Title: Soft Urbanism: Safeguarding the private city Keywords: space, power, governance, residential, inner-city Authors: Henning F¨ uller and Nadine Marquardt Address: Institut f¨ ur Humangeographie Robert-Mayer-Str. 6 D-60325 Frankfurt am Main Telephone: +49/69 798 22403 Fax: +49 69 798 28173 E-mail: fueller@em.uni-frankfurt.de n.marquardt@em.uni-frankfurt.de Paper no: 043 Abstract: In the recent years we are witnessing a shift regarding the grand narration of the American City. After long years of urban flight by the middle classes and a corresponding neglect for the downtown area, an urban renaissance has gained sig- nificance. Driven by rising prices for land, an increasingly unbearable commute and changing demographics, living downtown is gaining attraction for the former suburbanites. Developers and city planners are readily responding towards and actively encouraging this trend by producing a new residential downtown: safe and clean, exciting and lively, convenient and healthy. Considering the implications of such recently produced ‘soft urban’ spaces from a power-aware perspective some additional functions can be pointed out. The new residential downtown evolves as a risk-managed, homogenized and privatized part of the city. Visibly the most dif- ferent opposite of a Gated Community (commonly imagined as a fenced suburban enclave) these new ‘soft urban’ spaces functionally do have a strong resemblance with GCs. In taking ‘the best of both worlds’, the emerging soft urbanism can be conceived as a sophistication of the privatized city we see in Gated Commu- nities: providing the comforts of a safeguarded environment without missing the excitements of the city. PUG 043 1