1989–2019: Politics of Space in the New Berlin

Projects realized especially for the exhibition exemplify various urbanistic policies and their consequences for today’s Berlin. A comprehensive mapping of the privatization of Berlin for the first time visualizes the sale of municipal real estate throughout the past decades. In his Glossar der Privatisierung (Glossary of Privatization), Andrej Holm analyses certain terms that reflect administrative instruments and processes on the basis of which the extensive sale of state-owned real estate was executed. Charlotte Malterre- Barthes and students of the Technical University of Berlin present the real estate portfolio Real Estate of Emergency, which examines around thirty current objects of speculation and exposes the interests behind them. Guerilla Architects examine the language of the speculative housing market by translating a glossary of the real estate language into film. Schroeter & Berger deal with the creativity dispositif of the municipal marketing campaign be Berlin and adapt its aesthetics by means of collage, montage and détournement. Based on a research project by architectural theoretician Verena Hartbaum, who systematically explored Berlin’s historicizing architecture, Daniel Poller recorded the vast number of new buildings of the last three decades in a photo documentation in order to demonstrate social mechanisms of distinction and exclusion on the basis of their formal principles. With his video installation, Poller creates the image of a real existing Berlin that has chosen the past as its social objective.

Guerilla Architects is an international collective of architects, urban planners, and artists. Founded in 2012 while sharing a common squatting experience in London, the team focuses on unused and forgotten urban resources. Based in Berlin, Kiel, and Sofia, they use unconventional and subversive methods to reveal how socioeconomic structures are being questioned and threatened in urban public spaces.

Shahrzad Rahmani is a freelance stage designer and scenographer in Berlin. In her work she focuses on interdisciplinary spaces and installations in theatrical, urban and performative contexts. Born in Karlsruhe and raised in Tehran, Shahrzad completed her studies in architecture at KIT in 2010. Already during her studies as well as afterwards she was involved in exhibitions and worked in architectural offices in Germany, Spain and Iran. Since completing her master's degree in stage design-scenic space at the TU Berlin, she has been working as a freelance stage designer, set designer and scenographer at theaters, festivals and for exhibitions.

Philine Schneider works as an architect in Berlin at the intersection of curatorial practice, art, and research in urban planning and architecture. In 2011 she co-founded CollageLab in order to develop transdisciplinary research in architecture and urbanism. Within this framework, she conceived exhibitions, competitions, workshops and other event formats. In addition to her work as an architect, she worked from 2011–2015 as a research assistant at Bauhaus Dessau and 2015/2016 at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in the field of international urban planning. Since 2019 she is a partner at rosa architekten, Berlin.

Katalin Gennburg is an urban researcher and an active member of the German Left party. She studied philosophy and historical urban studies at TU Berlin and wrote her thesis on post-1990 land privatization in Brandenburg and the wealthy suburbs of Berlin. In the elections for the Berlin House of Representatives in September 2016, she was elected by direct mandate to represent the electoral district 1 of Treptow-Köpenick. In the House of Representatives, she is the Left party’s spokesperson on urban development, tourism, and the Smart City Berlin strategy.

Sheila Seyfert-Menzel studied communication design and works as a graphic designer, illustrator, author and concept developer in the fields of brand development, corporate design, editorial and web design for cultural and commercial projects.

Verena Hartbaum is an academic staff member at the Institute for the Foundations of Modern Architecture and Design at the University of Stuttgart and is currently working on her doctorate at the Technical University of Munich on the relationship between architecture and consensus. Her research interests include retrospective building in Berlin, a topic she addressed in the books Retrospektiv Bauen in Berlin (2017) and Der Walter-Benjamin-Platz in the Disko book series (2013, reissued in ARCH+ 235, 2019). For the book series Schriftenreihe für Architektur und Kulturtheorie, she co-edited the book Bayern, München. 100 Jahre Freistaat — Eine Raumverfälschung (On architecture in Bavaria) (2019) and Germania, Venezia: Die deutschen Beiträge zur Architekturbiennale Venedig seit 1991—Eine Oral History (on German submissions to the Venice Architecture Biennale) (2016). In 2015 she was involved in the conception of ARCH+ 221: Tausendundeine Theorie (Thousand and One Theories).

Andrej Holm is a sociologist with a focus on urban and regional sociology and works at Humboldt University in Berlin. In numerous publications, he has addressed urban politics in neoliberalism and associated processes of revaluation and repression, a topic in which urban social movements play an elementary role. In addition to his activist and academic activities, Holm was state secretary of the Berlin Senate’s Department for Urban Development and Housing for a short time in 2016/2017, which he still advises today as a member of the advisory board for the city’s Urban Development Concept on Housing.

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, urbanist, and scholar. In 2009 she founded the urban design practice OMNIBUS. From 2014 to 2019 she was program manager of the Master of Advanced Studies in Urban Design program led by Marc Angélil at ETH Zurich, and was a guest professor at TU Berlin from 2018 to 2019. She holds a PhD from ETH Zurich on the effects of the political economy of food on the built environment. She co-authored the books Housing Cairo: The Informal Response (2016), Some Haunted Spaces in Singapore (2018), and Eileen Gray: A House under the Sun (2019). She is a founding member of the Parity Group, a grassroots organization committed to improving gender equality in architecture. She co-curated the XII International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo, held in 2019 under the theme Everyday.
 

Daniel Poller is a visual artist living in Berlin. The construction of history and its erasure or overwriting by images is a central motif in his artistic practice. He is currently working on a long-term project on the transformation of Potsdam’s inner city. In his recent feature “Frankfurter Kopien” (Frankfurt Copies) in ARCH+ 235, he takes a critical look at the reconstruction of Frankfurt’s old town.

Schroeter & Berger is a design office founded in 2005 by Maximilian Sauerbier and Sebastian Helm while both were students at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Their designs incorporate stylistic devices and design maxims from modernism, constructivism, and the Russian avant-garde, visual poetry, New Objectivity, and the clear typography of Switzerland. In addition to commissioned works, they realize socially relevant projects in the form of conceptual, interdisciplinary, and cross-media visual and auditory works. Their work has been presented internationally at festivals, on radio and television, and in museums and galleries.
 

Florine Schüschke studied architecture at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). Her interest lies in the city and in the social and political conditions that enable non-profit-oriented urban development.

How, of all places, was it possible that Berlin, the city of unlimited open spaces, came to experience an increase in rents and a shortage of affordable housing? After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the merging of the eastern and western parts of the city made spatial resources seem inexhaustible, but investor-friendly urban planning, real estate speculation and massive waves of privatization fostered an urban sell-off policy. For the present and the future, the following questions arise: How can the housing question be dealt with? How can the restored awareness of the social responsibility of property, as it is currently being discussed in politics and civil society, manifest itself?

Thursday, September 19, 2019, 7 pm
Mythos des Marktes (The Myth of the Market) I
Discussion with Daniela Brahm (artist, ExRotaprint, Berlin), Andrej Holm (sociologist, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Karin Lenhart-Roth (political scientist, Hochschule Hannover), Florine Schüschke (urban researcher, Berlin), Steffen Zillich (politician, Berlin)

Thursday, October 10, 2019, 7 pm
Mythos des Marktes (The Myth of the Market) II
Discussion with Arno Brandlhuber (architect, Berlin, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich), Katalin Gennburg (politician, Berlin), Guerilla Architects (Berlin), Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (architect and urban designer, TU Berlin / ETH Zürich) Birgit Möhring (general manager Berliner Immobilienmanagement GmbH, Berlin), Philine Schneider (architect and curator, Berlin)

During the post-reunification period, Berlin provided space, was in a state of flux and, according to the political vision, was to become a cosmopolitan city again. These ambitions of becoming a global city often came along with a national rhetoric, which imagined Berlin as Germany’s figurehead in the world. This idea on the one hand led to the comprehensive overwriting of GDR modernism, and on the other to a style of architecture supposedly characteristic of Berlin, with a historicizing and reconstructive way of building. With the completion of major projects such as the Humboldt Forum, the construction of luxury apartments with historic-looking facades or the projected reconstruction of the Karstadt department store on Hermannplatz, the debate on revisionist tendencies remains virulent.

Thursday, September 26, 2019, 7 pm
Mythos der Geschichte (The Myth of History)
Discussion with Adrian von Buttlar (art historian, Technische Universität Berlin), Michael S. Falser (art historian, Heidelberg University), Verena Hartbaum (architectural theorist, University of Stuttgart), Daniel Poller (artist, Berlin)

Today, Berlin is regarded as creative, smart and innovative. By taking a detour via subculture, art and creativity, the city has at last become a global city. For Berlin knows how to stage itself as a haven for artists, creatives, and start-ups. This staging of Berlin as a laboratory for innovation and creativity is part of a “culturalization of the urban sphere” (Andreas Reckwitz), in which urban creativity and culture are specifically mobilized and exploited as a resource. As is so often the case, the revolution devours its own children: The myth of the creative Berlin in turn leads to displacement and exclusion, to institutionalization and commodification. How much truth lies in the narrative of the creative Berlin? Which positive and negative urban impulses have evolved from the scene? And how can independent creative spaces be preserved and newly built in order to contribute to the promotion of a city for everyone?

Wednesday, October 2, 2019, 7 pm
Mythos der Kreativität (The Myth of Creativity)
Discussion with Florian Hertweck (architect, University of Luxemburg), MetroZones – Center for Urban Affairs (Berlin), Nina Scholz (journalist and author, Berlin), Schroeter & Berger (designers, Berlin)

Tuesday, October 8, 2019, 8 pm
Die Inszenierung des Urbanen (The Staging of the Urban Element)
Screening of works from the n.b.k. Video-Forum collection, selected by Kristina Paustian (n.b.k. Video- Forum), with a commentary by Sophia Gräfe (media and cultural scientist, Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin)

Films by Denis Beaubois, in the event of Amnesia the city will recall… (1997); Arno Brandlhuber / Christopher Roth, Are You Happy? (2012); KP Brehmer, Walkings Nr. 1–6 (1969–1970); Niklas Goldbach, Habitat C3B (2008); Allan Kaprow, Sweet Wall (1970); Holly Zausner, The Beginning (2003)

The connection between identity and economy has been far too little explored in Berlin discourse. This issue reveals that Berlin Neohistorismus, the facade discussion, Critical Reconstruction, and later the discourse on the Creative City, in addition to the identity-political goals after reunification, served decisively to enforce an economy of the city based on privatization. In this process, history and creativity became marketing tools for the real estate industry in the global competition for locations. The effects of this reactionary projection put Berlin under social-spatial tension today.

This issue is the second of our two Berlin issues, which we publish as a sequel to our exhibition 1989-2019: Politics of Space in the New Berlin. In a sense, the first issue dealt with the lost struggles of the past, such as the mass privatization of municipal real estate after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This issue now asks how practicing architects can regain agency. We address three central aspects that lead to a new Berlin practice: the economics of building in the face of an overheated real estate market, the discovery of the periphery against the backdrop of the scarcity of building land in the city, and the question of participation, still unloved and misunderstood among planning offices and critics alike.

ARCH+ is an independent magazine for architecture and urbanism. Founded in the wake of the 1968 awakening, it focuses on the critical reflection of the social aspirations of architecture. Each issue gives an in-depth examination of a topic and addresses current discussions in other disciplines with regard to architectural and urbanistic issues. For the time of the exhibition, ARCH+ will relocate its editorial offices to Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in order to create an issue, based on the exhibition and the discourse program, that seeks to address the discursive and political changes of recent times as well as the current paradigm of the spatial policy in Berlin. As already realized during documenta 12 (2007), ARCH+ transforms an exhibition space into a public editorial office and combines artistic positions with the production of critical theory.