The transition from people''s property to private property: Consequences of the restitution principle for urban development and urban renewal in East Berlin''s inner-city residential areas

The constitutional decision to return to their original owners all real-estate property in East Germany that had either been expropriated or placed under state administration (the restitution principle) has had significant consequences for urban development and urban renewal. Experiences from East Berlin's innercity residential areas illustrate the effects on the state of repair of housing, the character of residential neighbourhoods, the tenants living in the areas affected, and the future structure of real-estate ownership. The case studies reveal a picture of a contradictory development of residential neighbourhoods, including shifting power relations and new polarizations, especially between tenants and landlords.     

Insurgent participation: consensus and contestation in planning the redevelopment of Berlin-Tempelhof airport

Despite decades of debate, participatory planning continues to be contested. More recently, research has revealed a relationship between participation and neoliberalism, in which participation works as a post-political tool—a means to depoliticize planning and legitimize neoliberal policy-making. This article argues that such accounts lack attention to the opportunities for opposing neoliberal planning that may be inherent within participatory processes. In order to further an understanding of the workings of resistance within planning, it suggests the notion of insurgent participation—a mode of contentious intervention in participatory approaches. It develops this concept through the analysis of various participatory approaches launched to regenerate the former airport Berlin-Tempelhof. A critical reading of participation in Tempelhof reveals a contradictory process. Although participatory methods worked to mobilize support for predefined agendas, their insurgent participation also allowed participants to criticize and shape the possibilities of engagement, challenge planning approaches and envision alternatives to capitalist imperatives.     

柏林城市文脉与设计之都创意化道路

柏林的经济、文化事业发达,是世界的艺术中心、时尚设计中心,也是欧洲文学、媒体、音乐及科学的发展中心。柏林建设了完整的创意设计服务平台、国际推广的本土设计品牌、完善的创意人才培训体系等,以其深厚的文化底蕴实现了城市的创意化发展,并逐步成为国际文化创意的大熔炉。     

Dictators and their capital cities: Moscow and Berlin in the 1930s

Stalin and Hitler planned major changes in the townscapes of their capital cities. These plans were part of their effort to install highly mobilized despotic regimes that needed a wide-ranging set of symbols to focus allegiance and to impress awe. These plans remained to some extent paper exercises but part of it left significant traces in the contemporary cities, particularly in Moscow. The intended changes showed similarities in their megalomania expressed in plans for a gigantic dome surrounded by a huge public square in the core of the city. There were also differences as regards the type of symbols used due to both dictotors' different roles within their regimes, the degree of didactic intent due to the nature of the commanding ideologies and the level of modernization of both countries, and the diverging versions of antimodernist building style (which they shared with many others elsewhere at the time).     

THE SOVIET WAR MEMORIAL IN TREPTOW,BERLIN*

ABSTRACT. The Soviet War Memorial in Treptow, Berlin, was an important emblem of political power and ideology during and after the cold war. Designed as the Soviet Union's premiere extraterritorial battlefield shrine, the site combines a veterans' cemetery with a large‐scale memorial complex celebrating the Soviet victory in World War II. The monument was intended for use in Soviet military commemorative activity and became a key sacred space in the Cult of the Soviet War Dead, but its location in Berlin meant that it served other political purposes. By avoiding definitive statements on key issues the memorial attained a semantic flexibility that enabled it to remain a focal point of commemorative activity for decades. The memorial continues to play a part in contemporary Berlin, though the political overtones are now overshadowed by its role as a shrine to the war dead.     

The vernacular and the monumental: memory and landscape in post-war Berlin

Recent geographical literature has given extensive consideration to monumental landscapes and collective memory. Vernacular landscapes have been given limited attention, though they too bear testimony to collective memory. The vernacular and monumental are intertwined in urban space, and ambiguity and fluidity mark their border, yet their distinction remains significant. The monumental sustains collective memory, linking the past, present and future. The vernacular provides spatial forms for the routines of everyday life. Yet, professionals and critics often interpret and present the vernacular as a symbol of collective memory, or a monument, rather than recognizing that collective memory in the vernacular is critical when centered on the complex relation between space and lived experience. The case study of Berlin during post-WWII reconstruction as well as the reconstruction following reunification demonstrates consistency in problems arising from treating the vernacular as the monumental.     

Building a national capital in an age of globalization: the case of Berlin

Berlin is being remade as capital of a unified German nation state, just at the time when the role of nation states is being called into question by the claims of globalization, and the associated rise of global cities. The experience of Berlin suggests that it may be unhelpful to accept the world-city agenda as a universal template. Instead, it is necessary to explore the ways in which different agencies, companies and authorities negotiate the world around them, seeking to insert the city into pre-existing ideas and realities, as well as to influence and shape them, in what is best understood as a wider process of 'worlding'.     

Local Bordering Practices,Refugees, and Civil Society: The Case of Berlin

Using the case of Berlin, this article examines civil society actors in relation to local bordering practices following the large number of refugee arrivals in 2015. Combining critical border, migration, and urban studies and adopting a Foucauldian lens, the article aims to illustrate to what extent civil society actors have challenged and transformed local bordering practices vis‐à‐vis refugees within a specific urban space. The analysis illustrates that civil society actors have created new spaces of inclusion for refugees and brought new political and normative challenges to the established notions of belonging. On the other hand, they have also reproduced bordering practices either by their integration into formal state structures or by reinforcing hierarchical categorizations and unequal power relations embedded in the notion of humanitarianism. Finally, the article argues that these de/re‐bordering practices of civil society actors should be understood in line with the constraints that established bordering processes and the existing political and structural dynamics placed on them.     

From post-politics to a politics of possibility? Unravelling the privatization of the Berlin Water Company

This article explores the constraints and contingencies of contemporary urban governance, with reference to the partial privatization (1999) and partial remunicipalization (2012) of the Berlin Water Company (BWB). It outlines the processes through which this major shift in Berlin politics occurred, showing how the mainstream consensus on privatization was disrupted and alternatives to apparent neoliberal conformity emerged. Dynamics apparent in the BWB case – commercialization, privatization, re-regulation, public contestation and remunicipalization – are indicative of the challenges and opportunities of making policy in and beyond the global norms of neoliberalism. It is argued that this case is important because it reveals something about what we might call the “politics of possibility” within the paradigm of neoliberal urban governance: the continuing potential for change within the constraints of an urban governance configured to the logics and needs of markets. Given this, the paper concludes that local contingencies in urban governance problematize sweeping notions of a post-political condition. However observable post-political strategies and outcomes in Berlin and elsewhere are, researchers should not assume that they are inevitably dominant or universal.