing factors that shaped the shifting nature of cityscapes and urban social structures.

Part One
Property and Urban Politics

‘... it is only in connection with the obligations engraved on it that property is sacrosanc.... In respect to property without obligation, communism is right.’

Ludwig von Gerlach, 1848

CHAPTER 1
Property Owners and the Emergence of Municipal Self Government

Introduction

This chapter is mainly about the time preceding the period under examination – with occasional broader surveys and follow-ups. The chapter may be seen as background to the empirical sections, and will address some of the central conditions for the political and economic transformation of towns in the nineteenth century. The main purpose of the chapter, besides giving an overall picture of the political environment from which municipal self-governance emerged, is to examine the role ascribed to property ownership in the municipal reforms that were carried out in Prussian and Swedish towns in the course of the nineteenth century – with special focus on developments in Berlin and Stockholm. The rights and obligations of property owners with respect to the city administration will be discussed; what tasks they were required to fulfil or finance in the urban environment, and what meaning these orders and powers had to their social position.

Berlin

Karl von Stein's Städteordnung of 1808 for Prussian Towns

The municipal self-governance established by Karl von Stein’s Städteordnung (town ordinance) for Prussian towns in 1808 was one of the cornerstones in the Prussian national building process after the Napoleonic Wars. Prussian towns had stagnated because of mismanagement and misrule by local officials. Stein wanted to remove the salaried bureaucrats and officials from municipal administration, and break the tradition of centralistic, absolutist municipal governance and instead base urban governance on the perception of a citizens’ association, where ‘suitable men’ would run municipal services to care for the common good. The modern term ‘élite’ is not accurate in this case. A person was seen as suitable to run municipal affairs rather through close ties with the local community, which he was also to represent outwardly. The town ordinance of 1808 had provided conditions for the professional classes – those who had not studied at university and who therefore could not be inducted into the traditional cadres of officials – to take on responsibility for the towns’ self-governance. In order to instruct and train these groups, for example a special Bürgerakademie (Citizens’ Academy) was established in Berlin in 1824. It was expressly intended for the liberal middle class and was to promote and reinforce them for town governance responsibilities.¹

Stein’s town ordinance contained reformist ideas from the English self-government principle, as well as concepts from the physiocrats and the French Revolution. The modernist features of the town ordinance comprised its representational system and suffrage. The City Council was elected by the citizens, but not through fraternities or guilds, but by city districts and constituencies. The City Council then appointed the Magistrat and mayor. The franchise was practically democratic by nature, with a low property qualification and no other electoral classing. At the same time, Stein wished to retain something of the corporate character of the town. This found expression above all in the special status that the town dwellers that possessed property came to occupy.²

Through the town ordinance, a complicated division of the urban population was established, into a burghers’ community and an inhabitants’ community, which made true political participation possible for only a particularly small group. Active and passive electoral rights (the right to vote and the right to be elected) belonged to anyone who owned buildings or land, who ran an independent enterprise, or who at least paid a certain amount of tax. Everyone else had limited rights and was categorised as Schutzverwandte; inhabitants or ‘visitors’.³

The most noted – and criticised – sections in Stein’s Städteordnung, just as in the reforms of this town ordinance that followed during the nineteenth century, concerned property owner privileges. The town ordinance of 1808 originally decreed that two-thirds of the City Council assembly should consist of the owners of dwelling houses. Through the reform of the town ordinance in 1853, the proportion was reduced to half, and remained so until the privilege was abolished in 1919. From the towns’ two categories of people with different municipal rights – burghers and inhabitants, a further category crystallised: the property owners.⁴

As a basis for the special status of property owners, Stein had turned to an old Germanic legal conception in which property ownership was associated with personal freedom and legal rights. Property ownership guaranteed a place in public life. According to this historical picture, property owners in ancient times had been regarded as ‘urban aristocracy’. Non-property owning officials: those in the liberal professions, and academics – those who would later be referred to as ‘the enlightened middle classes’ – thereby experienced drastic restrictions to their rights to participate in decision-making on municipal affairs. Stein and the reformists associated with him had put a premium on the residential stability and ‘constancy’ (Stetigkeit) of the wealthy citizens in bringing stability and prosperity to the towns.⁵ Stein was supported in this by liberal constitutional theoreticians, who considered that the right to vote should express intellectual and entrepreneurial independence – refinement and property ownership (Bildung und Besitz) – which above all was ascribed to the middle class. In addition, Stein considered that the property owner privileges would make it impossible for salaried officials to be used as tools of government by the political Right. The town, which in the Middle Ages had been a corporation organised under civil law, at the beginning of the nineteenth century became an organisation under public law with the right to self-administration.⁶ Through the elevation of the property owners in the Constitution to the mainstay as a group for the urban self-governance, it was also the property owners who became the most immediate link between local administrators and decision-making bodies and the community.

Liberal Reform Movements for Municipal Self-Governance in Prussian Towns, 1831 and 1853

Stein was not a one-dimensional conservative reformist. He ranks rather as a trailblazer of liberalism in Germany. Stein wanted to show that there was a direct path from the old corporate tradition to liberal concepts for society. He was strongly linked to a historical perception which presupposed urban freedom for economic and social well-being. Both Stein’s self-governance ideas and his constitutional perception were basically moral. The main mission of governance and forms of administration were to improve people and especially to foster them in a community spirit and activities for the public good.⁷

In general, the perception of the character of local self-governance followed so many threads that a partial explanation for the broad support the concept had is that it was not limited to any particular movement or ideological school. During the 1830s, municipal self-governance became an important component in a liberal philosophy for separating the urban city from state administration. This was not really the form of municipal freedom that Stein had intended. Stein had seen municipal reform as a way to political participation by citizens. Self-governance was merely the first step towards the constitutional system which would be completed by national representation in which property owners at all levels were linked.

Liberal theory on municipal autonomy with respect to the state originated rather with political scientist Carl von Rotteck. Rotteck strove not merely for the decentralised organisation of municipalities; he also saw a dualism between state administration and the self-governance of towns. To Rotteck, the local community was the original common organisation, and therefore municipalities should be organised independently of the state. Self-governance offered citizens their own societal sphere free from state intervention.⁸ Rotteck’s ideas that municipal governance should limit state bureaucracy, which was perceived as a reactionary tool, had enormous influence, not least on the central category which was to uphold local governance, namely the property owners. Participation in public life, and status in the societal hierarchy became increasingly dependent on ownership conditions – and decreasingly dependent on hereditary factors and tradition. The ‘silent middleclass revolution’ had begun; a social system built on competition, contracts and commercial strength.⁹ At the same time, Rotteck’s isolationist self-governance ideology had a corporate character, which meant that it appealed to both the producing and the domiciled middle-class.

With the town ordinance reform of 1831 – which was principally a liberal product, characterised by the progressive spirit which permeated the German Vormärz era – the franchise was extended to all urban inhabitants, while eligibility for municipal office was still divided among the burghers and other inhabitants. The special status of property owners, however, was unchanged. On the other hand, the group of wealthy members of municipal government, who in many cases were owners of real estate, gained in influence. The ideal perception of the city administration as a ‘moral community of respectable, free men’ was difficult to maintain in reality. The right of private ownership took precedence over the community concepts and principles of the town ordinance.¹⁰

The event that marked the crossroads for German liberalism – at both national and local level – was the failed revolution of 1848. This event came to have fateful consequences throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. Democratic development broke down. Certain elements of Stein’s reform and pre-revolutionary liberal reform movement lived on in fact, but they were incorporated in a compromise worked out by the Prussian authoritarian state and a moderate wing of the liberal middle class.¹¹

It was not until the 1853 reform of the town ordinance for Prussian towns that it was determined that all those living within the town limits were regarded as citizens of the town and thereby had the right to participate in all the town’s affairs, and had an obligation jointly to bear the town’s costs. With this, the basis for urban citizenship as written into the older town ordinance was formally abolished.¹² However, upon closer examination, one sees that there still existed significant divisions of the town’s inhabitants. General municipal affiliation had a more refined version – burghership (Bürgerrecht), that is to say, the right to participate in municipal elections, and suitability to hold a non-salaried post in municipal administration and to be elected as a municipal representative.¹³ The right to burghership was dependent on Prussian nationality and on the person not being in receipt of poor relief. In addition, there were three further criteria, at least one of which must be met to hold burghership rights in Prussian towns, and the right to vote was bound to these preconditions: possession of a dwelling house in the city, proprietorship of an independent enterprise with at least two employees or payment of income tax or normal tax amounting to 4 Marks.¹⁴ The town ordinance of 1853 remained in force until the end of the First World War. Throughout this entire period, then, one could still speak of a division between the town inhabitants between those who had burghership rights and those who did not. Within the burghers’ rights grouping, property owners became additionally distinguished as a group with an exceptional status in municipal politics.

Honorary Officials, Municipal Constitution and the Three-Class Electoral System in Berlin

Municipal self-governance in German towns has seldom been regarded as a form of political representation. The field of ‘politics’ was limited to the state. The rest – above all the municipalities – was administration, as indicated also via the original German term for self-govern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Abbreviations
• General Editors' Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: Property and Urban Politics
• Part Two: Building and Lending
• Part Three: Under One Roof
• Final Summary and Discussion
• Bibliography
• Index