Chapter 12: From Anti-Gentrification to Fab Lab Community: Spatialisation of Conflicts, Contentious Politics and the Limits of Techno-Politics in Urban Areas

My involvement with Fabulous St. Pauli started during my PhD years. I was searching for communities which cared about social justice, but were not following a pattern of looking back at simpler ways of living to express their political ideas (see e.g. Chitewere and Taylor 2010). I wanted to cover different versions of those communities which sprung up here and there in many parts of the world, especially in cities of the so-called Western world. Most of the ideas which had broadly speaking approached history in progressive thought, taking technology seriously, and looking at the ills of modern technological infrastructure came of course in the cities of large industrial countries (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999). Taking into account that such ideas are most recently carried by urban social movements rather than a traditional working class movement, these often resorted to entrepreneurial and creative ideas to raise awareness or create conditions for social struggles (see Harvey 1989; Jessop 2003). Some of such communities started as an outgrow of garage hobbyists, to get bigger spaces in order to perform their experiments and do their crafts, others saw them as a good way to mix with people of different technical expertise in order to complete their projects; others just did this for fun. I had already followed a few other spaces (Derby Silk Mill,¹ Leicester Hackerspace and NottinHack most notably) which all of them were communities that to some degree encompassed the above description.