This research studio will ask students to develop a project that addresses how the streetscape may contribute to the life of the city. Each student will produce a unique body of research that uses the lens of gentrification, interpreted broadly, as a way to guide the speculation of material assemblies, programs, and planning of public streets. The initial focus will be within specific corridors of Berlin that will be used to study the spatial, political, and cultural spaces of the street. The studio will begin with a collaborative research phase, a corridor analysis and representation, and will then move into design research through individual projects.
Studio Narrative High profile projects have become lightning rods for public response, provoking intense debate about the future of the city and in some cases leading to oppositional action. The new Amazon headquarters tower at Warschauer Strasse, now in the early phases of construction, is just the latest example of a corporate landmark rising from a post industrial site in the former East. Its neighbors include the Mercedes Benz Arena, a new Mercedes headquarters, a shopping mall, and luxury condominium towers in various stages of construction on the one hand —and the remnants of a post-1990 informal DIY creative scene that colonized a series of abandoned warehouses and industrial ruins along a rail line. In a similar fashion but with a different architectural strategy, Google is currently renovating an ensemble of historic buildings in the trendy Mitte district to serve as a new regional office. Its original plans for a similar project in Kreuzberg had to be scrapped because of intense neighborhood opposition, where an established bohemian and immigrant community successfully organized against it. Google’s experience in Kreuzberg, where expensive automobiles parked overnight are torched on a regular basis, may explain why its architectural strategy differs from Amazon’s and approaches camouflage. The contrast between the two strategies, although they achieve similar outcomes, reveals the extent to which gentrification in Berlin is localized in its expression, and why it can be so difficult to analyze.
Corporate headquarters and other large developments grab attention for their visibility and have come to symbolize gentrification through its most prominent actors. But this focus obscures the more pervasive ways that these processes operate, and tends to polarize opinion into simple binaries that fail to capture the range of effects that are often subsumed under the term ‘gentrification’. What first comes to mind for many Berliners, for example, is not the looming presence of a new corporate tower, but the more mundane and practical matter of rent. The division of Berlin after World War II resulted in two distinct situations, each of which markedly delayed the forces of market capitalism that shaped most other major cities in the West. Communism was avowedly anti-capitalist, and instrumentalized urban planning for the repressive goals of a totalitarian state. West Berlin was an island, cut off from the rest of western Europe, and required constant injections of money and population to be sustainable. After reunification, both halves of the city featured low rents, abandoned properties, vacant land, and a depressed economy with high unemployment. It would take almost twenty years for infrastructural
investment, market speculation, and the relocation of the federal government from Bonn to kick development into high gear. Thus, the onset of gentrification came much later than in other European capitals, but when it arrived it happened at an accelerated pace.
Although average rents are still lower in Berlin today than in other European capitals, the perceived threat to the social and cultural fabric of the city has led to dramatic defensive measures. These have included calls for new affordable housing construction, the purchase of thousands of privately-owned apartment units for public housing, a crackdown on vacation rental platforms such as Airbnb, and most recently a five-year rent cap that was imposed in February 2020. The latter measure was struck down in April 2021 by Germany’s constitutional court.
The ongoing controversy surrounding rent is paradigmatic of the ways that law, public policy, capital investment, and physical space intersect with lived experience to provide a generalized sense of ‘gentrification’ among Berliners. What residents often mean is something other than mere affordability, however. The term also signifies a profound loss, both of a way of life and of other qualities that are ineffable but constitute what Berlin “is” for them.
The aim of this studio is to examine the reality and the limitations of this generalized notion of gentrification, and to develop a more nuanced account of its many manifestations in concrete situations. For what is often dismissed as gentrification is sometimes better understood through other lenses, and perhaps evaluated in neutral or even positive terms rather than as categorically negative. Berlin neighborhoods have long histories that have seen successive waves of distinct communities, and the perception of loss is typically directed toward the condition of the city as one first encounters it—as something that is the “real” Berlin that must be preserved in its current state. The research agenda is to distinguish and discover various types of change—through their social, material, and spatial manifestations—and to speculate about the present and possible multiplicities within contemporary Berlin without reduction to a single valuation.
001: Initial Research . Atlas The initial research phase will attempt to outline gentrification as an active element of urbanism and as a result of specific economic, physical, social, and cultural factors. The work will provide a working definition of gentrification and produce an overview of topics that focus a lens into the evolution of the streetscape in contemporary Berlin.
002: Representing the Street . Media and Analysis The analytical phase will ask groups to produce models, animations, and/or drawings that can be used to represent key components of corridors in Berlin.
003: Propositions The final phase of the studio will ask students to develop a proposition for the future of the streetscape in Berlin in relation to the topic of gentrification.