Disclaimer: The following essay was written by me as an introduction to a project "Berlin – Barriers and scars", made in collaboration with Max Koenraad and Kas Bartelink, and is reproduced here with their explicit permission.
Reading time: 7 mins
A city grows and develops in stages. Shifts in economic, political, and social contexts define the city. A city takes new paths in development to adapt to its society. Changes in the city fabric are sometimes consciously designed by human decision. Master plans are these "designed" responses. More often, however, the physical changes are nothing if not evolutionary, a direct response to human behaviour and interaction. Such are organic city changes.
The city fabric bears witness to the trajectory of city development. Alterations in the building structure and the spatial planning noticeable long after the changes are made. Traces of different structures, a patchwork in the city, preserve the information of human history. A variation within the city fabric often makes living conditions different in each of its patches, forming social barriers. This study investigates how social changes force the physical city to adapt, and how these physical alterations affect social life in return.
During the centuries of its history, Berlin has undergone many social and political developments. To look further into the idea of how such changes affect the physical urban fabric and may lead to the formation of barriers, the four most prominent periods in Berlin's history were selected. Our study of Berlin starts with the German industrialisation of the 19th century and Hobrecht's plan. Then, the destruction of the city in WWII, followed by its reconstruction by the Allies. Finally, it completes with German reunification.
Berlin Wall. Courtesy: Bettmann/Corbis
The starting point of this research is marked by the rapid industrialisation of Berlin. Started as a twin city of Berlin and Colln, then merged to form what we now know as Berlin, it surrounded itself with fortifications in the middle of the 17th century. Those quickly deteriorated and were abandoned by the mid-18th century, when the Customs wall enclosed the city at a larger perimeter, to ease levying of taxes on goods that came to and from the city. But in the 19th century, rapid industrialisation required the city’s expansion and restructuring; the city opened.
Hobrecht's plan, 1862
Rapid urbanisation and population growth ensued. To cope with the rise of population, Hobrecht's plan, named after its main author, James Hobrecht, was adopted. Essentially, it was the first attempt at planning the city for future growth that Berlin ever had (Bentlin, 2018).
The plan showed a network of radial and ring roads that connected the sprawling suburbs and featured a wide mesh of roads – a key element in the future building structure. As the plan was focused on the feasibility and optimisation of its new infrastructure, what happened within the dedicated plot seemed of lesser importance. This and its other shortcomings are now frowned upon as being the causes of many social issues of Berlin in the following decades.
As the population quickly expanded and the need for dwellings grew, rental barracks or so-called Mietskazerne became the dominate building typology for many years to come. A testament to land overuse, buildings filled all sides of grid block, leaving an interior courtyard. Lower floors featured more expensive and finer apartments, with living conditions becoming poorer and poorer upstairs. The poorest citizens took up the rooms under the roof. This vertical segregation was one of the key features of this new type of developments. It mixed social classes within one building but without any attempts to bridge the gap of wealth – a social barrier. Horizontally, such variation also persisted. The street-side apartments were finer and richer than those in the rear buildings, open to the courtyard. The streets were aligned with middle-class dwellings – rich facades behind which the utmost poverty is hidden (Kuck, 2010). All this inherent inequality, financial contrasts and the strict house rules, which borrowed the system of cohabitation from Prussian barracks, made Mietskazerne such a known cultural phenomenon.
The developments in the older parts of the city, within the old customs wall, such as Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichstadt, were negligible. They began to develop almost two centuries earlier, in the era of Berlin fortress, as new towns next to the old Colln. They showed a much tighter mesh of roads and low-rise, two to three storey buildings, compared to five or six of new Mietskazerne. The older central districts are commercial centres of the city, where the life is most active, and high-class citizens are living. This forms a stark contrast to new Hobrecht-plan neighbourhoods across the old city border.
Hence, in this stage of the city, social changes made alterations to the type of planning and the prevalent typologies. As poorer citizens were pushed out to the new outskirts, the social barrier is formed because of this physical difference in the building texture.
Old vs New City
Although the city grew spectacularly during the following decades, and there were new (unfinished) city plans in progress in the 1930s, the next drastic change to the city fabric of Berlin was its destruction after WWII. The city was a subject to 363 air raids between the 1940 and 1945, the most devastating one happened in February of 1945, destroying most of the aforementioned Dorotheenstadt, Friedrichstadt and Mitte.
The societal context of this transformation is the political agenda of the Nazi state at the time, which lead to the physical destruction of the city. The chaos of war forms a new distinction in the city, between lived and unlived spaces. This line is coincidentally drawn again at the old Customs border - the central districts are almost destroyed while the newer areas around are barely touched. The city is torn apart and fragmented. The destruction of large areas of the city at once made empty patches in infrastructure and built areas, forming almost a network of islands. The social barrier is in the contrast of the destroyed areas, turned into a complete wasteland with no life happening, with the remaining districts, where the life goes on.
At this stage, an interesting urban phenomenon arises that can be compared to a blank canvas. The city is presented with a rare opportunity to rethink its shape and make adaptations with a power of hindsight. As we see in other damaged cities like London, large post-war reconstruction plans were made to help national recovery (Ehrlich & Clout, n.d.). Such plans involved rebuilding, clearing slums and other changes that lead to improvements in the life quality within the city in years that followed. This raises a question of what could be done in Berlin if it had the possibility of forming anew. However, this possibility was always illusionary; the vanquished state was split after the war, and the later restorations had different goals in mind, as shown later.
City vs Non-city
In the following stage, the Reconstruction of the split city is carried independently by the two sides across the border. Although the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, the opposition of political powers at play is so strong that we can speak of the wall long before the physical barrier is built there.
In the East, the optimisation of housing is happening as a backdrop to the advancing industry. Individualism is brought to a minimum, and the main typology becomes Plattenbau, a prefabricated multi-storey apartment building. In the West, a few experiments with dwelling typologies are encouraged by various famous architects. However, though with different rationale, the two sides arrive at similar solutions. Large avenues and low-density developments are built, and a concept of a street is often abandoned. Though neither states it openly, “looking over the Wall” is common, and the two sides are planned as similar as they have ever been, even with an unprecedented physical barrier in between.
Here, it is interesting to note how similar urban solutions of the West and the East are different in their core ideas. In the west, large avenues were built according to modernist principles of prioritising vehicular traffic. A common citizen could afford a family car and enjoy the convenience of the motorway. In the East, individual car ownership is rare, and the avenues were constructed not as motorways but as statements of power, with military parades and marches on state holidays in mind (Schweigler & Wise, 1998).
Hansaviertel district in the West is a good example of different attitudes to the living of common people on the two sides. It was built as a social housing experiment during 1957 Interbau development, an international architectural event organised by FRG that invited the likes of Alvar Aalto, Oscar Niemeyer, and Walter Gropius (Wagner-Conzelmann, n.d.). Here, the famous architects showed the most up-to-date ideas of individualistic dwelling they could offer. In the East, on the other hand, the state was optimising the construction of dwellings for expanding population using efficient Plattenbau. This is happening at the same time as major reconstructions of the Konzerthaus and Nikolaiviertel are given almost unlimited resources and funding – a sign that the project was considered politically important (Hohensee, 2010).
The social gap between the common people in the East and West is unfathomable. Not only they are physically unable to interact, a four-meter tall wall and a death strip in between, but mainly because their states have different political agendas and hence the attitude towards the living of ordinary people.
West City vs East City
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany is the last large social development in Berlin to this day. The city and the nation are together once again, and the state now deals with the aftermath of having been split for almost half a century.
Unification sees the end to many modernistic experiments of the 1950s and 60s, densifying planning and shaping the old streets to what they used to be. Critical Reconstruction is the new way, an attempt to come back to happier times through more traditional mixed-use planning. In the reunited city centre, the new buildings are fit within the historical network of streets. However, the lack of control for this new development backfires.
After the fall of the Wall, the Friedrichstrasse becomes arguably the most desirable place in the city once again, and huge plots are given to the highest bidders to quickly develop this region. Large companies establish their offices here, as Berlin becomes the state’s capital. But the regulations for facades are minimal, and the rush to develop highly profitable central plots leads to questionable developments and office overbuilding. The economic decline of the city does not stop, its growth less than projected. Critical reconstruction, or more precisely, the way it was feverishly carried out, now often considered a mistake in the city planning (ibid).
In an attempt to forget the GDR past and restore a pre-war look, the old Plattenbauten are retrofitted with more western-looking facades. Humanisation is important now. At this stage, we can speak of a blurring of the barriers formed in the previous steps. Traditional restorations, a return to the old city grid and mixed planning, improvements to derelict areas built in the East; the city tries to remove some of its scars.
In this last stage, the physical change – the collapse of the last physical barrier, causes the largest social movement to unite and provide a decent living for all. With the physical and political oppositions now out of the way, it is the time to blend the fabric. The monuments of the Berlin Wall are great illustrations of the current zeitgeist – the boundaries are blurred, the no man’s land is turned into a park; what used to break the city is now joining the community as city’s heritage.
Whole(?)-City
In summary, following the example of Berlin, it can be noted that societal changes and a physical structure of the city are intertwined. One causes the other; a social development causes an adaptation in the physical presence to suit its new needs, and this difference between structures has its effects on the society and the living in return, a complete loop. Such differences often become social barriers and the focal points of segregation between communities and come in different forms. They may be about contrasts of old and new, built and destroyed, or of two opposing political systems. But in the end, modern society strives towards equality and seeks to remove these barriers to form one unified community.
(other images produced by the authors)
