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Considering how Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg has been stigmatized for decades, and recently targeted for redevelopment, you would hardly guess from the outside that the neighborhood is beloved by racialized long-time residents, and considered to be a warm, welcoming Heimat: a space of belonging, where you do not have to justify your presence. This identification is tied to the neighborhood's racialization; the qualities that have been labeled as problems to be transformed through social mix make it a space of relative safety and security, in a context in which many residents experience attempted exclusions from German identity. Based on interviews with racialized long-time residents, contextualized within racialization in Germany, the racialized displaceability embedded in social mix policy, the contested meaning of Heimat, and the experiences of Wilhelmsburg residents with migrantization, I argue that this emphatic claim is a strength that is threatened by the current process of social mix gentrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'urban laboratory' concept has become a popular discourse and structure for urban projects in recent years. In this article, I ask what the concept achieves in the context of racialized urban disinvestment and stigmatization, with the Hamburg International Building Exhibition's (Internationale Bauausstellung Hamburg, 2006–2013) work in Hamburg–Wilhelmsburg as an example. Drawing on laboratory studies and urban sociology, I sketch out the laboratory as an 'imaginative infrastructure', including what it offers to the 'investigators' who use it. Based on the 'situatedness' of the urban laboratory, I argue that the racialization of the neighbourhood and its residents is important to the history of Wilhelmsburg's planning, and to its recent laboratorization. Laboratorization of racialized people and spaces is not new, but rather has a long history in European colonialism. I conclude that though the experiment in Hamburg–Wilhelmsburg appears to be with the neighbourhood's racialization itself, there is nothing experimental about attempting the planning myth and common sense of 'social mix' to which Internationale Bauausstellung Hamburg contributes. I argue that racialized Wilhelmsburgers deserve problem-solving that does not reinforce existing patterns of development and thus their stigmatization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]