On my early morning commute, I cycle through the still sleepy streets of my middle-class, residential neighborhood to the rougher and livelier thoroughfare Potsdamerstraße, which will take me directly to Potsdamer Platz. I bike past social housing where satellite dishes picture children or national flags; I pass Turkish grocers, kebab stands, chain bakeries, casinos, hostels and brothels. The smells of vomit and urine mix with those of freshly baked bread and endlessly turning kebab sticks (see figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1 Cycling through Potsdamerstraße at dawn.
The city shows itself differently at dawn. On the usually congested Potsdamerstraße, a few taxis bring home drunken partiers while trucks drop off wares for the coming day. Women in tight pants and high heels swivel their hips under washed-out streetlights and whisper to the occasional passer-by. Paperboys with wrinkled faces deliver the news and uniformed workers rush to their shifts.
Potsdamer Platz cuts a sharp contrast with not just dingy PotsdamerstraßeFootnote 1 but all its immediate surroundings. Against a dark dawn sky, soaring above the city’s predominantly low-rise skyline, the futuristic creations of international starchitects gleam, signaling at a distance that from the center of Berlin rises a luxurious and cosmopolitan micro-city (see figure 1.2).
Figure 1.2 Potsdamer Platz from afar at dawn.
Privately owned and operated, Potsdamer Platz fits anthropologist Marc Augé’s description of a non-place.Footnote 2 Little “organic social life” manifests in this corporate complex with its tony hotels, restaurants, shopping malls, cinemas and offices. Catering to tourists, suited professionals and monied residents, Potsdamer Platz represents the ongoing marketization and gentrification of Berlin. It is a designed space, “cleansed” of both undesirable things, like garbage and graffiti, and the undesirable poor and homeless people common on the city’s less-regulated streets.Footnote 3
The destitute aren’t the only locals Potsdamer Platz keeps out of sight. Beneath the complex’s street-level profile lie the four levels of a labyrinthine underworld, an invisible realm that houses the backstage service functions of the complex. It bears little resemblance to the upperworld it serves with its dark, often malodorous and sticky spaces hemmed in by low ceilings, infinite corridors and concrete stairways.
This chapter explores how the spatial segregation of Potsdamer Platz is not an incidental matter of architectural design, but rather a particular social mapping that interrelates with status.Footnote 4 Indeed, space is not what social theorist Henri Lefebvre calls a “neutral container” existing in the background of our lives.Footnote 5 Instead, he famously argues, “social relations … project themselves into a space, becoming inscribed there, and in the process producing that space itself.”Footnote 6 What social relations does the vertical segregation of Potsdamer Platz establish between the upperworld and underworld? How do the architects, investors, politicians and the media market the complex? Do the cleaners even figure into how it is marketed? If so, how? And how do the cleaners and their management relate to and experience Potsdamer Platz?
Potsdamer Platz: “City for the Twenty-First Century”
Residents and visitors alike know Potsdamer Platz thanks to its central location and striking appearance, and also because it markets itself as a territory of symbolic importance – the “heart of the capital.”Footnote 7 A few blocks away in one direction are the Brandenburg Gate, the Holocaust Memorial and the Reichstag (the German Parliament). In the other direction lie the National Library, the Philharmonie and the Tiergarten, the city’s signature public park. Emblematic of Potsdamer Platz’s distinctive architecture, the Sony Center’s whimsical roof suggests an off-kilter circus tent, and the peak of the Atrium tower glows like a cubic, turquoise flame on a rectangular candle. Designed by a team of internationally celebrated architects, both foreign and domestic,Footnote 8 this showy skyline is more typical of North American than European cities (see figures 1.3 and 1.4).Footnote 9 The diversity of architects represented here produces a variegated cityscape, however planned, suggesting that the modern Potsdamer Platz has served as a testbed for architectural innovation.
Figure 1.3 The facade of the Kollhoff Tower.
Figure 1.4 The atrium inside the Kollhoff Tower.
When the postwar reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz began in the 1990s, the barren parcel became the biggest construction site in Europe.Footnote 10 Heavily bombed, almost all of its buildings reduced to ashes during World War II, Potsdamer Platz in the postwar period was an abandoned, fallow, a non-place with no-go zones, all under military observation in the east. In the western part, a platform let tourists glimpse the German Democratic Republic, or GDR. The Wall ran straight through the present-day Potsdamer Platz complex.
With the fall of the Wall in 1989, these sixty-eight hectares became a prime real-estate development opportunity, controversially sold to two large-scale investors: Daimler AG and Sony.Footnote 11 The political goal was to make Potsdamer Platz an icon of the newly reunified German capital.Footnote 12 Although markedly different from each other, all buildings were designed as “an impressive testimony to the transition to the twenty-first century.”Footnote 13
Concerted design effort went into attracting consumers, tourists, wealthy residents and businesses alike. Potsdamer Platz is therefore emblematic of the city’s desire to market Berlin as both an attractive site for corporationsFootnote 14 and a culturally creative metropolis.Footnote 15 Indeed, the tenants of this privately owned, thus non-public complex include Sony, Deutsche Bahn, Daimler Financial Services, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Freshfields. The coworking brand WeWork set up offices here.Footnote 16 Potsdamer Platz is designed to become a hotspot of creative workers, in addition to the professionals already ensconced there. The glassy towers, typical of corporate architecture found in urban centers worldwide,Footnote 17 have been the exception rather than the rule for Berlin with its comparatively light and aging industrial footprint.Footnote 18
But for the 100,000 visitors that Potsdamer Platz can welcome on a daily basis, the area offers more than just office space:Footnote 19 370 rented or owned apartments, many of them second homes; luxury hotels like the Ritz-Carlton; specialty stores and the Arkaden shopping mall (see figure 1.5); restaurants, snack bars and cafés; a casino, a theater, large cinema chains and a dance club.
Figure 1.5 The Arkaden shopping mall.
Various cultural and urban events make their home here, most famously the annual Berlin International Film Festival, or Berlinale. Against the backdrop of swarming fans, press photographers and TV cameras, film stars walk the red carpet on Marlene-Dietrich-Platz – a name chosen to evoke the racy glamor of the Weimar Republic. Indeed, the modern reinvention of the complex harks back to the 1920s, when Potsdamer Platz was a hub of department stores, entertainment centers and hotels, like the “Haus Vaterland,” catered to the emerging mass consumer and cultural markets,Footnote 20 and the ten-story office building “Columbushaus” as well as Europe’s first traffic light set up at Potsdamer Platz which marked the city’s ambition to position itself as a world-class metropolis.Footnote 21 Nothing of the area’s Nazi past remains; the swastika flags that hung from monumental buildings and the Columbushaus offices of the Nazi “T4 Euthanasia Program” – along with those of the anti-Nazi Leninist resistance movement “New Beginning” – bear no marker or memorial.Footnote 22
The selective presentation of historyFootnote 23 at Potsdamer Platz fits with the image and experience it aims to cultivate. As an icon for Berlin, if not all Germany, Potsdamer Platz is meant to represent the future as the “city for the twenty-first century”Footnote 24 where one finds an “incomparable blend of high-class entertainment, shopping, restaurants and culture, harmoniously combined with living and working opportunities.”Footnote 25 But Potsdamer Platz predominantly caters to those who can afford such “high-class” entertainment, shopping or housing, or who work for one of the marquee corporations anchored here. Furthermore, although people do work and live at Potsdamer Platz, it mostly caters to visitors; it seems more conducive to buying and consuming things than to settling here and living one’s daily life.
Potsdamer Platz’s proliferation of high-rises exemplifies the increasing verticalization of cities. The geographer Stephen Graham notes how such “vertical growth” is promoted by “city leaders and development agencies keen to engineer glitzy, futuristic skylines as a means of building urban ‘brands’ that compete with other so-called world or global cities for investment, tourism, media exposure and the ‘creative class’ (mobile and well-educated high-tech elites).”Footnote 26 This goes hand in hand with the privatization of urban space and the displacement of lower-income groups from city centers – another trend Potsdamer Platz epitomizes.
In her study of New York, sociologist Sharon Zukin shows how consumer-oriented contemporary cities become increasingly exclusive (both economically and culturally), homogeneous and therefore “soulless.”Footnote 27 Potsdamer Platz, the nonpareil “non-place,” exemplifies the phenomenon. Not only is the complex “formed in relation to certain ends,”Footnote 28 namely for consumption purposes of an exclusive group of people, and its history selectively staged and marketed, but its transnational design provides little in terms of identity. Diverse as they may be in terms of style, the buildings could stand in any other cosmopolitan city.
As a corporate micro-city, Potsdamer Platz illustrates a pair of correlated trends: the rise of service workers who maintain these corporate cities and serve their exclusive clientele,Footnote 29 and efforts to make these workers and their labor invisible. Priced out of the city center, these employees live far from Potsdamer Platz, and once at work, they’re kept belowground and out of sight. Below the skyscrapers one finds basements deep under the ground with service centers, garbage collection points and workers.Footnote 30 If the overseers, investors, politicians and architects behind Potsdamer Platz are right that the complex represents the future of city life, we must examine the implications of this segregation. Who works here, and what does it mean for them and for the society that they are kept out of sight underground?
CleanUp’s “Prestige Object” Potsdamer Platz
A range of service employees reports to Potsdamer Platz for work: security guards, garbagemen, cloakroom and counter attendants, waiters and kitchen staff, tailors, salespeople and cleaners. Some service workers spend their workday aboveground, but the corporate underworld is where most goods are delivered, stored and sorted, where garbage is collected and clothes laundered and tailored. Among the service workers, cleaners occupy a unique position as they enter virtually every space in the upperworld – offices, apartments, shops, public areas – even when the world belowground remains the nodal point for their work.
Service workers, including cleaners, are not directly employed by the corporate tenants of Potsdamer Platz but by a service-work provider; in the cleaners’ case, CleanUp. Every few years, Potsdamer Platz management invites bids for various service contracts. Given its size and prominence, Potsdamer Platz is a major client in the portfolio of service companies, a “prestige object” for CleanUp.Footnote 31
The CleanUp management promotes the image of prestige and exclusivity Potsdamer Platz seeks to project, thus boosting its own image. It comes as little surprise, then, that the director of CleanUp Berlin decides to place me at the complex. In addition to showing off CleanUp’s success and size within the industry, Potsdamer Platz lets the account manager, Tom, advertise the good relationship the company has cultivated with its prestigious client. CleanUp’s operations here run relatively smoothly – an outcome that is by no means guaranteed. Account managers often struggle with demanding clients who ask for services beyond the contract or condescend to them. Tom, however, speaks about Potsdamer Platz positively and with some pride.
Potsdamer Platz is our prestige object. We do everything, from glass and building to external cleaning here. It is the company’s biggest object in Berlin, a complex that, of course, everyone in Berlin knows. And if you look around, very high-profile people live here, and you find exclusive shops and the offices of distinguished doctors.
Though Tom may be motivated to toe the company line and paint an unduly positive picture, his enthusiasm for the company seems genuine. At twenty-five, Tom is young for his position and he looks it. He wears a fixed dental brace, and his tanned round face, marked by a scar on the right cheek, bears the flush of youth. Some cleaners attribute the scar to his weekend job as a bouncer, others to a flight of stairs after too many drinks (the police once confiscated his driver’s license on suspicion of drunk driving). What gives Tom a more managerial appearance is his attire: pink dress shirts (some with a CleanUp logo affixed to the left collar) tucked into designer jeans, brown leather shoes and a heavy silver watch on his right hand.
Tom’s office is located in a futuristic office building, designed by Richard Rogers, whose proportions and complicated whimsical exterior suggest an update of Rogers’ Pompidou Centre in Paris. From his office, Tom has an unobstructed view of the Berlin skyline, prefaced by the manicured meadow of Tilla-Durieux Park with its steep artificial rise. Apart from a martial arts trophy and a photo of his infant son, the office is dominated by CleanUp corporate messaging: the logo, slogans and stickers, images of smiling cleaners on his desktop screensaver and CleanUp mugs decorated with generic figures of cleaners, a prominently displayed corporate mission statement.
Tom has ambitions to enlarge the scope of his responsibilities by acquiring more buildings within Potsdamer Platz. A map of the complex denominates its different areas, from A to D, and buildings, for example A1, A2, B1, B2 and so on. Tom refers to the map in our first conversation.
Look how large Potsdamer Platz is – it’s over 550,000 square meters. During the day more than 150,000 people are here, at night less, of course, around 90,000. All these buildings are part of it and we are responsible for A1 and B1. Recently CleanUp was able to acquire more objects, like the Canadian Embassy and parts of the Sony Center.
Potsdamer Platz’s high volume of visitors has direct implications for cleaning, as does its architecture. “There are areas and surfaces to clean, and then all this glass. It is a very work-intensive place. Here we need to constantly keep up the cleaning,” Tom says.
Potsdamer Platz boosts both CleanUp’s image and Tom’s standing within the company. On my first day at Potsdamer Platz, Tom and his colleague Norbert bring me to the Kollhoff Tower. We take “the fastest elevator in Europe” to the twenty-fourth floor, where we tour the Panoramapunkt roof terrace (see figures 1.6 and 1.7). In each direction, Tom points out objects in the CleanUp portfolio. For Tom, Potsdamer Platz represents the achievement of having risen from cleaner in its murky underworld to manager overlooking a prestigious empire of objects.
Figure 1.6 View over Berlin from the Kollhoff Tower’s Panoramapunkt.
Figure 1.7 View over Berlin from the Kollhoff Tower’s Panoramapunkt.
While Tom’s office places him within the Potsdamer Platz upperworld and spatially manifests his elevation within the CleanUp hierarchy,Footnote 32 the foremen’s office is located on the second floor of a building where the cleaners’ room is underground. It functions more as a space for storing materials and processing paperwork than one representing the company to the public or the marketplace. The foremen’s office is small and plain, with barely more than a rudimentary desk and chair for furniture. Detergents and cleaning materials are stacked here; the foremen hand these out by request only, otherwise, supplies have a tendency to go missing.
In contrast to Tom, who reports to work around 9 a.m., the foremen start working when the cleaners’ shift begins at 5 a.m. In limbo between the upperworld and underworld, they spend much of their days en route from building to building, floor to floor. For the cleaners, the foremen are the main contacts. They are responsible for day-to-day management: instructing cleaners, checking their work, providing them with the necessary equipment, allocating shifts and, when necessary, stepping in and cleaning. The foremen dress more like the cleaners than like Tom or the typical Potsdamer Platz professional, and report to work in CleanUp-branded work pants, thermal jacket and baseball cap.
Tom approaches Potsdamer Platz through the lens of business opportunity and career advancement. For the foremen, however, the prestige object with its slick and soaring towers represents a recipe for overwork: a large, difficult “territory” to oversee combined with high client expectations: working at Potsdamer Platz means dealing with “fussy, rich” upperworlders. On top of that, the size of the building complex and the number of objects make the foremen’s work intense. “I walk eight kilometers back and forth under Potsdamer Platz every day,” Norbert says. Stress and sleep deprivation are engraved under his eyes and on his forehead. It does not surprise the cleaners when for almost half a year Norbert takes sick leave due to overwork and high blood pressure. With the added work during his absence, Anton seems to get paler and thinner almost by the day, to the point that cleaners worry that he, too, might be at risk of overwork. As for Anton, he betrays a note of pride in “surviving” the stressful work life of a foreman.
Potsdamer Platz from Below: The Cleaners
Modern city-dwellers are no strangers to environments like Potsdamer Platz; such corporate micro-cities can be found around the world, from Hamburg’s HafenCity and New York’s Hudson Yards to the Archipelago 21 development in Seoul. These upperworlds are frequently visited, read about and photographed. And apart from the occasional stack of cleaning materials, Tom and the foremen report to typical corporate offices. By contrast, the corporate underworld of Potsdamer Platz, designed to be hidden, is almost immune to representation.
The cleaners spend a great deal of time underground. They are responsible for cleaning certain basement areas, and both the garbage collection point and their basement utility room are underground. Potsdamer Platz regulations state that after 9 a.m. cleaners may not walk with their cleaning cart through aboveground spaces, such as the shopping mall, and instead must use the basement level to move around. Thus, cleaners are spatially and temporally made invisible to the upperworld.Footnote 33
The Labyrinth
The Potsdamer Platz underworld is an enormous territory of four subterranean levels, each almost the size of the aboveground footprint. Natural light does not reach the minus area; daylight, street life, hustle and bustle are the hallmarks of another world. One day an older cleaner named Bertha asks about the weather. “I haven’t seen the sun today yet,” she says. “I’ve been in the basement all day.”
Some parts of this corporate underworld are so cold I need a jacket and scarf in order to work – to the amusement of my fellow cleaners. “A bit brisk?” teases Christian. “Well, once you have warmed up, you can come and clean.” When I can’t tolerate the cold at the garbage collection point, Matthias nicknames me “Madame.” Other underground areas are hot and stuffy. While passing through certain tunnels, one notices the airlessness that cleaners regularly contend with. Conditions change according to both location and season. “You have to see how it is in the summer, really sticky,” my cleaning colleague Michaela says. “You don’t get enough air. And in the winter it is really cold.”
The smells under Potsdamer Platz verge on the unendurable. The upperworld’s waste converges here to be concentrated in grease collectors, garbage cans and waste pickup points. Cleaners transport garbage cans through gray empty corridors and service elevators to the minus-four level where the garbage collection point is located (see figure 1.8). These paths are imprinted with the smell of waste. In the large hall of the garbage collection point, the waste is separated into containers to be driven off by trucks.
Figure 1.8 Corridor to the garbage collection point.
Compared to the shiny malls, spacious lobbies and open-plan offices above, the Potsdamer Platz underworld is stifling and poorly maintained. The ceilings are low, the gray or off-white walls often marked with bumps or streaks where carts have collided with them. (Steering a fully loaded garbage cart in a straight line through a corridor is harder than it looks.)
Even for cleaners with years of experience navigating this underworld, it is a baffling maze that connects a dizzying array of enclosed spaces.
“So, now we get to the labyrinth,” says Lena, a trainee, as we make our way through the supply passages to mop their concrete floors. “You see one door, then another – endless doors.”
An unserious but telling rumor has it that some underground spaces here have yet to be discovered. The labyrinth is a seemingly endless succession of interlaced paths, unexpected corners, dead-ends of iron doors, gates and walls. Staircases, elevators and tunnels extend throughout the underworld and up into the backstage areas of the upperworld. It’s not difficult to get lost – or trapped.
“Everything is so full of nooks and crannies, and for everything you need a key,” Benjamin says. “And if you close the wrong door behind you, you can’t get back.”
I suspect this represents some hyperbole until experience proves otherwise. Sent to clean a toilet one day, I take a wrong exit on my way back. All the doors are identical, and I have only a vague memory of my route. When a door closes behind me, I find myself in a small room in complete darkness. I can’t go back the way I came because the door has locked behind me, and from here only one door opens: to the emergency staircase (see figure 1.9). I go up and down the stairs, checking for open doors – to no avail. Eventually, I pick up a cell phone signal and call a colleague to come liberate me.
Figure 1.9 Stuck in the emergency staircase.
Remembering one’s keys and maintaining a good mental map amount to survival skills for cleaners in the sparsely populated territory under Potsdamer Platz, though elsewhere in the minus area workers confront congestion. The service elevators to the garbage collection point are in heavy demand, and waiting for an empty one, I notice that faces are becoming familiar. Nearly every morning Michaela and I come across a flirtatious handyman. “The sun comes up, the ladies again!” he greets us, sometimes producing chocolates or candies from his uniform’s pockets. At the garbage collection point, a man who claims to be the longest-serving worker at Potsdamer Platz will detain his coworkers to chat.
In the minus area, the upperworld shops store wares and receive deliveries. The tailors work in the minus-two level below the shopping mall, sitting between clothing piles in carrels whose high metal grids bring prison bars to mind. Matthias and Benjamin often go out of their way in hopes of encountering a particularly beautiful and curvaceous Brazilian tailor there. Benjamin calls her “Conchita.”Footnote 34 Matthias blames Benjamin for these detours. “Because of her we have to do these hallways twice a week and hang out in the minus area, even though it should only be once a month!” For all their utility and discomfort, the minus areas nevertheless serve another purpose as a social stage and cruising area.
The Basement Room
Dark, stuffy, windowless and low-ceilinged, the cleaners’ basement room sits at the minus-two level under the mall. It functions as a storage space, laundry facility, break room and changing area. The workers call it variously A2 (its official designation on the Potsdamer Platz map), the maintenance room, the storeroom or the cleaning room. Thanks to its versatility, the room is usually full.
On the left side in the front, cleaning carts are lined up next to the ride-on floor scrubbers, which cleaners drive to mop large areas (see figure 1.10). The carts carry all the equipment needed for a shift: feather dusters, brushes, mops, hooked poles for gathering hard-to-reach trash and so on. These supplies hang from the wall above the cleaning carts, and detergent bottles are stacked on shelves beside the entrance. Near the front of the room, cleaners empty dirty water into a drain in the floor, then retrieve fresh water from the adjacent tap (see figure 1.11).
Figure 1.10 Lined up cleaning carts in the basement room.
Figure 1.11 Drain in the basement room.
Toward the back of the basement room, a narrow door opens to a tiny unlit room where bundled electrical cables are plugged into wall sockets. For cleaners, the little chamber meets two needs. First, it serves to hide equipment from other cleaners – a secret Marcel shared with me while stashing a new broom. Heavily used brooms smell and work less well; and newer equipment is in short enough supply that cleaners wind up competing over it.
Cleaners also use the room to change clothes before and after a shift. Since the room lacks a place to put a change of clothes, one has to hold them under one’s arm. And because the cables prevent the door from properly closing, one has to simultaneously guard the door while changing and holding clothes. Some male cleaners skip the balancing act and just change in front of their coworkers.
In the basement room, cleaners have lockers where they can secure their belongings (see figure 1.12). Above the two rows of lockers, cleaners stow their buckets and other equipment. A cabinet next to the lockers holds the keys cleaners will need for their shifts, and a bulletin board updates those shifts on a weekly basis. Bigger and higher lockers are more desirable and usually taken. On my first day, the only locker left is a small one in the lower row. Michaela advises me to bring a padlock. That same day, I leave my jacket on a chair in the room during the shift. It’s gone when I return.
Figure 1.12 Lockers in the basement room.
Despite the presence of a little fridge, the cleaners prefer to keep food in their lockers. One day Alexey, a cleaner from Kazakhstan, opens the fridge only to immediately slam it shut again. He warns me not to use it: I’ll find God-knows-what bacteria and rotten food there. On top of the fridge, an old water kettle splutters throughout the 9 a.m. break to produce coffee, taken black (given the fridge, milk seems ill-advised). Cleaners bring their own cups and cutlery and use hot water from the kettle to rinse them. The tap next to the fridge has only cold water, and dishwashing liquid is usually in short supply, as is hand soap, particularly when Michaela – or “Mutti” (mommy), as some of the younger men call her – is on leave. Among this group, only she demonstrates any care about keeping the basement room clean.
Industrial washing machines and a dryer as well as buckets and mops crowd the back of the room. The machines run most of the time, although at least one of them is usually out of order. But even with only a few working, the washing machines make a racket, and the dryers emit such thick hot air that it can feel, Matthias complains, like 80°C (see figure 1.13).
Figure 1.13 Washing machines, the dryer and mops in the basement room.
The focal point of the room is a large white table in the back, graced by a stool with peeling paint and four chairs in varying states of disrepair salvaged from garbage collection points around Potsdamer Platz. “Where else are we going to sit?” Michaela asks.
Since there are far fewer chairs than cleaners, seating privileges at 9 a.m. are a source of tension. Some cleaners try to reserve seating. “This chair is reserved for Mrs. Naller!” Maria scrawls on a note she leaves on a backrest. On the back of another chair, a note reads “Director.” Such property claims are routinely ignored – chairs, like lockers, are first-come, first-served.
Overall, the basement room provides little to accommodate a comfortable social gathering or leisurely time-out from work. Packed with equipment, shelves, lockers and at times people, the room is often noisy and hot from the machines and redolent of filth from the mops, saturated with dirt, from the drain and the nearby garbage room. Unless the basement room’s heavy metal door is closed and the garbage containers are emptied, the stench is overwhelming. No wonder the cleaners don’t regard this space as theirs, or, apart from Michaela, do more to help maintain it.
Yet the basement room remains central in cleaners’ work life as a space to meet, talk and relax. At times, A2 feels like a chaotic stage play, with comedies and dramas unfolding around me. Especially before the start of the morning shift at 5 a.m., during the half-hour break at 9 a.m. and at the end of the shift around 1:30 p.m., cleaners gather in this room. They come and go, change clothes, collect gear, change the water of their buckets, take a coffee break, take a bite from a homemade sandwich, look at the schedule of shifts or fill out a timesheet. At times the room is so crowded that people in chairs must constantly move them back and forth to make way for the others.
Cleaners tell me, and a foreman confirms, that the basement room became the main place for cleaners to sit and socialize after they were banned from the second-floor social room. During one 9 a.m. break, a client had passed through and subsequently complained to management that the cleaners were too loud and made off-color jokes. The only other space designated to the cleaners is the second-floor smoking room. But not every cleaner is a smoker, has the necessary access card or wants to be seen by the foremen, whose office is across the hall – especially if they take a long break. Indeed, there is always a good reason for cleaners to find themselves in the basement room, even during the shift, since all the equipment is there.
Cleaners in Potsdamer Platz’s Upperworld
While Potsdamer Platz’s underworld constitutes a nodal point, cleaners and other workers are also present aboveground. In the very early morning, when the upperworlders are yet to populate the streets, the cleaners are still allowed to freely move around Potsdamer Platz. Junction points where the paths of workers frequently cross, or where people smoke and take breaks, become busy sites. Over time I begin to associate familiar faces with the various corners of Potsdamer Platz where I encounter them.
At one of the shopping mall’s side exits, groups of cleaners often gather to take last puffs before a shift. One important coordinate in the cleaners’ mental map is the Potsdamer Platz McDonald’s. It’s open twenty-four hours, the coffee is affordable and the staff is prone to handing out freebies to cleaners, especially the younger ones. I buy my coffee from the same young woman most mornings, exchanging smiles and a few words. A few months in, she starts giving me the occasional free cookie, or a large coffee for the price of a small.
The first time Marcel takes me on his cleaning tour through Potsdamer Platz’s outdoor area, two scaffolders, one old and one young, approach us.
“Who’s the hottie?” the older one asks Marcel.
“My intern,” Marcel responds with a broad grin.
Their eyes travel back and forth between Marcel and me.
“I am not searching for a girlfriend,” Marcel clarifies.
“Are you gay?” the old man demands.
“Nah, I’m no ass pirate – that’s this guy,” Marcel says, indicating the younger scaffolder.
“No! I am not!” the younger scaffolder snickers.
Some days later I pass the scaffolders again.
“So alone here,” the old man observes. “Where’s the boss?”
At first, I am taken aback by such patronizing flirtations but after a while I get more used to such exchanges, which aim to open the floor for provocative jokes (also refer to Chapter 4). I also realize that women are not the only recipients of unwanted sexual attention amongst Potsdamer Platz service workers. The checkout girl Clare at McDonald’s is so infatuated with Marcel that he routinely gets free burgers. “I ordered four hamburgers and she just added two Big Macs and everything was free,” Marcel says. “It’s too much.” Everybody at CleanUp knows about this and therefore goes to McDonald’s when Clare is on duty. Marcel is perplexed when random CleanUp workers start coming up to him to say, “Yo man, thanks!” They all benefit from Clare’s infatuation, as Clare herself tells other cleaners, “You can thank Marcel for this.”
Free food and drinks at McDonald’s are not an exception. These are part of an economy of gifts and flirtations amongst Potsdamer Platz service workers. The receptionist Jasmin brings Paul his morning coffee unbidden, the gay bar owner treats Marcel to cocktails in the afternoon and Lena is always excited to pass by the ice cream parlor: “I get free ice cream if he is there – but shhh!”
Cleaners are part of the service workers’ scene at Potsdamer Platz – a scene with its expressions and rules of interaction. Loitering in front of McDonald’s, especially in summer when the basement room is too hot, cleaners and other workers amiably hassle each other. A handyman banters in passing, “I’d like to work for your company!” – implying that we’re always on break. Having heard this expression many times before, Marcel has a ready answer: “But they don’t take everyone!”
Apart from the area around McDonald’s and those designated for smoking, most of the upperworld consists of workspaces for the cleaners. Yet cleaning a lobby, stairwell and roof terrace also provides the opportunity to pause and observe the hustle and bustle – to “consume” life, if only in a voyeuristic sense. Cleaners keep tabs on a man and woman who regularly meet at a certain hidden spot to kiss and hold hands. A clandestine love affair? One cleaner reports catching a glimpse of the man’s wedding ring.
Male cleaners also occupy themselves ogling women. “In the summer, it’s like a punishment,” Marcel groans. When a group of young women walks past, Marcel stops, stares and aims a feckless pelvic thrust in their direction. “Oh, to fuck her now!” The miniskirts, bare legs and low-cut necklines provide much fodder for unfulfilled desire and sexist commentary.
Streets at the edge of the complex, along with inner courtyards of Potsdamer Platz apartment buildings, provide cleaners with opportunities to leave work behind. However, this can only be done on the sly – no easy task given the prominence of glass and surveillance cameras in this high-density development.
Though rooted in the corporate underworld, the cleaners’ scene at Potsdamer Platz extends aboveground. When cleaners look at the architecture of Potsdamer Platz, they see more than a layout of buildings to be cleaned. It is also a place for observing the world and hanging out: a stage for social encounters.
Cleaners’ Presence from Below
The Potsdamer Platz upperworld is shiny and spacious; the underworld dark, labyrinthine, cramped and malodorous. These worlds have distinct populations: shoppers, tourists, white-collar workers and wealthy residents above; cleaners, garbagemen, tailors and other service workers below. A one-way membrane separates the worlds: cleaners have access to the upperworld, mostly for the purpose of cleaning it, but the people from above cannot descend. Indeed, while the upperworld predominantly shapes the image of Potsdamer Platz as the “new” Berlin, the “city for the twenty-first century,” the corporate underworld usually remains hidden from representation, buried not only spatially, but also discursively.
Potsdamer Platz is designed to minimize the cleaners’ visibility. Rules set by the Potsdamer Platz management reinforce this erasure, for example the rule that cleaners may not move freely aboveground after 9 a.m. and, if they do, they must present themselves in ways that do not disturb the upperworld: they may not speak too loudly or joke in ways that might cause offense.
Potsdamer Platz is designed to reinforce status hierarchies that help separate the upperworld and underworld.Footnote 35 It’s apparent within CleanUp how closely status hierarchy and building design interrelate: Tom’s office sits in one of the “prestigious” buildings, the foremen’s office is stacked with cleaning material, the cleaners occupy a rank dungeon on minus-two. Among the cleaners too, hierarchy emerges: according to who has what access card and key, who knows the labyrinth well enough to navigate it, who has a bigger locker in the upper row, who gets to sit in a salvaged chair.
The Potsdamer Platz cleaners constitute what we might call a “presence from below.” I borrow the idea from the historiographical notion of “history from below,” namely that ordinary people’s experience and perspective matter to history at least as much as the role of “great men.”Footnote 36 Cleaners are well aware of their status as “minus men,” as the cleaner Matthias puts it – and minus women, he does not think to add. Yet this doesn’t mean that these workers experience Potsdamer Platz only according to how this space and their position in it has been designed.Footnote 37
Cleaners consciously struggle with the problem of invisibility, yet they do not perceive themselves merely as invisible figures.Footnote 38 They are part of a scene above- and belowground in which workers interact with and recognize each other. For them, the underworld can be more than just a dark, dingy and cramped “space”; it can also be a “place”Footnote 39 of social encounters, of taking breaks and withdrawing from the gaze of managers and clients alike. Similarly, cleaners find and make room for themselves in the upperworld. In Lefebvre’s words, the same spaces that are “abstract” – designed toward homogeneity and coherence – may, at least temporarily, become “differential” – enacted and lived in alternative, heterogeneous ways.Footnote 40 Despite its meticulously designed nature, the space of Potsdamer Platz is therefore more “essentially contested” than it may appear.Footnote 41
Apart from the basement room, cleaners are not tied to particular spaces; nor can they claim them. Cleaners are constantly on the move, making both work and leisure space dynamic.Footnote 42 Here we do not find the divide between what have been termed “dominant” spaces of work, such as the office, the desk or counter and “liminal” spaces, such as toilets and stairwells.Footnote 43 Similarly, cleaners’ spaces of work cannot easily be separated into “front-stage” spaces – where cleaners are visible to clients and managers – and more private “back-stage” spaces.Footnote 44 For cleaners, the liminal and back-stage spaces can be workspaces as much as those typically considered as the dominant and front-stage ones.
Descending into the corporate underworld of Potsdamer Platz from the upperworld where I otherwise belong, I discover – “with all [my] senses, with the total body,” as Lefebvre puts itFootnote 45 – a different facet of the complex. It no longer seems a non-place, a transitory, overdesigned, artificial and homogeneous corporate environment devoid of meaningful interpersonal relations. The more time I spend in the workers’ world, the more the crafted prestige, slick architecture and tailored suits aboveground fade into the background, eclipsed by the increasingly familiar faces of my underworld colleagues.
As my perceptions change, so does the way I am perceived. I become more visible to workers than I had been as an upperworlder. My borrowed identity follows me even as I cycle home on now-congested Potsdamerstraße after my shift. Still wearing the CleanUp uniform, I elicit a response from cashiers at the Turkish supermarket where I stop to shop. “Already off work? Any weekend plans? Partying tonight?” I sigh that I’m too tired, up since four. One well-built middle-aged man in jeans and a black sweater points at my company shirt: “You work for CleanUp!” he says with a grin. “Me too!”
By the same token, I become intermittently invisible in the upperworld. Colleagues from the university and an old school acquaintance fail to recognize me in my uniform; they pass me by without a word, a reminder that cleaners are overlooked, ignored, made socially invisible. Cleaners in the upperworld remain minus men and women.
