SS22

For some years now, we have been experiencing a rising wave of urban movements in Berlin with demands for a common good-oriented, user-driven and social urban development. Practices and discourses are diverse, oscillating between bottom up and top down, whereby planners have to constantly readjust and justify their role. In the history of Berlin, such movements have developed in various constellations of power in waves that flared up and subsided again. The results for urban development have been as diverse in their constellations of actors, goals, programmes and typologies as they have been in their scope, reproducibility and impact on the present.

We want to examine the city of Berlin and the backgrounds of the types and prototypes that emerged from visible and invisible social negotiations. We want to understand which operating systems in terms of common good values, power relations, narratives, legal instruments are supporting them. How and with what motivation did planners position themselves in them? How and by what means did they breathe, feel, live, translate, amplify and attempt to materialise the voices of neighbourhoods, interest groups and other marginalised communities? And with which methods did they vision, protest, support, moderate, act politically?

By illuminating a multi-voiced dialogue between municipal public services and self-organised, bottom-up urban design over the last 100 years, the seminar aims to make the concept of a socially oriented planning practice tangible in its contradictions and difficulties.

The result is a narrative, a pool of knowledge, a map or matrix, perhaps a kind of excavation for the future in an increasingly neo-conservative-liberal urban development…