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Tourism definitely wasn't a major drag on the techno scene. There's always been the tourist clubs and the clubs that were more underground. Berliners usually
by wheels 3y ago
Tourism definitely wasn't a major drag on the techno scene. There's always been the tourist clubs and the clubs that were more underground. Berliners usually don't go to Berlin's best known clubs. (Who the hell goes to Watergate or Tresor? Old joke was that Tresor was the biggest club in Dresden.)
I think the biggest drag is actually rent prices. When I got to Berlin 20 years ago you could get a room in a shared flat for €100. That same room now would be €500. Same for music spaces: it was easy to rent unused warehouse space in the inner city 20 year ago. There are a lot of interesting things that happen to a city when rent is ridiculously low as it was in Berlin for a long time (there were more apartments than people).
There's still a lot going on in Berlin, but the character has very much changed. 20 years ago it was rare for clubs to be legal. Most of Berlin's well known clubs now started off as illegal clubs back then. But there were hundreds of other spaces that didn't survive and transition to being legal spaces. There's still some of that, but much, much less. Also back then just randomly setting up a sound system in a park in the summer was much more tolerated. "Open Airs" in Berlin were just kind of what you did in the summer.
Honestly, while I generally did not partake in such, the pandemic was the first time that I realized that came back some. Partying was illegal and the parties were moderately guarded secrets. I hadn't seen that much buzz around illegal parties in more than a decade.
Addendum: As a weird note, I don't even get the grandparent's comment about Potsdam? For the non-Berlin folks, it's a city just outside of Berlin's borders, but an hour away on the train from the more alternative bits of the city. It's neither known for its music scene, nor honestly as a place that rich people want to move. I know a couple of people that have moved there because of usual suburb reasons: they wanted a bigger place, and it's cheaper there. The other cities listed there are also weird. I've been out in all of them but Lyon and, yeah, there's some stuff, but to say the "scene" is moving there is really off. Three of the cities listed there are in the Balkans, but the best city for techno in the Balkans is undoubtedly Belgrade.
- lippihom 3y agoA room in a flat now for €500? Maybe way outside the ringbahn...
- wheels 3y agoI was trying to make a comparison to the €100 rooms from 20 years ago. That would be a single room in a 4-6 person shared flat. Those are still €500-ish. (In places just outside the ring like Treptow, Britz, Wedding, Lichtenberg.) In my shared two person flat back then I paid €300 (bills included). That room now would be way over €500.
- codethief 3y agoI think your comment depicts the current & past situation in Berlin quite well. Overall, rents & overall cost of living in Berlin have increased tremendously, and available resources (unused warehouses, apartments, …) have gone down. It just can't be as underground and "poor but sexy" anymore if your DJs and ravers, during the day, all need to work high-paying 9-to-5 job to make ends meet. Sooner or later, the Berlin scene will just feel like the one in Brooklyn. Everything will be properly gentrified.
- elevaet 3y agoI think this same kind of dynamic happened with London as well.
- luzojeda 3y agoGenuine Q. Do berliner straight dislike any tourist no matter how they behave? I tend to go out in Buenos Aires where I live to more underground clubs and don't mind that there are a few tourists here and there. Im travelling to Berlin and was recommended Tresor, is it just a place for tourists?
- wheels 3y agoHate's not the right word. A lot of clubs have a community around them -- they have their regulars; people go there to see their friends. If there are too many tourists, there's less space for regulars. There are always some tourists, and that's fine, but a lot of those communities that I mentioned a second ago have been choked out by a club eventually being so popular with tourists that the regulars don't bother going anymore. The lines are too long, it's full too early, prices go up, etc. A lot of the well known clubs started off as underground spots that eventually were overrun. God, the last time I went to Renate, it was credit card only, didn't know a single person there who wasn't working there, even though we had guest list there was a 30 minute line at the coat check. That's what we don't like. ;-) Also, often tourists aren't accustomed to Berlin's marathon club opening times (some clubs don't close on weekends) and end up too trashed and are annoying. So, yeah, tourists have a harder time at the doors. Honestly, I've only been to Tresor once. It's kind of a misnomer since it's named after a very famous, very important long-closed club in a different part of Berlin with a totally different vibe. The current incarnation ... it's probably fine. Like, there are a handful of clubs in Berlin that actually feel a lot like the clubs Berliners do go to, but are mostly there for tourists. You can spot them because ... you can spot them. ;-) (Good rule of thumb in Berlin: if you can easily find the entrance, it's for tourists. Most of the more scene-y clubs don't have a sign.)
- pdntspa 3y agoDang... a Berlin native friend of mine took me to Renate around 2011-2012 ish. Great vibe but I got yelled at for being a tourist :( I get it though, where I live we have desert undergrounds and parties up in the mountains with a vibe that is threatening to be overrun by tourists. To say nothing of all the plug-in camps popping up at Burning Man...
- kjkjadksj 3y agoThe rent thing doesn’t exactly make sense to me because there are sometimes large underground scenes in expensive cities too. I have no idea how they coordinate warehouse parties in these places where the warehouse even for warehouse use would have a lot of value, but they do.
- larodi 3y agoYea prices, forgot to mention it. Indeed very massive factor, Berlin is much more expensive compared to… say 2005. Belgrade is long way from Europe although the scene is good, but I’d say Croatia and Albania are much more preferred by promoters
- wheels 3y agoI think with the references to "promoters" a few times it's clear you're talking about a different metric than I am. Clubs in Tirana and Zagreb feel gltizier, more what one would expect from Balkan clubbing (which obviously exists in Belgrade too). Belgrade has some grittier clubs where both the decor and crowd feel like they're taking style cues from Berlin.
- immibis 3y agoYou are absolutely right about rent. Its effect is not limited to techno - rent extraction is a damper on everything in the economy (except for rent extraction). Imagine a guy comes around to your house every month and demands $1000 or else he breaks your kneecaps. You'd be quite motivated to ensure you can make that $1000 each month and you'd not be left with as much energy for doing everything else you might want to do. That's essentially the economic effect of rent. At least taxes are indexed to your income, so you can always afford to pay them; rent is not.
- seabass-labrax 3y agoAs someone who considers themselves somewhat principled, I would be somewhat more motivated to spend that month in exercise and martial arts training, to allow myself the opportunity to terminate this questionable attempt at a contractual relationship on the man's part. Replace acquiring 'physical fitness' with 'understanding of the minutiae of state and federal renting laws' though, and I think that would just about characterise my response to an obnoxious landlord, too...
- m_fayer 3y agoRight on. I moved to Berlin 15 years ago in my mid 20s. Back then we didn’t work very much, we constantly had hangovers, we were constantly out, running around Neukölln and Kreuzberg. Whenever I chat to that age group now, while they often look the part, they’re actually tired, overworked, cash-strapped, and living far from the center of the city. A good weird party scene needs that bad-judgment-high-enthusiasm energy of the young, and now there’s much less of it.
- pantalaimon 3y agoPotsdam certainly is the place where the rich and famous live (Günter Jauch, Hasso Plattner just to name a few), they are shaping the city by donations and philanthropy to restore it’s historic glory.
- wheels 3y agoPotsdam has almost exactly the same GDP per capita as Berlin (€45,378 vs. €45,074) and is ranked only 63rd highest GDP per capita of the 110 large-ish cities in Germany. I'm not convinced. ;-)
- downWidOutaFite 3y agoThis sounds similar to what's happened in Oakland, CA. When I moved here 25 years ago there was a huge underground music and arts scene in West Oakland warehouses but the last 10 years of gentrification has wiped it out. After the pandemic (and constant right-wing propaganda) Oakland is now once again deemed a wasteland and businesses are fleeing, but I've started noticing a new youth culture is slowly starting to emerge here and there. I've seen the pattern in several other places as well: arts thrive in the affordable undesirable edges of society until it generates enough buzz for capitalists to notice it and move in seeking to profit off of it. The problem is that culture is not valued in capitalism because it has no landlord.
- Gibbon1 3y agoThe crackdown on all the spaces after the Ghostship fire basically obliterated it. Says something about the civic culture in the US that they chose to just wipe those spaces out instead of just making sure they were safe.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ambicapter 3y ago"making sure they were safe" What a weird thing to say. Places like Ghostship are built on not following the rules. You think they're going to follow the rules on fire safety? You want the authorities to spent their time and energy trying to enforce rules on a place who's raison d'etre is to be anti-authority? Sounds like a waste of everyone's time.
- Gibbon1 3y agoWhy is that weird? The Ghostship was a nightmare firetrap that the code enforcement people knew about and did nothing. In a perfect world they'd have done their job and 36 people would still be a alive. In a less perfect world they'd be in prison. Most of the places they shut down were mostly fine.
- 3y ago
- ska 3y ago> I think the biggest drag is actually rent prices This is a super common cycle. City gets economically depressed -> rents drop a lot -> lots of young people and artists, etc. move in -> great "scene" develops -> people with a bit more money start moving in because of the scene -> rents rise -> young people and artists move elsewhere -> scene slows or stagnates. Obviously that's an oversimplification, and just becoming cheap to live in isn't enough by itself, and just becoming more expensive isn't the death knell.
- whstl 3y agoTrue, but I feel like in Berlin it was probably more drastic because, apart from gentrification, there was a huge wave of people moving in because of work (especially in tech), and more recently refugees. Charlottenburg, Steglitz, Wilmersdorf or Wedding were never known for "the scene" but prices still got way higher. And places like Prenzlauer Berg were already gentrified when prices got even crazier.