Mapping the Hidden Curriculum of The Global City: From Bogotá to Berlin

As urbanization continues to evolve and the economic and social relations of cities across the globe continue to grow more dynamic, it becomes increasingly important to deconstruct the idea of the “right to the city” and begin to draw parallels between this movement and others. Education, like urbanization, is a constantly evolving process and political act; if in the quote above words like “urban” and “city” were replaced with “education” and “schools,” the message would be equally meaningful. Yet, the connection between the city and schooling goes beyond a spatial relationship whereby schools exist within cities; we argue that cities are in and of themselves schools, with the ability to teach those who inhabit them through their spatial organization, built environment, and social policies. We are interested in the ways in which the city itself acts as a school, or more specifically how it “schools” and what it teaches. In the pages to follow we will unpack this analogy of the “city as school” and apply theories of hidden curriculum to develop a theory of the curriculum of the city. We will begin with an introduction of theoretical foundations both of right to the city theory and hidden curriculum, as well as an explanation of our international comparative case study methodology. This will be followed by two case studies, the first focusing on the city of Bogotá, Colombia and another on Berlin, Germany—the context of these cases will be summarized more fully below. Finally, we will conclude with an analysis of both cases through the lens of the curriculum of the city and suggest directions forward for applying this type of comparative analysis.

Coined first by Lefebvre (1968) and further developed by Mitchell (2003) and Harvey (2008), we understand the right to the city as being theoretically twofold: first, that for the city to be a place that allows for the free exchange of diverse ideas, it must be more than merely a habitat, or a space that people simply inhabit. For, as Ford (2013) argues, “The city as habitat works to suppress the possibility for encounters to take place or, more accurately, works to ensure the domination of the exchange value of the encounter” (p. 305). This assertion is founded in Marxian economics, which suggests that within a totalizing capitalist system even space is a commodity—it is pushed through the valuation process to determine exchange value for the market. The exchange value to which Ford (2013) refers stands in contrast to “use value” or a commodity’s, social function or utility. The right to the city advocates for the use value of space to be privileged over the exchange value of space. However, the struggle for the right to the city is about more than increasing the number of spaces for public use, it is about transforming the way we think about cities as places that we are not only shaped by, but that we can actively shape.

The right to the city has been taken up in a number of different ways around the United States, Africa, Latin America and Asia by a number of different actors. Social activists have rallied around the right to the city as a way to organize action in different aspects of city life, as is happening all over the world (Mayer, 2012). Nongovernmental organizations as well as city, regional, and national governments are also finding ways to incorporate this idea into their policies and practices. However, this has caused a widening gap between the way that the right to the city was originally intended, as a radical force for social transformation, and how it has come to be interpreted by organizations such as UNESCO—as “not a positive right in a legal sense: neither UNESCO nor UN HABITAT have the intention to promote a new international legal instrument. Rather it is wished to encourage cities to learn from the best practices and tool kits that both UN Agencies have already and will prepare with the relevant partners” (italics added, Brown & Kristiansen, 2009).

We see both interpretations as potentially incomplete, as the original Lefebvrian formation may lack a sense of operationalization – how do we take these ideas and turn them into concrete action? Meanwhile, the UNESCO interpretation may go too far, turning the right to the city into a “framework” and “toolkit” such that it loses its radical, ideological foundations. This disconnect prompts us to attempt to develop an understanding of the right to the city as somewhere in between radical social theory and fully operationalized UN-style framework. In doing so, we turn to our analogy of the city as school and apply theories of hidden curriculum to better understand specific elements of what is at stake in the struggle for a right to the city. Additionally, we explore how a deeper understanding of the city’s curriculum can lead to more inspired, inclusive, and equitable ways of being and evolving in urban spaces.

For decades education scholars have argued that modern public schooling produces ways of understanding the social world whereby contemporary class, race, and gender divisions are legitimized and reproduced, and opportunities to transgress these boundaries are limited (Giroux, 1983). State mandated school curricula play an important role in this reproductive mechanism—yet, theories of school knowledge tell us that often much is learned through pedagogy, the relationship between students and teachers, and the organization of physical space within classrooms, schools, and communities. The arrangement of desks, the quality of textbooks, the language of instruction, the types of tasks which students are assigned and how students are expected to complete those tasks are all part of the “hidden curriculum” of schooling (Synder, 1971). The content of this hidden curriculum means that schools can be places of possibility, opportunity, and creativity—or places of control, regulation, and surveillance; globally these distinctions are often drawn along racial and socioeconomic lines.

Theories of hidden curriculum have evolved over the last 40 years; beginning with Jackson’s (1968)Life in Schools which details how students go about learning how to “keep busy,” “wait quietly,” and exercise the functions that will be “necessary” in the workforce. Similarly Robert Dreeben’s (1967) treatment focused on the ways that schools encourage people to repress their individuality and accept categorization, while Elizabeth Vallance’s (1973) article pushed further, describing the hidden curriculum as “covert” and the “residue of schooling.” Samuel Bowles and Herbet Gintis (1976) as well as Paul Willis (1977) focused squarely on the reproduction of class relations in the context of capitalist labor. More recently, Apple (1982) and Giroux (1983) argue for greater attention to be paid to elements of politics and power, as they suggest that resistance and struggle can counteract the hidden curriculum. Typically applied specifically to the formal schooling experience, we think that theories of hidden curriculum, when applied to the city as a school, can help expose “lessons learned but not openly intended” (Martin, 1983) in urban spaces.

Starting from the analogy of the city as classroom, we can ask—who are the students? Who are the teachers? Who are the administrators? What are the behavioral expectations for each of these groups? In thinking through how we might answer these questions for our own respective cities, it becomes clear that schools and cities reproduce society in much the same way. Like school classrooms, the social construction of urban space operates within the context of a “curriculum” that is established from “above” and is influenced by both the state and civil society. These elements interact to produce a way of knowing and also normalize particular types of policies and rhetoric. The mechanisms through which the curriculum of the city is implemented can be understood as pedagogy such that organizations, institutions, buildings, and parks actively or passively act as teachers with political will and a particular agenda. We believe that population density characteristic of cities, combined with the curriculum of the city can act as a vehicle for social control or as an inspiration for collective action. For this reason, it is important to better understand the tides of urban “curricular” evolution, or stagnation, taking place around the world.

We are four American women, three of us live and work abroad in education and social policy (two in Germany and one in Colombia) and one of us is a PhD student based in the United States. We do not claim to occupy the same position as many of those in our respective countries for whom engagement with the right to the city is not an intellectual exercise but a way of life. What we hope to contribute to the dialogue around the right to the city and social justice-oriented urban evolution is a comparative, international, interdisciplinary approach to analyzing the struggle through a new theoretical lens. This will be done through an analysis of texts written in English, German, or Spanish—interpreted by the authors, and then synthesized for this article in English. This is an intentional element of our methodology, as we find that barring major works, many grassroots intellectual conversations and debates are never translated and therefore these discussions stay isolated from each other and their collective power remains unrealized. Our goal is that this exercise in comparison will expose not before seen dynamics of the curriculum of the city and open the door for similar types of creative analyses of these and other issues that exist at the intersection of international education and urbanization.

Our methodological approach is interdisciplinary, multilingual, global, and city centered (Brenner, 1998). While every city has its own unique history, political situation, form of government, and approach to development, we are intentional in our comparative approach as there are aspects of the hidden curriculum of all cities that are shared. Further, by positioning the right to the city as a global issue and incorporating texts from cross-national discussions, we aim to highlight it as a human right. Although a common critique of taking a universal approach to any human rights struggle is that it can obfuscate the unique differences in how problems are situated in a particular place at a particular time, taking a comparative approach legitimizes the universal aspects of the struggle while also attending to particular national or regional systems of oppression.

We have chosen the cities of Bogotá, Colombia and Berlin, Germany because the authors of these respective sections reside there and thus feel particularly well suited to analyze the occurrence of an urban curriculum in the ways we are most familiar. The Bogotá case is a macrolevel survey of how the right to the city has been taken up rhetorically and in reality through government positions and policies—it will focus on the content of the city’s hidden curriculum. It will look at the estrato system as one particular element of the curriculum of the city that controls aspects of life as diverse as how much one pays for cable television to the quality of a child’s teacher. The origins and intentions of the estrato system will be discussed as well as particular ways that this system has been co-opted to perpetuate inequality in access to resources and education quality. Here, we will see how a public policy, or in the language of the curriculum of the city—a pedagogical choice, serves to maintain the status quo and teaches those in upper estratos what is “rightfully theirs” and those in lower estratos what they “deserve.” Because estratos also impact school districting, these lessons are reinforced formally through curriculum, as well as through teachers and administrators, most of whom come from the estrato themselves.

The case of Berlin will take a slightly different approach, focusing on the context of the city’s hidden curriculum through the lens of a largely immigrant district called Neukölln. It will provide a brief introduction to the particularities of immigrant classification in Germany and its manifestations on the lived experiences of residents in this iconic district. The social and spatial dynamics of Neukölln will then be described and analyzed through the lens of Germany’s historical and contemporary approach to immigrant “integration” and the formal schooling system. Finally this section will conclude with a case within a case—two examples of nongovernmental organization programing models that are actively reforming and intervening in policies by creating alternative spaces and pathways for an education that better fits the needs of both parents and pupils.

After presenting and analyzing both cases separately, the article will conclude with an overall discussion of the curriculum of the city mapping process and what can be learned from this exercise, both individually and comparatively. We will discuss directions for future research as well as other promising models of incorporating the right to the city into education and public policy in such a way that direct action to enhance use and control over urban space respects and maintains the theory’s original foundations.

Over the past half century Bogotá has grown tremendously, both in size and in population density, with the most recent census in 2005 reporting a population of 6,776,009 (Library of Congress, 2007) and current predictions estimating a population more likely approaching 9.558 million (CIA, 2015), making it the eighth most densely populated city in the world (City Mayors, 2007). Due to violence and political unrest throughout the country, Bogotá has also become a refuge for many Colombians, which has impacted migration patterns and the growth of the city, and has resulted in the development of both legal and illegal settlements on the outskirts of the city and deteriorated zones within the city center (Rueda-García, 2003). As the city grows somewhat haphazardly and more and more people call Bogotá their home, the question of the right to the city becomes increasingly more concerning. Known as “the home of all and nobody’s land” (Cámara de Comercio de Bogotá, 1992, p. 2; Rueda-García, 2003), Bogotá seems to be what Balbo (2003) had in mind when he explained how a city functions:

The city of Bogotá, sometimes recognized for its progressive politics, publishes a lot of rhetoric in reference to the right to the city, elimination of discrimination, and use of participatory politics. Unfortunately, the implementation of this curriculum of the city has been slow to take root. Government policies, specifically social stratification, while perhaps created with the best of intentions, have had lasting effects on the segregation of the city’s residents, limiting opportunities for an encounter between residents of differing socioeconomic levels. Additionally, the country’s history of armed conflict plays a role in residents’ mistrust of politics and fear of the participatory process (Echanove, 2004). Finally, while education is often used as a tool to change such trends, these policies have also impacted the educational experience offered to the children of the city, promulgating social fragmentation and weakening the possibility for residents to embrace their “right to change and reinvent the city more after [their] heart’s desires” (Harvey, 2013, p. 4).

In the literature published by the mayor’s office in Bogotá, many progressive ideas are promoted that cite both the right to the city and advancing participatory governance. The mayoral administration has made attempts to implement these ideas but has frequently been met with resistance and criticism. When Gustavo Petro took office as mayor of the city, his office created the Plan de Desarrollo Económico y Social y de Obras Públicas para Bogotá Distrito Capital 2012–2016, which lays out goals and priorities of the office for the 4-year term. The first stated goal of the office was to reduce social segregation and discrimination, recognizing that the human being is the top priority in the development of any city. The report goes on to explain that segregation in the city has grown but in order to progress it must be reversed; it lays out a vision of what should and could be:

Unfortunately, these ideals have not yet been realized in the general public. Whether due to poor communication or poor implementation or lack of multipartisan approval, any attempts to make real change in terms of social segregation have been quickly suppressed. For example, as a response to the large number of displaced people in the country, the government approved a new law, Ley de Vivienda de Interés prioritario (“ABC de la ley,” 2012), to create free housing for those who need it, and assist them in transitioning to a new living situation. This past year, Mayor Petro attempted to use the law to assist in the desegregation of the city by placing housing developments for displaced people in some of the wealthiest areas of the city. He explained, “The social stratification in Colombia is a caste system, antidemocratic and anti-Republican and antihuman. This must end” (Lancheros, 2014). Many are in agreement with his sentiments, but not with his approach. Some argue that implementation is too abrupt, that the city needs to have a clearer, more formalized plan for desegregation, and that all parties involved must be brought to the table in the development of the plan.

The question becomes: what holds the city back from moving forward and implementing the ideology that it espouses? It would be unfair and inaccurate to blame the segregation of Bogotá’s residents on a single policy decision or event as with time the effects of both have become intertwined. Still, Colombia’s decision to implement a public policy for social stratification in its cities has undoubtedly solidified the deep division between the rich and the poor, greatly impacting the city’s “pedagogy,” or implementation of programming. Some even go as far as to say that this decision helped to disempower its citizens from assuming responsibility for lifting themselves out of poverty and integrating into the mainstream (Rueda-García, 2003).

This stratification policy, developed in the 1980’s and later formalized in 1994 through a new law for public utilities (Uribe-Mallarino, 2008, p. 141), classifies each city block into estratos using a series of indicators defined by the quality of the structures present on a particular block and the materials used to build them. The original plan for the estrato classification was to aid in the cross subsidization of public utilities including water, gas and electricity, ensuring that all citizens have access to these services. The use of the classification has since spread to telephone and cable television as well. Under this system, residents of higher estratos pay more than residents in lower estratos for the same utility or service, with the assumption that the estrato of a household accurately reflects the buying power of its residents (Uribe-Mallarino, 2008, p. 141). Additionally, estratos have become a way to determine property tax and other city fees, as well as the strategic placement of social programs (Departamento Administrativo de Planeación Distrital, 2000, pp. 1-2; Rueda-García, 2003).

Social stratification by city blocks or neighborhoods, however, has left many without a right to the city; segregation has caused constraints for those who need the subsidies offered in the lower estratos. While the policy may appear progressive on the surface, it sustains the domination of exchange value over use value. The current policy pegs individuals to specific areas of the city or requires that they live beyond their means. There is stigmatization involved with the lower estratos but those who truly need the subsidy have no choice but to live in estratos one or two. Additionally, if the quality of the housing in the area improves, the classification may change despite the fact that the income of the residents has very likely not increased causing residents to decide if they can afford an increase in their utility payments or if they need to relocate. Thus a citizen’s ability to actively shape their city, or more specifically their neighborhood, is curbed and the right to the city’s call for use value over exchange value is neglected. Equally concerning, are those who attempt to seek a better quality of life by moving into higher estratos and forgoing the subsidies that they may very well need. There are cases in which people move to higher estratos and stop paying into their social security in order to cover the higher utility bills (Gómez, 2014).

It seems as if many still believe that the policy was developed with the best of intentions. Advocates of the policy are concerned that without the stratification those with lower socio-economic status will not receive the much needed subsidies. It is also evident, however, that policies such as this are integral elements of the city’s pedagogy and have had a powerfully destructive impact on the culture of the city and capacity for participatory governance. Opponents of the estrato system, such as Roberto Lippi, head of the United Nations group, UN Habitat in Colombia, suggest that while subsidies should continue to be offered for those with economic hardships, the calculation of the subsidy amount should take into account every resident’s individual situation instead of that of each city block. This more humanized approach might begin to dismantle the rigid estratos classification system while still allowing subsidies to be given to those who need them.

The estrato system has also had lasting and detrimental effects on the schooling system. García and Quiroz (2011) explain that as the city began to classify neighborhoods, schools that may at one time have offered quality education began to receive less attention and fewer resources causing middle and upper middle class families to stop sending their children to schools in neighborhoods of low estratos. Families that could afford to do so began sending their children to private schools because the local school was in a lower estrato or because their new home in a higher estrato did not have a public school nearby. The estrato system succeeded in systematic social segregation both at school and at home, ensuring that education in Bogotá no longer functioned as “a factor of equity, but as the principal mechanism of the transmission and amplification of the existing inequalities” (p. 23); this is supported by government literature (Alcada Mayor de Bogotá, DC, 2012) which fully recognizes the problem of the “two parallel education systems (public and private)” (p. 17). Instead of working to help lift individuals out of poverty, the education system is reinforcing the divide that has been created among citizens of the city. Beyond the infrastructure and administration of the schools, the preparation of the teachers and the resources available to the students, the schools in each estrato are shaped by “the cultural capital of the community, that establishes collective parameters in the expectations, social control of pedagogical process and the students’ capacity for cultural exchange for the duration of their education” (p. 17).

While the current divide between residents of the city is ever present, the decade-old vision developed by the city administration leaves residents of Bogotá with some hope. Official government literature addresses bigpicture city “curriculum,” suggesting that exposure to diversity is something of value and that there is injustice in discrimination and social segregation. Yet the technical actions of the city and its residents suggest the current pedagogy of the city is so deeply seeded in social relations and the fear of change is so great that any progress will continue to be slow. For example, the ongoing debate over the potential elimination of the estratos system is currently focused more on the process for disassembling a system that has become a part of the city’s identity and less on whether or not social stratification is an ideal that the city wants to uphold. The city’s future will depend on the ability of all members of society to reimagine the curriculum of the city, and make pedagogical shifts in the guaranteeing of rights.

According to the 2010 microcensus, 25.7% of Berlin’s residents are of Migrationshintergrund (MMH) or of immigrant origin (Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg, 2010). Only 47% of these residents are counted as “Germans,” as within the MMH category a distinction is made between “foreigners” and their domestic counterparts—the result of the Federal Republic’s largely jus sanguinis citizenship laws. Among those considered MMH “foreigners,” Turkey is the most common country of origin, accounting for 20.2% of those with immigrant origin (Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg, 2010). The remaining 80% is split between more than 12 sending countries. Migration from European Union member states complicates this picture; historically large groups of migrants to Berlin, such as Polish workers and their families, are not always represented in portrayals of the city’s diversity.

As is the case in many other large cities, some districts exhibit larger immigrant populations than others. In Berlin, the contrast or even discrepancy between districts is quite pronounced. Berlin became largely the city it is today in the 1920s with the absorption of surrounding villages into a conglomeration of semi-autonomous regions. To this day, each Berlin district retains its own council of elected officials, even its own local mayor. For this reason, we find it useful to focus on the particular background and development of one of these districts. In the case of alternative pathways to educational access and inclusion in the city of Berlin, we have chosen a site of great notoriety, as well as promise, in this regard—the district of Neukölln.

Neukölln began as a Christian, workingclass village, as its name “New Cologne”—a historically industrial city in the coal-mining and majority Catholic region of western Germany—reveals, incorporated into Berlin only after WWI. Yet it is anything but reflective of these origins today. To illustrate: Karl-Marx Street is host to a gallery of late-night kebab stalls, long-distance calling centers, and faux designer handbags. Just around the corner from this ode to communism’s founder—this strip of hurried, never-ending commerce—is an idyllic scene: remnants of pre-1920s Neukölln, complete with a former town square and steeple.

A history of guest-worker policies—Germany’s active recruitment of (initially temporary) labor from countries like Turkey and Greece in the postwar boom period and family reunification reforms has made Neukölln incredibly diverse: 24% of the district’s population was listed as “foreign” in 2014, which does not include the entire MMH category, such as German citizens of immigrant origin (Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg, 2014). This transformation from village-like aesthetic to bustling, multicultural boulevard is much more contemporary and thus much more notorious, than that of its neighboring districts. Neukölln’s critics are equally contemporary, conflating high unemployment and welfarerecipiency with criminality and a largely Muslim (read “radicalized”) immigrant population. The writings of Neukölln’s former (and polarizing) mayor are a case in point (see Buschkowsky, 2012, 2014). As a result, Neukölln has acquired a two-pronged identity of poverty and ethno-religious “ghettoization.”

And yet, Neukölln is also a haven for students, artists, and Leftists. Galleries intermingle with gambling kiosks, tapas bars with socialist meet-ups. Such a montage leaves the district’s infrastructure complicated at best: Due to a lack of local voting rights in Germany for immigrants without EU citizenship (see Citizens for Europe, 2014), Neukölln’s public institutions remain decidedly “German” in their composition; registered voters remain loyal to the traditional party of the workingclass (the SPD), despite the district’s increasingly morally conservative population. That is to say, the space of Neukölln is largely a space physically occupied and created by immigrant populations who, in contrast, largely lack the political rights and/or social respect to truly determine the future and even conversation surrounding this space. In this sense, Neukölln provides a strong example for the tension between “exchange-value” and “use-value” in practice.

Despite recent efforts to recruit highly skilled workers in response to an aging population and declining fertility rates, the history of immigration to Germany remains primarily low skilled. Due to the initially temporary nature of guest-worker recruitment, the country chose not to invest resources such as language training and educational programming into new arrivals nor in their Germany-born children. This would not change until the Immigration Law of 2005—the first to legally define and increase the federal government’s role in integration that, among other reforms, called for federally funded integration courses (Heckmann, 2010). Today, second and third generation children of MMH still face numerous linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic challenges that are exacerbated by a stratified education system.

Education in Germany is controlled by the 16 individual Bundesländer, or states, yet KG-12/13 systems across the country remain largely uniform. Children are separated after the fourth or six grade into distinct academic and vocational tracks that prepare students for the path of future academic, white-collar laborer, or unskilled worker. Mobility between tracks is restricted and only those in the top academic track have direct access to the university system. While track decisions are attributed to academic performance and to an extent parental discretion, research shows they are principally associated with socio-economic status (Carey, 2008).

Germany’s tiered system is equal parts efficient and inequitable: it is associated with lower dropout rates, more recognized qualifications, and better job preparation, but children of MMH disproportionately face lower educational attainment, limited access to higher education, and fewer chances for economic mobility. Germany held the Organization for Economic Development’s (OECD) largest performance disparity between native and immigrant students in 2003 and was one of the only countries where second generation students performed worse on international assessments than the first generation (OECD, 2006). While Germany fared better in 2012, still more than double the amount of immigrant students scored below proficiency than their native counterparts (Bloem, 2012).

In addition to poor results on international assessments, a recent focus on “inclusive education”—which Germans largely understand as the principle that all children have access to quality education that allows them to reach their full potential—has forced Germany to address injustices associated with school stratification, a system un-inclusive by design. Various states have toyed with reforms such as increasing the age at which students are tracked or combining the two lower tracks into comprehensive schools. Though largely backed by educational experts, conservative political parties, parents, and teacher unions have thwarted many inclusion efforts. One such attempt in Hamburg led to the resignation of the city’s mayor (Mara & Levitz, 2010).

Berlin is one of Germany’s poorest states and performs below average academically. In Neukölln, where some schools cite a student body of upwards of 75% MMH (Fincke, 2012, p. 19), educational challenges expand beyond school stratification. Many face deeply fundamental issues navigating educational terrain due to language proficiency, lack of cultural capital, and parents’ unfamiliarity with the system (“Migranten Verlieren,” 2013). Systemic injustices coupled with intergenerational transmission fuel the inability of children of MMH to overcome these challenges to fully access, contribute to, and evolve within the city.

In light of the challenges MMH children face in a district wrought with barriers to access, whether concerning quality education or local government programming that reflects the needs of all members of the Neukölln population, attempts at rectifying such barriers abound. As seen through the theoretical lens of the right to the city, educational access for the families of Berlin’s Neukölln district can be framed both in terms of institutional reform and third-party interventions. Quite often, a combination of internal (governmental) and external (nongovernmental) efforts can lead to the most promising progress. For when external organizations work to support existing institutions in the slow process of their reform, more space for the coconstruction of an educational encounter is created. In the following two examples we illustrate a case of the city’s “hidden curriculum” that is twofold in its approach, with the first occurring on-site in the classroom, the second off-site in, as it were, the living room.

Ein Quadratkilometer Bildung (QKB) translates literally to “One Square Kilometer of Education,” indicative of its geographic directive within educational reform. QKB is a non-governmental organization that operates on a regional basis in neighborhoods with high percentages of underprivileged families due to background, socioeconomic status, or as is often the case, both. In contrast to initiatives that aim to supplement, QKB is interventionary and aims to enhance, filling gaps within current programs rather than generating new ones. The desired outcome is “a local alliance for education” that bridges and builds understanding between schools and local (governmental and non-governmental) institutions relevant to the lives of youth (“Once Square,” 2014). To achieve this, a holistic grasp of education is required; QKB programs are aimed at parents, teachers, and community members as much as they are students.

QKB operates in eight regions across Germany, but has its roots in Neukölln where it launched in summer of 2007. The core of all QKB programs is the Pädagogische Werkstatt or “educational development and learning platform.” The Werkstatt is a center for educational (self-) assessment, training, professional development, and networking. All are welcome and encouraged to participate as both potential learners and teachers. The crux of Neukölln’s Werkstatt is “models of selfassessment, project planning and educational workshops as places to learn through discovery” (“Once Square,” 2014). Its name, “Campus Bildung im Quadrat gGmbH,” refers to its location within the infamous Campus Rutli school, which made headlines in 2006 when teachers wrote the Berlin Senator with a plea to close the school due to deteriorating conditions and violence. The school has since become a model for integration, visited frequently by delegations from within Germany and abroad.

By addressing educational needs on multiple levels, QKB programs give students and their parents a more collaborative understanding of their development and enhance their connection to school and community. Parents become more equipped to navigate the education system and support their children’s learning. Teachers and local institutions gain awareness of the challenges faced by immigrant and Roma families. Students learn how to be active participants in the spaces and services their region affords them. The use-value of regional spaces is brought to light by increasing the access and participation of those who need these spaces most.

“Ein Quadratkilometer Bildung” also serves to build a bridge between existing services and the populations they are meant to serve. In this case, children within the public educational network are provided with more tailored support; existing educational encounters are effectively adapted to meet the needs of an ever-changing classroom. But what of those children, those families outside the schoolhouse? Where does this bridge begin and end? A similar and yet quite different project has emerged in the district of Neukölln alongside QKB under the name of Stadtteilmütter or “Neighborhood Mothers.” Rather than duplicating the efforts of QKB, the Stadtteilmütter initiative holds a very particular target population at its core: low-income families with young children of Turkish and Arab origin. The Stadtteilmütter of Neukölln offer an alternative, trial-and-error solution to creating an inclusive educational encounter beyond existing infrastructure.

Stadtteilmütter began as a pilot project in 2006 to address a group marked for statistically low rates of preschool and/or kindergarten enrollment in Neukölln. The approach: putting a more holistic understanding of early childhood education into practice at the neighborhood-level. “Holistic” in this sense refers to a system of house-calls, made by immigrant mothers of predominantly Turkish or Arab origin who have been trained by a district facilitator to discuss and relay information relevant to early childhood education. This information includes available day care, preschool and kindergarten options in the neighborhood; the healthcare infrastructure in Germany; homesafety, nutrition and exercise tips; and safe, effective parenting skills. Ten house-calls per year are scheduled for each participating family, corresponding with 10 particular topics. Each Neighborhood Mother visits about 10 contact families per year, amounting to approximately 200 hours of in-house support (Bezirksamt Neukölln, 2015). As participating Stadtteilmütter are required to live in the neighborhood they serve, relationships with potential participating families are established in shared community spaces over time, such as the local mosque or ethnic-cultural center, where rapport can be said to already exist.

The position of the Neighborhood Mothers, embedded in and stemming from the community they are meant to reach, allows for great success in the transmission of most of the 10 topics. The district’s 2009 external evaluation of the program found that nearly all of the participating families expressed an intention to enroll their young children in public pre-K and day-care programs (Koch, 2009, p. 69). Furthermore, an overwhelming majority of the participants reported having positively received and applied the information received throughout the 10 annual house-calls, such as information regarding subsidized sports and activity centers for young children, languagelearning and tutoring offerings, and local medical practitioners and pharmacies. Stadtteilmütter also advocate for and support multilingualism at home and in the neighborhood.

As a result of its demonstrated success in filling the gaps it was intended to address in low-income, Turkish and Arabic-speaking families of Neukölln, the pilot graduated to an officially sponsored program in 2009. Its model has since been exported to other districts in Berlin, as well as to other cities in Germany, now serving populations beyond the original focus group. The strength of both programs lies not only and, we would argue, not necessarily in its ability to assist families in navigating the decidedly German educational framework and network of social welfare programs, but in the way it facilitates a form of education in areas not otherwise or necessarily covered by existing institutions, the day-care center or third grade classroom included.

For the Stadtteilmütter, this education extends to the participating mothers themselves as well. Seventy percent of the immigrant mothers trained to become the advocates and educators of the Stadtteilmütter program stem from households on welfare and other government subsidies. Most are classified as low-skilled immigrants, most are unemployed, and many never advanced beyond the ninth grade (Koch, 2010, p. 66). As Stadtteilmütter, immigrant women are employed by the district and are encouraged to recruit other immigrant women to work with the program. A similar effect can be measured in Ein Quadratmeter Bildung: Many immigrant women from countries like Bulgaria and Romania, from which a majority of Neukölln’s Roma families stem (Bezirksamt Neukölln, 2014, p. 4), find employment in the QKB program; Roma men and women are also included in this effect. From these two cases we learn that the right to the city can take the shape of the right to a specialized educational opportunity and system of support, as well as a right to employment for those deemed less skilled by the state.

From the case of Berlin-Neukölln and these two examples of reform by way of organizational intervention, we have demonstrated how the educational encounter may be transformed through the simple provision of spaces and pathways to do so. On one hand, Ein Quadratkilometer Bildung works to intercede and enhance, positioning itself between the experience of the school and the needs of the child. On the other hand, Stadtteilmütter Neukölln establishes an alternative place and method of education beyond the classroom. Stadtteilmütter effectively re-appropriates the space of the home and QKB the space of the school in ways that appear to be on the terms of the less powerful of the educational equation. In a system as strictly defined as Germany’s, this marks a shift toward a “use-value” in the sense of pedagogical space and away from the exchange environment of the parent-child and/or teacher-pupil relationship. Yet this analysis may be slightly erroneous. For could Stadtteilmütter, for instance, embody the exact “exchange-value” we aim to criticize, in transforming the home from a space removed into a space now carefully connected to the economic function of education in supplying jobs and future productivity (e.g., employing neighborhood mothers and integrating their children into the public education system)? Further investigation is needed to uncover what exactly these programs contribute to the curriculum of the city—nevertheless, in contrast to the barriers both the German educational system and the district’s notoriety may produce for its residents, especially its children; programs such as these seem to make a qualitative improvement in people’s current lived experiences.

While Bogotá and Berlin are different cities on different continents, through these case studies we see that there are commonalities in how each respective process of urbanization is not inclusive of all members of society. Official rhetoric as well as leadership is varied; in the case of Bogotá the mayor has taken up right to city ideals and language quite explicitly, making strong progressive (some may even say radical) cries for how the city must transform to become more democratic and humane. In Berlin, the rhetoric around social transformation is much more technical, and each district within the city has a different set of elected officials who are charged with leading processes of integration. Yet in both cases policies and practices that are in direct opposition continue to hide in the respective “official” rhetoric, or curriculum.

In Bogotá, the estrato system essentially takes the built environment and turns it into a litmus test for socioeconomic status, which in turn determines subsidy levels, school districting, and other dimensions of the lived experience. This drastically limits interactions between people from different socioeconomic statuses and therefore widens the spatial and ideological gap between the rich and the poor. The hidden curriculum of the estrato system is in part encouraging people to conform neatly into a particular pre-determined definition of “need.” Likewise, in Berlin the MMH categorization is de-facto linked to definitions of self and place that disenfranchise and disempower. In both cases the curriculum of the city pressures people to define their desires within the architecture of a system they did not build. Further, diversity, whether it be socioeconomic, ethnic, racial, religious, or more likely an intersectional combination, is something to be managed; like the “problem” child in the classroom of the city. In Berlin, non-Western immigrants are expected to adapt to existing sociocultural norms and socioeconomic structures. Without the right to vote in local elections, their norms and preferences go unheard.

In many ways, particularly in the example of Berlin’s in-school tracking system and Bogotá’s estrato system, schools are reinforcing and reflecting the curriculum of the city. These systems teach students that their intelligence and worth is largely tied to their socioeconomic status, ethnic background, and physical surroundings. Disadvantaged students are expected to rise above, work harder, and adapt to mainstream sociocultural norms in order to succeed—otherwise accept their position in the “lower ranks” of society. This stymies any possibility of students being empowered to “change themselves by changing the city,” because the curriculum of the city as well as their actual in-classroom curriculum does not support the idea of one city, which belongs to all.

We see in the two Berlin organizational microcases that civil society is working to address the problem; however, while alternative pathways for reform from the nonprofit sector, like those orchestrated by Berlin’s Stadtteilmütter, can provide useful services to those in need, they can also serve to enable the structural forces that create this need in the first-place. On the one hand, Stadtteilmütter, Ein Quadratkilometer Bildung, and other community participatory programs provide jobs for and empower women and immigrants who may not otherwise be employed; however, on the other hand, we must ask—are programs like these transforming the system that excludes these individuals in the first place or only “filling gaps” that exist within that system? For certain, transforming a system and learning how to operate more effectively within a system are two different things, but perhaps the latter can act as preparation for the former when facilitators are working specifically to both expose the curriculum of the city and to give people both short term (survival) and long term (aspirational) ways forward.

Mapping the curriculum of the cities of Berlin and Bogotá has exposed the complexity of the relationship between rhetoric and reality, policy and practice, and the ways in which cities and schools are mutually reflective of society. We believe that by engaging with the narratives of struggle of different cities around the world we can more easily map the curriculum of our home cities and therefore work to expose and reform the curriculum. We can also explore how the idea of the right to the city has been previously addressed or operationalized, using these examples as inspiration for effecting change in our own communities. By taking a global, comparative approach to understanding processes of urbanization, we give power to the idea of the right to the city as a human right worthy of worldwide attention, responsiveness, and action.