With these stark lines from their 1979 song “Neppes, Ihrefeld un Kreuzberg”, the Cologne rock band BAP offered a scathing portrait of migrant life in West Germany. Sung in the local Kölsch dialect, the song narrates the arrival of so-called Gastarbeiter (‘guest workers’) from Turkey, conjuring the disorientation, labour exploitation, and social exclusion they faced. The chorus loops together Nippes, Ehrenfeld, and Berlin’s Kreuzberg; all districts imagined here as symbolic of hardship and resilience, where working-class and migrant life unfolds under the shadow of systemic neglect. The dream of a better life followed by the bitter realisation that one is not wanted, cuts to the core of a postwar Germany unwilling to reckon with its dependence on migrant labour. Long before the term ‘gentrification’ became commonplace, BAP’s lyrics offered a powerful critique of urban inequality, racialised displacement, and the hollow promise of West German prosperity. This song – and the comparison it draws between Ehrenfeld and Kreuzberg – sparked my interest in this part of Cologne, as Ehrenfeld is often cast as Cologne’s Kreuzberg, a district where countercultural identity, working-class histories, and a globalised urban present intersect and, at times, collide.

Rather than exploring the area by myself, I decided to develop an itinerary for my colleagues from THEAGENT, so we could discover the neighbourhood together. We were also joined by colleagues attending the 2025 IFTR conference in Cologne. It was a welcome opportunity to show our colleagues how THEAGENT has been working on sites – exchanging ideas not (only) through papers or panels, but by moving together through the urban fabric, walking, pausing, noticing, and discussing.

The tour traced Ehrenfeld’s complex urban development: we moved from remnants of its industrial past – old factories and workshops now housing design studios or performance spaces – to the easy cosmopolitanism of its trendy bars and clubs, and on to the clean-lined, globally recognisable aesthetic of the 2010s’ new-builds.

We began the walk at the Venloer Straße/Ehrenfeld U-Bahn station, a bustling node in the district’s present-day mobility network, surrounded by falafel shops, discount chains, and bike traffic. Yet just behind it rises a striking monument to Ehrenfeld’s industrial past: the Helios Tower. Built in the late 19th century by Helios-electricity plant, the lighthouse stands incongruously inland, far from any coastline. Its purpose was never maritime but emblematic – constructed as a test facility and company symbol by a firm that electrified lighthouses across the globe. It now anchors the area’s historical memory and functions as an unofficial logo for the neighbourhood, appearing on tote bags, graffiti, and real estate brochures.

Around it, remnants of Ehrenfeld’s rapid 19th-century industrialisation remain legible in the red-brick factories, chimney stumps, and gridded workers’ housing that still structure the urban landscape. For a brief period, Ehrenfeld was its own city, springing up on farmland as a purpose-built industrial settlement before being incorporated into Cologne in 1888. It grew rapidly with the arrival of companies like 4711, the famed cologne manufacturer, and others who saw the area’s cheap land and good rail links as fertile ground for production. Today, many of these industrial buildings have been converted into cultural venues, start-ups, or loft apartments becoming spatial palimpsests, where brick and steel meet brushed concrete and bike storage.

The second stop, Bartholomäus-Schink-Straße, marks one of the district’s painful historical layers. In October 1944, thirteen young members of the Edelweiss Pirates were hanged here without trial by the Gestapo, their bodies left on display as a warning. Among them was sixteen-year-old Barthel Schink, whose name the street now bears. The Edelweiss Pirates were local teenagers who resisted Nazi conformity, rejecting the Hitler Youth and helping deserters, forced laboure rs, and Jews in hiding. A memorial plaque and large mural now mark the spot of the executions, embedding memory into the everyday fabric of the street.

From there, we walked to Kebapland, a cult-status Turkish grill opposite the police station. Even before reaching it, the thick smoke rising from the charcoal grill signalled its presence. The olfactory landmark divides opinion in the neighbourhood. Its popularity stretches beyond Ehrenfeld: comedian Jan Böhmermann has publicly sung its praises, while locals and late-night revellers pack its small terrace. But its visibility is not without friction. Police officers working across the street have long complained about the constant haze; efforts to extend the chimney and mitigate the smoke have been expensive and largely ineffective. Kebapland thus occupies a curious space in the local imagination: celebrated, contested, entrenched. It became a springboard for our reflections on the spatial legacy of the post-war Gastarbeiter programme, not only in the form of businesses and culinary culture, but in the contested presence of Turkish life in a district increasingly shaped by gentrification.

We proceeded to Helios37, a renovated industrial complex now home to creative studios, co-working spaces, and events. Its name and branding play on local memory, referencing the nearby Helios Tower, yet the building’s clean signage and discreet fencing mark it as part of the new ‘design economy’. Here, gentrification reveals itself less through erasure than through careful curation. The former factory is not demolished but recontextualised: its industrial past aestheticised and monetised. Just a block away, the contrast is stark: new-build lofts, minimalist cafés, and co-living developments model a sleek, globalised urban future. We paused here to take in the contradictions. As Cologne urbanist Jochen Scharf has shown, the area around Heliosstraße once had an extremely low residential population, whereas other areas of Ehrenfeld held densely built working-class housing. Today, it is the site of targeted urban reinvention. An urban playground – much like the one surrounding Warschauer Straße in Berlin – is emerging integrating consumption, creativity, and trendy venues for an urban middle-class with disposable income. In recent years, bars, cinemas, and even black light crazy golf venues have spru ng up, pointing to changing consumption habits.

We continued on to the Sonic Ballroom, a longstanding dive bar and music venue that has resisted the polish of more recent arrivals. Here, the atmosphere shifted: rougher, louder, stickier. Opened in the early 2000s, the venue continues to host punk, garage rock, and indie gigs, drawing a fiercely loyal crowd. It offered a counterpoint to the smooth surfaces of Helios37 and the design-led co-working complexes. If the ‘new’ Ehrenfeld banks on cosmopolitanism and upward mobility, places like the Sonic Ballroom hold on to an older idea of subculture: gritty, niche, stubbornly unbranded. Yet even here, contradictions abound. Rising rents and noise complaints from new residents have made it increasingly difficult for such venues to operate without compromise. We stood for a while outside and discussed the shrinking space for affordable nightlife in Cologne.

A few streets over, we reached the site of the CityLeaks Urban Art Gallery – though we found no gallery, only a row of closed artist studio doors. When we rang the doorbell, a man working in one of the studios emerged from one of the spaces and generously offered us some background. The studios, he explained, had been home to several local street artists, some of whom had taken part in the CityLeaks Urban Art Festival. Held biannually since 2011, the festival has brought international muralists to Ehrenfeld and Cologne, turning the district into an open-air gallery. After our conversation with him, we looked around more attentively, spotting wall works we had previously overlooked. It was a reminder that the aesthetics of urban life are often found not in designated sites but in margins, fragments, and chance encounters.

The final stop of the walk was the Urania Theater. We had not scheduled a meeting here, but a stroke of luck led to a spontaneous conversation with its artistic director, Bettina Montazem, who happened to be working in the theatre’s bar/café when we arrived. After we sat down with a drink, Montazem joined us and told us about her theatre. Having taken over the theatre in 2018, she first programmed a relatively traditional repertoire with Brecht plays and the like. Having been hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and facing dwindling audiences and shifting public taste, she made a bold decision in 2021 to shift the theatre’s focus. Instead of staging plays, Urania began to present what Montazem calls “Handlungsvarieté” (“plot-based variety”) – a genre-blurring mix of circus, cabaret, and narrative storytelling. The result is a playful, popular format that reaches new audiences without abandoning artistic ambition. Montazem spoke candidly about the challenges of running an independent theatre in a rapidly transforming district: the competition for attention, the need to balance accessibility and innovation, the pressures of sustaining both local identity and financial viability. Her openness gave us an intimate glimpse into the cultural labour that underpins Ehrenfeld’s creative life, not just in terms of performance, but also in terms of negotiation, adaptation, survival.

We ended the evening at Bumann und Sohn, a trendy beer garden that embodies the district’s current moment: artisanal drinks, curated DJ sets (just unfortunately not in the night we were there), urban greenery. It was an apt conclusion in a space that draws on Ehrenfeld’s layered histories while also signalling its present as one of Cologne’s most desirable (and expensive) quarters. Sitting under the large umbrellas at Bumann und Sohn, we circled back over the day’s impressions: the uneven transitions, the juxtapositions of style and use, the ways in which history clings to the built environment even as new layers are added. Ehrenfeld no longer reads as a marginal district, but its role within Cologne’s urban imagination is still being negotiated. What kinds of futures are being made here and for whom?