Berlin’s Urban Planning Dilemma

The noise never stops. Every day, new masses of concrete and steel rise up from the ground before the very eyes of tourists strolling along the East Side Gallery. This never-ending construction site is located right next to the most famous ruins in German history: a 1300-metre section of the Berlin Wall covered with colourful murals by artists from all over the world. The longest segment of what’s left of the Wall today winds its way along the banks of the Spree River. But believe it or not, this is precisely where developers are building a kind of Las Vegas. Auditoriums, shopping centres and luxury hotels have already been built on the old no-man's land between the boroughs of Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg.
It all started thirty years ago.

On 9 November 1989, Berlin, previously divided into East and West Berlin, did away with over 155 kilometres of walls and no-go zones. What remained was a scar in the cityscape that became a goldmine for land-hungry developers.
“The city was totally broke in the 1990s,” recounts historian Niko Rollmann, who has been living in Berlin for over twenty years. “The economy had collapsed and the city did everything it could to attract foreign capital.”

New building projects were supposed to pay off the city's €60 billion debts. One such project is the development of a huge site along the banks of the Spree. Investors and urban planners called it Mediaspree to attract financial backers. As the name suggests, the 180-hectare complex is to be a hub of media, communication, new technologies and services. After being presented to the Berlin senate in 2002, the project took off and became an integral part of the city's development plan.
  
The American billionaire Philip Anschutz bought up most of the land at the East Side Gallery. The Anschutz estate has since become a study in gigantism. There’s the enormous Mercedes-Benz Arena, and one of Berlin's tallest towers is going up next to a brand-new shopping centre slated to open in the autumn of 2018: the East Side Mall. Conveniently located right across from the Warschauer Strasse station, the mall is to be the hub of this new, youthful, dynamic business district, which is now a hot spot for international investment.

In 2008, 87 per cent of those who turned out for a local referendum initiated by the Mediaspree Versenken! association voted against Mediaspree. That was a purely symbolic victory, however, because such referendums are not binding, so it hardly made a dent in the colossal construction project.

Various segments of the Wall were consequently torn down and the banks of the river privatized to build luxury apartments, for example, in 2013.

“The possibilities are limited,” concedes Niko Rollmann, who is also involved in Mediaspree Versenken’s efforts to stop the project. “There are national laws that can’t be challenged by local governments,” he points out. “What’s more, it took the authorities a long time to realize what was going on, so the Mediaspree projects were able to proliferate rapidly. Local residents had no say in the matter.”

Since then, some residents have thrown in the towel now that the buildings are shooting up into the sky. Others, however, are continuing the struggle in various forms. Behind the concrete and the cranes, another, marginalized, free and artistic Berlin is struggling to survive.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, vacant lots and abandoned factories became romping grounds for artists, punks and clubbers. Back then, the city was a magnet for people of an alternative cast all over the world who were looking for an affordable, creative urban lifestyle.
  
Novel forms of housing emerged: it was the golden age of squats, huts and caravans on the former no-man's land. A few of the last remaining bastions are still left on either side of the Spree and along other stretches where the Wall once stood in this rapidly changing city.

A bunch of caravans have been parked on one of these barren, dusty, amorphous expanses in Alt-Treptow, in southeast Berlin, since 1991. The resulting trailer park came to be called Lohmühle, after an adjacent street. “The area had basically been left to go to seed,” recounts Zosca, one of Lohmühle’s pioneers. At the outset, the community had to cope with the difficulties facing many ungovernable squats in Berlin. “There was violence and problems with alcohol and drugs,” Zosca recalls. “So we formed an assembly and drew up some rules.” The resident population is now limited to 20 people at most. While the residents share a communal space, their living quarters are fenced off and kept strictly private. They make use of solar energy and collect water in large jerry cans.

The land, which belongs to the city, is currently let to the residents under a tenancy agreement renewable every five years. “Our current lease runs to 2021, but we’re very worried that we might get evicted afterwards,” says Zosca. “After all, we see big housing estates popping up all over the place and we know the city has plans for our plot, which is constructible.”

Everyone remembers the evacuation of other squats like Cuvry, in which Niko Rollmann was heavily involved. Unlike Lohmühle, an authorized camp run by a small committee, Cuvry was an unauthorized squat set up on privately-owned land in 2011. Homeless people, refugees and illegal immigrants, artists and others lived there – a diverse and occasionally problematic mix of people. After a fire, the inhabitants were evacuated in 2014 – and never got to come back.

Berlin, a hip new multicultural capital, attracts investors as well as residents from all over the world. The city’s population has been growing by roughly fifty thousand a year for ten years now.

Berlin has traditionally been a city of renters. Over 80 percent of its denizens rent their homes. “The people moving here have higher salaries and greater purchasing power,” worries Niko Rollmann. “But even those who’ve been living here for a long time have to pay higher rents too as a result, and they can't afford it. This is the gentrification spiral.” And along with the rent hikes, real estate prices in the German capital have gone up by as much as 120 per cent since 2004.

In 2015 the federal government took action to curb rent increases, introducing rent controls in conurbations like Berlin with particularly tight housing markets. In practice, however, this law, which only takes effect under very specific conditions, has always caused problems in application and doesn’t satisfy tenants or owners.

This past April, over 250 associations called for a protest, and between 10,000 and 25,000 Berliners demonstrated against the alarming rent explosion. The protestors gave vent to their wrath on posters saying “Tenants aren’t lemons” and “Houses for people instead of property for profit!”

To make matters worse, big companies locating in the city are also causing prices to rise for other goods and services, such as a meal in a restaurant. “I talked to a local activist about how the advent of corporations like Google and Zalando is changing parts of the city,” Niko says. “He said they could just as well have dropped a bomb on the neighbourhood.”

Rents in Berlin currently average between €9 and €10 per sq m. So housing here is still cheap compared to other European capitals like Paris (average €25 per sq m) and London.

“What’s happening there is a social and political experiment, the search for and invention of new collective forms of organization and coexistence, a different relationship to the environment, a different way of inhabiting and using the world,” wrote journalist Stéphane Foucart in Le Monde in April 2018. Foucart was describing a ZAD (zone à défendre)
that was set up to block the construction of a new airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in France, which the police then by and large evacuated by force. But he could just as easily have been talking about the Teepeeland or Lohmühle camps. In May, by the way, Köpi, another autonomous housing project near the old Wall, put up a big banner that said “Solidarity with the ZAD”. “The experimental dimension was always there, right from the start,” confirms Niko Rollmann, “especially where ecological housing was concerned.”

Berlin has taken on a big challenge over the past thirty years: to combat unemployment and overcome the economic crisis. Today, the European capital of start-ups is the model of a creative city that attracts business. But a new wall seems to be forming on either side of the former no-man's land, a wall between two worlds incapable of coexisting or even entering into a constructive dialogue with each other. Berlin has retained its image as a cool, culturally rich and diverse city with a vibrant alternative scene. But without the people who keep that image alive, it could soon be reduced to a myth.

Concept and execution :
Marine Leduc & Constance Bénard

Editor :
Stephanie Hesse

English translation & subtitles :
Marion Herbert

© 2018 Goethe-Institut France

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Germany License.