In Duisburg, police spatial control and evictions under building codes are implemented as parallel mechanisms that have been jointly developed and coordinated for the past ten years. These mechanisms primarily affect people from Romania and Bulgaria, many of whom are Romani. According to Lena Wiese, this enforces the social and legal exclusion of criminalized EU citizens and systematically shifts responsibility for this back onto those subjected to racial violence.
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In early July 2026, a symposium was held in Mülheim an der Ruhr under the title “Migration from Southeastern Europe to the Ruhr Region – Perspectives. Misrepresentations. Understanding.” The title refers to a discourse that has framed EU citizens from Romania and Bulgaria as a municipal problem for more than a decade: as abusers of social benefits, as a burden on housing and neighborhoods, or as criminals unwilling to integrate.
An IAQ report by the University of Duisburg-Essen on the living conditions of Eastern European migrants in Hochfeld and Marxloh – based on community-oriented field research – shows the exact opposite: EU citizens are systematically failing to take advantage of benefits to which they are entitled. Reasons for this include, for example, structural barriers to access, language barriers, uncooperative administrative practices, a lack of counseling infrastructure, and well-founded mistrust of authorities, which are experienced as a daily threat.
Result of structural exclusion
Together with my colleague Thorsten Schlee, I have documented Duisburg’s eviction practices as an exemplary case of this strategy: Since its founding in 2014, followed by an institutional reorganization in 2016, the city’s “Problem Properties Task Force” has been evicting residents from residential buildings in neighborhoods with high migrant populations – almost exclusively those where Romani people from Romania and Bulgaria live.
What Duisburg’s Social Affairs Commissioner Astrid Neese presented as a guest speaker at the symposium mentioned at the beginning – conflicts in neighborhoods, the claim that education “simply has no value” in this group, and the refusal to accept counseling services despite being fully informed – is explicitly described by critical research as a consequence of eviction policies designed to drive people out and as a result of structural exclusion from the fields of education and social services, for which Neese’s own department bears joint responsibility.
“Facts” vs. “perceptions of people”
At the beginning of her presentation, Neese expressed her fear of being perceived as a racist after leaving the room. She then spoke of how education “simply has no value” in this group, of children who do not attend school, of counseling sessions that are offered but not taken advantage of even though all the information is available, and of integration efforts that have reached their limits.
She did not address school attendance as a matter of educational interest, but rather as a prerequisite for eligibility for social benefits. She described the ‘mini-job’ as “merely a path to receiving benefits” and stated that the free movement of workers was not intended to function this way. She argued that while one must rely on “facts,” one must also consider the “perceptions of people” in the neighborhoods, which are reflected in election results and are “understandable.” To legitimize her position, she repeatedly cited Duisburg Mayor Sören Link, who, she said, had summed up exactly what she wanted to say in many instances.
Reputation management
Each of these elements can be analyzed. The concern expressed at the outset – that she might be labeled a racist – is not a sign of critical self-reflection, but rather reputation management that focuses not on the discriminatory impact of her own statements, but on the risk of being perceived as such.
The claim that counseling services are not being utilized despite the availability of complete information frames non-utilization as an individual refusal, whereas the IAQ report attributes this non-utilization to structural barriers to access, for which the department bears shared responsibility. The assessment of school attendance as a basis for benefits rather than as a reflection of children’s educational interests, and the characterization of ‘mini-jobs’ as an abuse of freedom of movement, frame the exercise of their rights to freedom of movement and social rights as a violation of uncodified behavioral expectations.
What goes unmentioned is the persistent shortage of school seats in Duisburg, which effectively excludes children – especially when evictions cause them to lose their registered address – from attending school and thus contributes to precisely the absences that Neese frames as a lack of interest on the part of the group.
The reference to election results as a basis for legitimacy frames politics as a reaction to existing resentment, while at the same time reproducing and legitimizing that very resentment through this very framing – and thereby failing to recognize its own responsibility for its spread.
Framing legitimacy
The mayor’s endorsement signals that this framing is not merely the personal judgment of a department head, but is politically consolidated. The issue at hand is not about trash or compulsory education, but rather the question of who is considered a member of the community in Duisburg and whose exclusion appears legitimate from a regulatory perspective. The fact that this presentation took place at a conference whose title, “Distorted Images”, foreshadowed this reveals the discursive function of the format: the reflexive claim provides the framework of legitimacy without requiring substantive fulfillment.
Nees’s remarks reproduce an interpretive pattern that is deeply embedded in the institutional framework, the most visible result of which in Duisburg is the “Problem Properties Task Force,” in which, alongside the Public Order Office, the police, and the fire department, the Job Center and the Family Benefits Office also participate as social welfare agencies.
Agency with a displacement-oriented approach
Since 2016, the municipal “Problem Properties Task Force” has been conducting unannounced inspections of residential buildings, primarily in neighborhoods with high migrant populations such as Hochfeld and Marxloh. In addition to the Public Order Office, the police, the public prosecutor’s office, and the fire department, the Job Center and the Family Benefits Office are also represented in this special unit. The task force is assigned to the Department of Public Order, while the Job Center and Family Benefits Office fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of Family, Education, and Culture, Labor, and Social Affairs, which Neese has headed since 2020.
If a building is classified as a “problem property,” the inspection, decision, and sealing take place on the very same day. From 2019 to early 2025, the task force reported encountering 3,330 people, including 1,234 minors. Those affected are almost exclusively people from Romania and Bulgaria, many of whom are Romani. Comparable structural defects in other neighborhoods with different tenant populations go unaddressed.
“Reducing immigration”
The fact that the task force is not merely a tool for enforcing building codes is evident from the city’s budget (Product 021801), which lists the “detection and prevention of social benefit fraud in all areas of social benefit entitlements” as a task of equal importance alongside hazard prevention, cites the right to freedom of movement as its own legal basis, and reports a cost recovery rate of only ten to fourteen percent – meaning that the public sector finances over eighty percent of this monitoring unit.
An internal minutes of the Duisburg-Nord Network Partnership Steering Group from the fall of 2016 identifies “reducing immigration” as the goal of the eviction policy. On July 1, 2025, the Petitions Committee of the North Rhine-Westphalia State Parliament confirmed that the evictions are selective and cause “undue hardship” for those affected, without providing any objective justification for the differential treatment. However, this assessment had no consequences.
Immediate eviction
The orders prohibiting use are issued on the same day – in what the city describes in its own file note as an “expedited procedure” – without a written notice, information on legal remedies, or any discernible case-by-case review for each apartment. In the case of the occupancy ban issued in January 2026 at Fröbelstraße 33, the fire safety assessment lasted from 10:50 a.m. to 11:25 a.m.; five minutes later, the eviction decision was made – without examining which defects the owners or residents could have remedied that very same day.
Moreover, even the TÜV – whose report the city cited as the basis for its decision – had not issued an eviction recommendation; as the TÜV report explicitly states, the assessment rested solely with the fire department. In its landmark decision of November 12, 2025 (Case No.: 7 A 2985/21), the Higher Administrative Court of North Rhine-Westphalia (OVG NRW) ruled that an immediate eviction is proportionate only if immediate enforcement is the sole means of effectively averting the danger, and that a present danger must be demonstrated for each individual unit.
A lawsuit challenging the eviction from Fröbelstraße 33 is pending before the Düsseldorf Administrative Court. The building features a historic wooden stairwell, which is considered eligible for an exemption under § 69(1) of the North Rhine-Westphalia Building Code (LBauO NRW) – an exemption that the city regularly grants for comparable existing buildings but which, in this case, was cited as the primary justification for the immediate eviction.
Genealogy of urban racism
The fact that Neese reproduced the same problem framework at a Mülheim symposium in 2026 – one that Duisburg authorities have been cultivating for years – is no coincidence, but rather the result of an institutionally entrenched discourse whose genealogy can be precisely reconstructed.
What Markus End calls “Racial Prevention” already featured prominently in November 2016 in a presentation given by Duisburg Police Chief Elke Bartels at the Federal Criminal Police Office’s fall conference: Immigration, ‘social hotspots,’ and crime were causally linked there; Roma were described as a “homogeneous immigrant group”; and the same narrative was established that would resurface ten years later in Neese’s lecture.
Bartels referred to the communities from Romania and Bulgaria as “economic refugees” and reinforced the narrative that extends all the way to Neese’s 2026 lecture: litter, disturbances of the peace, “inappropriate behavior” in “middle-class residential neighborhoods,” and failure to comply with compulsory education requirements.
Parallel mechanisms
Starting in 2013, the police operated a Special Task Force known as the “BAO Triangle,” which employed a zero-tolerance strategy. In 2015 alone, 40,528 police actions were documented, including over 21,000 identity checks, carried out in close cooperation with the city regarding measures under registration laws. The “BAO Triangle” and the “Problem Properties Task Force” are not successive but rather simultaneous, distinct instruments of the same approach: police spatial control and evictions under building codes as parallel mechanisms that were jointly developed and coordinated.
The transition from the security mechanism described by Bartels to the social mechanism described by Neese does not mark a shift in substance but rather an institutional expansion. Bartels’ presentation should not be read as an isolated case, but as a document of a strategy that operates at the intersection between a regulatory and a social-policy dispositif of antiziganism. This strategy corresponds to that “municipal culture of inconvenience,” which, through a division of labor, brings about the social-legal exclusion of criminalized EU citizens and systematically shifts the responsibility for this back onto those affected.
The fact that Neese framed her remarks with the concern that she might be perceived as a racist completes the picture: Not only the content of her statements, but also the defensive strategy employed in response to criticism have a long tradition within the Duisburg administration and its security agencies.
Note from the editors: In a follow-up article, the author will analyze the structural mechanisms behind the above-described discourse, its spread to the federal level, and the political practices of its opponents.