In Frankfurt's smoke-stack-industry east, off the dominant financial citadel of the Frankfurt bank district, new places and new place-making strategies of New Entrepreneurs come to the fore. They are not easily seen, exist erratically and are only known to a small group of insiders. Their living in the shadows is a strategy: the actors wage a (survival) policy of hiding.

Dawn, first sunrays are disoriented, searching their way among historic roadside marks and haphazardly parked trucks. Frankfurt East has been ignored for years as a de-industrialised territory in the shadows of Frankfurt West's upcoming service-oriented and financial complex. Docks and railway installations were degraded into a backdrop for gangster and mafia films. Decontextualised from their function they can be characterised as unplaces.

Those unplaces are attracting an increasing number of budding artists and entrepreneurs. Hidden between old railway tracks, rotting industrial facilities, emotionless factory halls and warehouses and a mortuary is "morgen [morning]". ). this morgen is embodied in the duo and married couple Tritsch/Mühlbauer who are New Entrepreneurs. Place is a central variable in the world of imagination of a New Entrepreneur.

Tritsch/Mühlbauer approach the place that accommodates their residential, working and living house, as follows: "When you walk here from the disused wholesale market hall, first there is nothing. Only a few people are working around us, all of them are SME's and when you walk along Hagenstrasse it looks like after the war. Everybody is wheeling and dealing and better leaves the others alone. This gives the place an almost rustic character. On the other side, over there, these are Frankfurt dossers, they receive meals from Caritas. Directly opposite is a scrap dealer for ‚Beetles', than a paper wholesaler, all in all quite an odd stretch. And, on the way back from the wholesale market there is a Russian and Eastern European labour market, where you can get hands". (Interview with S. Mühlbauer April 2001)

The contexts and relations which are used in this description of the morgen place cannot be recognised by a viewer at first glance. The "Russian labour market" is highly flexible and cyclical, the mortuary is working discreetly and unobtrusively, the dossers and city vagrants eat at the Caritas counter and then hit the road again. the relational connections of this place stand out against normality discourses and prompt associations in the field of tension of "village" as a familiar home and a simultaneously crazed cabinet of oddities.

It is at this symbolic heterogeneities where the New Entrepreneurs attempt to anchor their placemaking processes, provide a starting point for their own history: Maybachstrasse in Frankfurt, where morgen is located, is, says S. Mühlbauer in the interview, "the place where we work, where our friends live and at the same time it is a challenge. If you make it in Frankfurt, you make it everywhere, it's quite a rough place here. It is hard to enthusiasmise people and I remember what a mad effort it took in the beginning to make a few people turn out. Now the shop is often full. But first it was sending invites to people across the city for a year. Well, the city of Frankfurt is rather small, there are all of 250,000 people living downtown. (Interview with Tritsch/ Mühlbauer April 2001, Frankfurt am Main).

"This is the building from the 1950s were morgen lives and works. Its three stories accommodate - from basement to flat roof - a gallery, a joiner's workshop, an office and a living quarter. Frankfurt's Osthafen [East port] is not only a location - it was also a source of inspiration for the name. As the sun rises in the East, thus a new morning begins, a new "morgen" and a new day" (quoted in Morgen: Fine Furniture & Fine Arts)

Stacking the functions work - living - pleasure on one base area fits in well with the image of a different harmonious morning, the desire to combine artistic activities and entrepreneurial action and last but not least familial life. In this respect an alternative concept is formulated, thought through and realised which is directed against the increasing fragmentation of urban social life. Seen from this angle morgen can be deemed an integral work of art and a sheltered nucleus from which New Entrepreneurs derive inspirations and simultaneously position themselves symbolically: The better utopia morgen is an island in an odd corner, it is the desired and spatial counterconcept to the adjacent mortuary.

On 20 July 2001 Hans Romanov, Frankfurt promoter and "scene pope" with domiciles between Paris and Berlin, spontaneously celebrated his birthday in the "morgen" basement vaults and distributed this announcement openly in mailing lists and electronic party distribution lists in Frankfurt. Out of a sudden, this place was known to a larger party community.

Shortly after, a virtual flyer announced the vernissage of a friendly artist, again in the morgen gallery rooms.

The places of New Entrepreneurs have a headstrong policy: To make them existent in the minds of people requires a specific place policy that re-negotiates belonging:
morgen is a meeting point of an open but still clearly outlined group of friends, colleagues, competitors, interested and curious people. Perception of this place requires a steering policy which is similar to that of a club: Being rejected by a bouncer is much more subtle and subcutaneous. Different information routes, such as word-of-mouth-recommendation, mailing lists and flyers ensure a targeted distribution of upcoming events, vernissages, new products. Beside the distribution of information there are also repeated attempts at making the "morgen" place disappear from the scene. For months on end, nothing is happening there, the underlying play is to balance out the visitors, disguise the place and bring it back to awareness. Tritsch/Mühlbauer do without an annual program and announce their art exhibitions at short notice, by sending invites via mailing list to selected interested persons and friends in Frankfurt's art scene: Being among those who belong (or not) to the thus obvious "scene" that can be read in the mail header is the in- or exclusion criterion which is never broached in public.
The strategy of concealing that becomes manifest in the process picks up an attitude that reminds of the old socialist service mentality: the customer is not "king" and business does not matter.
All the more so, since the "morgen" place does not clearly reveal itself visually as such but is only perceived as a place of events and performances by insiders and "those in the know". Positioning of the "morgen" place with its concealing policy in urban space does not only generate a social difference but, above all, the broad masses are left outside. >>>

Even if diligent seekers manage to find the place, there is a second differentiation criterion subtly implemented into the place. Thus, the parties after vernissages provide identification patterns among the visitors via the exhibited art, electronic music. Only the assignment to those patterns - based on the experienceability of this performance - facilitates the formative participation in the event. This embodies the subtle ostracising strategy: Nobody is sent away, rather everybody is admitted, but only a few are integrated. And also this initial integration is an exhortation to permanently making sure of one's belonging. Since the irregular changing of this "location" is, for the time being, the guaranty that no trend is being set, no financial dependencies are generated and commercialism does not obstruct creative activity.
Hence, it is these splits within the permanent change of the differentiation criteria, the avoidance of pure commercialisation and the adoption of concealing strategies that ensure those places' and their actors' survival for a certain time. If they positioned themselves as clear, overt counterconcepts to existing cultural and societal currents ("underground" model) they would be - as would happen when they chose the "mainstream" model - immediately processed by the urban trend machine and destroyed. >>>

Places are the fought for fields in the post-industrial city. At and in them subtle societal positioning strategies may be observed.
The unplaces in Frankfurt East are "heterotopies", as M. Foucault (1990: 39) called such: "Real places, effective places, which are drawn into the arrangement of society are, so to speak, counter-placings or skewbacks, utopias realized in real terms where the true places of culture are at the same time represented, disputed and turned round. In a way, they are places outside of all places, albeit that they can be actually localised. It is events that make heterotopies into an efficient place."
Thus, the place "morgen" does not function according to primarily economic laws but rather the social and entrepreneurial networks intersect at this place and generate an added value essential for the actors. The latter cannot be explained in terms of economics but with, in a positive sense, "post-mafioso" laws. In the shadows of traditional corporate operations and organisational routes of the established service-producing economy the actors pursue new interests: Entrepreneurial action is inseparably coupled with artistic activities and simultaneously acts as a social steering element whose control room is the "morgen".

The day is drawing to an end and ashen light is casting shadows on the grey concrete wall of "morgen". How long will the distinguishing machine "morgen" insist on its tightrope walk? How long can this multifunctional complex "morgen" uphold its information value by continually acting unlikely and erratically as an urban event place? How long will it have a critical "audience" mass which, on the hand, knows where "one" goes and, on the other, people who want to know? Would the "morgen" place be included into public directories this could possibly increasingly ensure economic success. But as a heterotopy it will lose in the process its attractiveness and innovation. If it would then also be included into international travel guides the decline were complete even if this would ensure economic success for the actors.
Consequently, places like "morgen" are spaces that elude utilisation logics by not demanding a primary financial result from their place. Hence, the spatial practice of the actors Tritsch/Mühlbauer embodies the critical moment of having resisted said space utilisation logics for a certain period: Their romantic new entrepreneurs label is an honest objective: It is visible at first glance and the most obvious included in the well-meaning logo and motto "morgen" which expresses and serves as a starting point of the hope for a different future and a better morning at this place. But reality is reshaped only by acting and re-encoding of places which have to create their existence first and step by step take their place in society. The romantic element "morgen" is thus rather another disguise in order to gloss over and subtly veil the hard but delicately structured differentiation criteria of organising and visiting actors. And so the veil of the night encloses the grey concrete block "morgen", wraps it like a cover in a short sleep so that it can serve the actors as a place of their practice come the next morning.