Project
"Cool Frankfurt" refers to a new type of entrepreneur - the New Entrepreneur
- who develops new heterogeneous place making strategies in urban space. By
New Entrepreneurs we understand an increasing number of people who (have to)
convert their artistic-creative talents into an economic revalorisation. Thus,
they do not primarily pursue an economic-entrepreneurial objective but above
all place making in societal and urban space.
"Be cool!" This could be the motto of the urban entrepreneurial type:
Be young, break with social-liberal traditions of safety-oriented status thinking,
try out new life prospectuses, feel the freedom of the individual and celebrate
life (in the city). Simultaneously, the postulation of a New Centre, above all
formulated by Tony Blair in the UK, includes the urge to stop claiming social
contributions from the government but to repay the education provided by the
government: The representatives of the New Centre should independently create
social securities and, hence, finance such themselves, with which neo-liberal
politics demands its integrative power in order to populate the New Centre.
Transferred to the situation in cities there are new special scene shops, galleries,
record label shops and further consumer offers. Those are often flexible, multi-functional
places for different lifestyle groups. In addition, the achievement of a New
Entrepreneur is also to gather urban groups and functional areas at such places
by providing variant readings of urbanity. Places are to New Entrepreneurs a
central component of their societal positioning work in order to create a context
for their professional activity, rub against it, deceive others and play with
it.
The playful and trance-like dealing with city as a permanent adventure playground
is not least accompanied by flexibility patterns and social disintegration processes.
Individualised entrepreneurial existence strategies veil over and wrap up both
independence claimed by politics and a gradual exclusion from social security
systems. What can be found under the buzzword of a new entrepreneurship among
New Entrepreneurs are individualised marketing strategies, social hardships
but also skilled interchange between social welfare office and employment relationships.
The following urban platforms deal with acting in the tension field between
neo-liberal existential framework conditions and pleasure in the economic realization
of one's own ideas. The empirical interview, text and picture material forming
the basis of the below findings was compiled and evaluated within the scope
of the research project "New Entrepreneurs: Creative Re-inventors of Urbanity"
at Bauhaus Kolleg "EventCity".
Project officers: Dipl.-Soz. Silke Steets and Dipl.-Geogr. Bastian Lange.
