In October 2025, during a press conference in Brandenburg, Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz sparked a debate when he claimed that migration causes problems in the Stadtbild (cityscape). Nassim Mehran argues that reducing residents, infrastructure, and stories to a cityscape can create a surface for projecting unease without examining its causes. Her text is a plea to overcome this austerity of interpretation and contains references to traumatic and potentially distressing experiences.
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Within one month, from my apartment window, I witnessed two people die by suicide near my home. I knew nothing of their lives or the preceding circumstances. I will not turn them into symbols or evidence of a single urban crisis. They remain singular losses about which I know almost nothing.
That limit matters. A window provides a view, not an explanation. It reveals what enters the frame while concealing wider relations. I encountered consequences, not causes: no biography, institutional history, or care relation was visible. Seeing compels attention; it does not grant knowledge.
This makes me wary of political claims based on a city’s appearance. A cityscape may register distress, but it cannot explain its production. Under uncertainty, however, what can be seen is easily treated as what must be responsible.
When an image becomes a diagnosis
In October 2025, Friedrich Merz connected a remaining ‘problem’ in the Stadtbild – the cityscape – to migration and deportations. Asked to clarify, he suggested that people ask their daughters what he meant; he later referred to migrants without legal residence or work who did not follow the rules. However, none of this can be inferred from appearances. His formulation invited the public to fill in the blanks with familiar fears.
My concern is not Merz’s personal opinion or intention, but the work performed by the formulation. Stadtbild compresses residents, infrastructures, and histories into a surface for inspection. Unease attaches to visible bodies, while removal is offered before insecurity’s causes are examined.
Merz did not invent this way of seeing, and conservatism should not simply be equated with the far right. The question is how frames travel. When visible differences become evidence of a failed order, the line between belonging and not belonging is drawn through appearance. Those exposed to a crisis become an explanation for it.
The problem with the Stadtbild formulation is not that it acknowledges urban unease. It asks a partial visual impression to perform explanatory work it cannot bear.
The city outside the frame
Outside, I pass a bicycle memorial for a cyclist killed in a collision. It is visible; the mobility regime behind it – road allocation, accepted speeds, enforcement, and investment – is not.
During a cold winter night, an unhoused man slept in our stairwell. He was not an image of disorder, but a person seeking warmth without the possibility of retreating from public view. The housing market, shelter capacity, welfare bureaucracy, care systems, and events that brought him there remained invisible.
Close to my home, a person was killed in a shooting, and sirens regularly cut through the neighborhood. They may create an atmosphere of permanent emergency, but cannot explain a particular crime or tell us who should be feared. What happens when the state becomes most audible at the point of emergency, while prevention remains quiet and undervalued?
I often think I can read exhaustion in the faces of people traveling to and from work. I cannot know what they feel by looking, but the perception prompts questions about insecure jobs, long commutes, care, rising costs, and housing fear. Berlin’s poverty rate reportedly rose from 16.1 per cent in 2024 to 18.7 per cent in 2025. The city identifies 57 areas where disadvantage is concentrated, increasingly on the periphery.
These observations prove no single structural relation. Suicide, homelessness, traffic violence, exhaustion, and a shooting are distinct phenomena, not one narrative of collapse. Their coexistence instead exposes the inadequacy of the image as diagnosis: suffering is visible while its production remains fragmented and obscure.
Visibility is also divided by class. Wealth allows one to purchase retreat: a quieter home, private mobility, paid care, and the ability to leave. People with fewer resources live more of their lives in public and have less control over their appearance. Poverty becomes hypervisible, yet its production remains abstract. Those least able to retreat are most likely to become the ‘problem’ of the cityscape.
An austerity of interpretation
The erosion of social and cultural infrastructure deepens this problem. Around 130 million Euro – almost twelve per cent of the previously planned amount – was cut from Berlin’s 2025 cultural budget, and continued to shape negotiations for 2026 and 2027. Social organizations report that funding often fails to cover rising wages, rents, and operating costs even as needs increase.
The loss goes beyond canceled performances, shorter hours, and fewer counseling appointments. Libraries, youth centers, neighborhood initiatives, cultural venues, unions, advice centers, and local media are infrastructures of interpretation: places where private distress acquires shared language, strangers meet, and explanations are tested. They are not automatically inclusive, but without durable institutions of encounter, collective sense-making becomes harder.
We might call this an austerity of interpretation. Cuts diminish not only services but a city’s capacity to understand itself. For people navigating multiple precarious situations, the focus is on getting through the day. Organizations survive from project to project; overworked residents have less time to participate. Experiences remain individualized – my rent, burnout, loneliness, fear – and their relations become harder to articulate.
Misinformation enters not simply as false content injected into credulous minds, but as ready-made explanation. Platforms reward speed, repetition, outrage, and recognizable enemies. In Germany, 40 per cent of respondents in the 2026 Digital News Report sometimes or often avoided news. This does not explain support for the right, but registers an environment in which willingness to remain with complexity cannot be assumed.
Struggle over the city’s causal map
A new House of Representatives will be elected in Berlin on September 20, 2026. A BerlinTrend survey published on September 2 placed the CDU at 21 per cent, the Left at 19, and both the Greens and AfD at 18. Housing and rents were by far the most frequently identified problem, at 32 per cent; immigration was named by ten per cent and security or crime by nine. This snapshot explains no vote, but shows material insecurity and struggles over belonging coexisting.
Poverty and insecurity do not mechanically produce racism or far-right votes. Such a claim would deny people political agency and repeat the reductionism being criticized. Between hardship and the ballot stands a contested infrastructure of interpretation: parties, platforms, news organizations, workplaces, unions, neighborhood networks, cultural institutions, and everyday conversations. Grievances have no predetermined destination. They must be named, connected, and organized.
The far right does not merely offer different policies; it supplies a way of seeing. It converts diffuse insecurity into a visible boundary between an endangered ‘us’ and a threatening ‘them.’ Housing scarcity becomes a problem of outsiders; weakened services become a problem of excessive claims; insecurity becomes a property of particular bodies. Visible identity replaces structural causality, while authoritarian certainty presents itself as relief from democratic ambiguity.
When mainstream actors adopt parts of this diagnostic grammar, even while rejecting the far right, they strengthen its account of what kind of problem society faces. The election is therefore also a struggle over the city’s causal map: what counts as evidence, whose insecurity is recognized, and who is made responsible for conditions they did not create.
From cityscape to democratic city
The BG’s “Deep Democracy” project asks why understandable disillusionment is increasingly articulated through right-wing authoritarianism rather than democratization. This question has an urban answer. Democracy requires more than elections, safeguards, or a rhetorical firewall against extremism. It needs a social and material foundation.
Affordable housing, dignified work, reliable care, safe mobility, cultural spaces, local media, and neighborhood institutions are not merely policy sectors. They shape whether residents have the security, time, relationships, and language required for public life. Deep democracy would grant those most affected greater authority to define problems and decide how resources are used. Marginalized residents must be able not only to appear in a more inclusive image, but to contest the frame itself.
I can still hear the sirens, pass the bicycle memorial, and remember the events that took place outside my window. The window, as a frame of perception, remains partial. The ethical lesson of the window is not that visible suffering is meaningless, but that we must refuse to confuse it with knowledge. We need to move beyond the frame, trace relations, and listen to people whose lives cannot be read from their bodies.
A democratic city does not manufacture the appearance of order by removing those judged not to belong. It produces safety without turning residents into threats, confronts suffering without converting it into spectacle, and makes its structures available for collective transformation. On the eve of an election, the task is not to deny urban insecurity. It is to prevent its misrecognition. Visibility is not explanation. Perhaps deep democracy begins there.