Zoom in a little closer, however, and a more complex picture emerges. The fight over Google’s Berlin campus was not about rejecting a tech leviathan as such. It was about preserving the integrity of a specific neighborhood—one in which Google would have struggled to fit.
Had Google chosen an office block in one of the Berlin business districts that are already home to many corporate HQs, or pledged to build a campus out on the city fringe, they would have probably been welcomed with open arms. The forceful local backlash, which involved two years of counter-campaigning (including a brief site occupation) from a memorably titled activist coalition called Fuck Off Google, came about partly because they chose a neighborhood that was already under considerable stress. Kreuzberg, the western Berlin location picked by Google, has both an especially distinct recent past and a pretty fragile present status quo.[...]
The withdrawal of Google’s Kreuzberg campus plan should thus be framed more as one neighborhood’s successful effort to avoid being disrupted, rather than a wholesale rejection of Big Tech. This doesn’t mean that Berlin is suddenly an inherently anti-business city. Indeed, there is already talk of a counter-proposal, with the center-right CDU (the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel) inviting Google to set up shop in the less-hip eastern district of Lichtenberg. (Absent Google, that Kreuzberg power station is now slated to have a more on-brand tenant: two humanitarian NGOs.) But the Kreuzberg saga should be a lesson for other major companies as they ponder where to place their giant corporate feet in cities: They must carefully consider the effect their intervention can have on a district expressly chosen for its desirability.
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