Common Place | Two Love Stories in Berlin

IOANNA YIANNAKOPOULOU SUPERVISOR: STAVROS STAVRIDES

COMMON PLACE TWO LOVE STORIES IN BERLIN

DISSERTATION, FEBRUARY 2017 NATIONAL TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS

“The Metropolis is to the Multitude what the factory was to the industrial working class. The factory constituted the primary site and posed the conditions for three central activities: production, internal encounters and resistance. The contemporary productive activities of the Multitude, however, overflow the factory walls to permeate the entire city. The three fields -production of the common, joyful encounter and organization of the resistance- are being realized in the biopolitical Metropolis that today emerges.�

(Hardt & Negri, Common Wealth, 2009)

If the city today acquires such an important role in human societies, what is the importance of its design from below?

Contents 1. Nothing worth mentioning (?) p.9 2. In the shadow of the Wall p.17 2.1 Collective representations and temporal priority p.19 2.2 Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain: neighborhoods of the unorthodox p.21 2.3 Permeable threshold and vast void p.31

3. Global cities and neighborhoods under threat p.33 3.1 Space in the era of neoliberalism p.35 3.2 The strategic contradiction of Berlin’s destruction p.40 3.3 Riverside projects and luxurious complexes p.46

4. The wealth of life by the river p.49

5. The vast possibilities of the empty barracks p.83

4.1 How can you measure solidarity? p.51 4.2 Sink Mediaspree! p.60 4.3 The demands of the referendum p.69 4.4 A deeper analysis of the demands p.76

5.1 The former common grassland is facing a dilemma p.85 5.2 Upstall - Dragopolis - City from below: a synthesis of difference p.96 5.3 Nonnegotiable 100% p.107 5.4 Thoughts for an alternative housing scenario p.112

6. Attempt for conclusions p.115 7. Appendix p.125 7.1 Spreeufer für alle! - The Spree’s riverbanks are for all! p.127 7.2 Modell Dragoner Areal - Model Dragoner Areal p.148

8. Bibliography and image credits p. 153

1. Nothing worth mentioning (?)

“A river, its two -once rigidly divided- banks and their heterogeneous inhabitants try to preserve the wealth of life produced throughout the years, counterposing an alternative urban development to the big business plan.”

“The second largest empty surface of a city, the old barracks and the decisive neighbors create a new habitation scenario, in order to obstruct the erection of the luxurious housing complex, in the face of whole Germany.”

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1.1 Kreuzberg (southwestern), Friedrichshain (northeastern) and the Spree.

In 1996 the so-called “Mediaspree Projekt” started in Berlin, a large redevelopment design of Spree’s riversides. The design foresaw the construction of supralocal leisure, work and shopping facilities bound together with luxurious housing estates. The part of the river, on which the project would take place, were the two -former industrial, currently mainly touristicareas of Kreuzberg (southwestern riverbank) and Friedrichshain (northeastern riverbank). The two districts used to be separated for 28 years from the Berlin Wall. During the Cold War, western Kreuzberg had become an oasis for the secluded, the paranoid and the outsiders, while eastern Friedrichshain was mainly an industrial area of harbor facilities in crisis. With the fall of the Wall the wild subculture of West Berlin was transmitted to the neighboring eastern part, finding plenty of unexploited, free

space to colonize. The social mixture of the two areas is still quite heterogeneous and consists of immigrants Turks of the 60’s, radical inhabitants of the -long since legalized- squats of the 80’s, techno lovers, alternative Germans that participated in the collective design process of IBA ’87 and temporary tenants that were enchanted by the audacity of the locus.

In this context “Mediaspree Projekt” was about to be erected, occupying 2 km along each riverside.

According to the plan, skyscrapers, offices, hotels and similar facilities would be built, including an arena with a capacity of 20.000 viewers. Of course, an intervention of this scale and type could not correspond with the turbulent subculture of the neighborhood. So, the state-owned plots, which were being used formally and informally by local

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NOTHING WORTH MENTIONING (?)

agents, started to be evacuated and sold via investorfriendly contracts to the “Regionalmanagement Mediaspree e.V.”, a conglomerate created exclusively for the internal coordination of the project.

Negative reactions were evoked, against the plan and the direction that the urban development was taking. The indignation of the inhabitants was not stemming strictly from their ideological beliefs, but mainly from the displacement of vital spaces and the destruction of local culture. This can be further understood with an analysis of the reactionaries: one part was the left/anarchic milieu, but the other one was the alternative and creative young people of the city. The cooperation of the two parts had as a result the formation of the initiative “Mediaspree Versenken!” (Sink Mediaspree!) in 2008. The initiative organized an inspired campaign with innovative actions, formed a counter-proposal for the two neighborhoods and led the District KreuzbergFriedrichshain to a referendum with three specific spatial demands: 50m minimum distance from the riverbanks and 22m maximum height for every new building, no construction of a new motorway bridge.

This proposal won the referendum by miles, as the 87% of the voters supported it. However, the results of the vote were advisory and not binding; thus, the initiative was called to participate in negotiations, was trapped into bureaucracy complications, lost its militancy and creativity and -being attacked by the media- ended up discussing issues of lesser importance. Today the biggest part of “Mediaspree Projekt” has been realized and the initiative “Sink Mediaspree!” has been dismantled.

In 2009, just as the dispute over the riverbanks was receding, the plot of Dragoner Areal in the center of Kreuzberg was becoming property of the “Bundesanstalt für Immobilienaufgaben” (BImA),

the Federal Department for Immovable Property Matters. The 47.000 sq.m. area is the second largest in Berlin, right after the old airport Tempelhof. The plot has a rich history, as it contains the remaining old barracks of the Prussian Cavalry. In 1919 in one of these, seven comrades of R. Luxemburg and K. Liebknecht were executed for their participation in the January Revolt. Following the spirit of modern life that flourished during the interwar period, two new buildings were erected to house a gas station and a mall, while the replacement of the military functions with industrial facilities had already begun.

During the World War II the complex was being used as a work camp. Today, an introvert world of small industries, garages and local shops exists between the former stables and riding halls, together with a biological market and a club. The plot is surrounded by poor immigrant neighborhoods, however this part of the district did not experience the turbulent years of Kreuzberg, since it is disconnected from the city, having hard borders in every direction.

After the bankruptcy of the plot’s main leaseholder, namely the logistics company “Translag GmbH”, Dragoner Areal became federal property, aiming to be sold in 2011 to the highest bidder. In 2014, the Berliner project developer Arne Piepgras participated in the second sale attempt of the plot, acting as an intermediary for the international company “Dragonerhöfe GmbH”, and offered the highest amount of 36 million euro -almost twice of the market value of the plot. According to Piepgras’s plans, the majority of the area would be destined for art businesses, commercial uses, offices and services with the rents ranging around 15 euro/sq.m., while quite a small part of the plot would be constructed as a housing area. Based on the “Planning Guidelines for the Urban Development of the Area Dragoner Areal”

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1.2 The area “Dragoner Areal” (center).

that were published from the District KreuzbergFriedrichshain in August 2014, the investor would be obligated to provide 33% of the housing units that he/she would erect as affordable tenant housing, meaning that the rent of these units should not exceed the price of 7,5 euro/sq.m. This, in the case of Piepgras’s project, would correspond to 66 affordable units out of 200, in an area of almost 50.000 sq.m.

The expected revaluation of the neighboring area, the displacement of the current land uses, the destruction of the perplexed self-made space that had been crafted and mainly the expropriation of the second largest plot in Berlin with no concern for the city’s needs caused reactions. Three initiatives were formed -“Stadt von unten” (City from below), “Upstall Kreuzberg e.V.” and “Dragopolis”- to represent the interests of the citizens. The first one consists mainly

of worried inhabitants of the neighborhood, the second of sensitive architects and designers and the third of the left milieu of Kreuzberg that lives nearby.

The general strategy of all three was to address the local society. Through discussions and activisms, emerged the request for 100% social housing, in the context that an alternative housing policy is necessary in contemporary Berlin.

Thanks to the initiatives’ persistence, in 2015 the decision for the plot’s sale to the highest bidder was outvoted by the Federal Parliament, while the State of Berlin* was already trying to buy Dragoner Areal.

However, even if the plot becomes state property,

*

According to the administrative system of Germany, the country consists of 16 Federal States. Berlin, being one of them, has its own Senate.

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the Senate of Berlin announced that only 50% of the residential units would be planned as social housing.

In the spring of 2016 the plots was characterized as “Restoration Area” and as a result its purchase and development in a reasonable price and by state agents would be preferred. The negotiation is still ongoing, as BImA refuses to withdraw from the sale to a private investor and in July 2016 sued Berlin.

PAUSE

The narration of the two stories could end here.

The data have been presented, the timeline has been completed. However, setting aside the usefulness of a quick review, it remains -as a narration- closed, fulfilled and leaves a question hanging: “Why should this interest anybody beyond the people that experienced it? It is a story about two urban movements in a specific place and a specific time, that maybe only encyclopedically are worthy of further examination, by whoever loves to hear stories of urban resistance.” Or maybe no? The hypothesis emerges that the analysis of the two cases studies from the perspective of the commons can offer important tools of deeper understanding, dispute and generalization, can answer the question: “how does this affect us?”

But what are the commons? According to the dictionary of G. Bampiniotis, common is “the one that belongs to many, is used or destined for many or everybody”. (1998, p. 915) What has such a character?

If somebody tries to answer this question, quickly realizes that the majority of the things that surround him or her are of private or public ownership. Is perhaps the public, common? Or maybe could the private become common if it contains many people?

The first answer that is attempted to be given is, no.

The common is vast, is the sea, the language, the stars, the particles of the air. The common is invisible, is every form of social cooperation. It belongs to all and simultaneously to no one. It cannot be tied to persons or even large groups, such as a State or a country. The second answer that is being given is that maybe the property status is not so important.

The common is a relationship between people, is the unexpected and unpredictable encounters that happen when people decide to act together, is the questioning of established hierarchies and ideologies

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during the common praxis. So no, the public or the private is not the common, but under the right circumstances can both be transformed to it.

The increased complexity of the contemporary world has the tendency to confuse, to fragmentize, to disorient. With the hypothesis that today cities are universally the productive places and the places of concentrated power, urban development and architecture acquire a new importance. But who plans space? Who has the right to decide about it?

What is the power that space itself has? The theory of the commons clarifies the meanings. There are places that once belonged to everybody, places that should belong to everybody, places that were a motive for new relationships between people and for new practices of sharing and loving, places that from resources became means for the existence and the creation of communities, places that from means became symbols and images that travel the world, calling constantly into question the notions of property, power, production and management. These places -forgetting for a while any legal frameworkare actually neither public, nor private. They are the places of the common, the common places. Such are the riverbanks of the Spree and the old barracks’ plot of Dragoner Areal in Berlin. This is the other side of their story.

2. In the shadow of the Wall

I don’t need no arms around me And I dont need no drugs to calm me.

I have seen the writing on the wall.

Pink Floyd, “Another brick in the wall - part 3”

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2.1 Collective representations and temporal priority In 1850 the American pioneers were riding towards Far West, treating the indigenous Indians as primitive tribes that were resisting civilization. In 1610 the native inhabitants of North America were watching the British colonists arriving uninvited with sailing ships and settling in their land. A narration’s starting moment turns out to be quite revealing for the course of the story.

The notion of temporal priority helps to clarify what is integrated into what, namely what precedes and what follows. The majority, if not the totality of protest movements, is studied and characterized as a reaction/resistance towards an initial action/ stance. Is this view right? Are the reasons for every revolutionary action found in the first move of those

2.1 Representation of Berlin, 1730.

in power? According to Foucault, power can be seen as a practice that is being exerted only over free subjects, since any person that is not free -so a person entirely enslaved- does not need to be disciplined, as he or she poses no threat to his or her masters. (1982) Delving deeper into this thought, it is becoming clear that freedom is not defined as something that a person has or has not according to a legal relationship, but as a fundamental component of human existence. For example, Hardt and Negri explain, the slaves -as an abstract category- are not free according to the legal meaning of the term, on the contrary they were and still are the ultimate symbol of oppression. Based on Foucault’s suggestion though, if they were indeed under total domination, there would be no need for power to be exercised over them. The surveillance and control of slaves manifests their primary freedom, which no matter how limited or oppressed is under circumstances of legal enslavement, exists and grounds their capacity to resist. The importance of this mental exercise is practical. The notion that precedes, integrates the notion that follows, has temporal priority over it and hence, strategic advantage; in other words, it can win. As long as a subject does not lose their selves and maintains -even marginally- their substance, then their freedom pre-exists; the power that is being exerted over them is temporally secondary and can -have to- be overthrown. (Negri & Hardt, 2009, p. 75) Can perhaps a similar analysis be performed for space? Of course, space does not have personal substance, so it cannot be characterized as “free”, with the meaning of individual emancipation; however, it is being produced as a social construct.

Lefebvre suggests the understanding of man’s

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IN THE SHADOW OF THE WALL

relationship with the abstract notion of space through three dialectically connected ways: spatial practice (perceived space), representations of space (conceived space) and representational spaces (lived space). (1991, pp. 38-39) The spatial practices of a society, Lefebvre mentions, reveal its way of function and simultaneously are revealing themselves through the decipherment of a society’s space. The representations of space, stemming from the intellectual processing of an authority (urban planners, architects, sociologists, technocrats) create the dominant, ideologically charged narration about space that is becoming perceivable and lived. Finally, the spaces of representation, lived through images and symbols that their users and inhabitants invent, are the dominated spaces, which imagination tries to appropriate and transform. In each one of the three ways of understanding, Lefebvre refers directly or indirectly to a society or to one part of a society that formally or informally constructs, reproduces or overturns the relation between man and space.

Setting aside Lefebvre’s system, Stavrides explains that any representation of space does not express a simple projection or a neutral interpretation of reality; on the contrary it poses a crucial stake between social groups. As such, it affects the materiality and the cognitive understanding of space, shaping behaviors, habits and actions that affirm or challenge the dominant narrations. (2016, pp. 209210) So, focusing on the third category of Lefebvre, namely on the lived spaces of images and symbols that are being understood as social stake, there emerges the potential of projection, perception and conception of different spaces, of spaces of resistance, of possible and not-yet-existing spaces. In that way, collective spatial representations are being created, which reproduce themselves through the

actions, the images and the words of those devising them.

Blending the two discursive routes mentioned above, one can conclude that when the collective representation of space is connected with memories and practices of freedom, then any corruption or abolishment of it that may follow in the timeline, will be contained and submissive to the first impression. In the same sense, any defense of the initial representation is an attempt for expansion and empowerment of memory and freedom. Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, the two neighborhoods of Berlin that are in the center of this dissertation, will be studied with this thought in mind.

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2.2 Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain: neighborhoods of the unorthodox The years right after World War II are being recognized as a transitional, fluid period. Germany was divided in four areas, according to the Yalta Conference: Soviet, American, English and French.

The city of Berlin, divided also in four corresponding sections, was deep inside the Soviet area -a fact that is usually being ignored. In May 1949 the American, the English and the French areas are being coalesced, forming the Federal Republic of Germany, with Bonn as the capital. The three corresponding sections in Berlin, namely the later West-Berlin, were not promptly included in the Federal Republic, maintaining for a few years the status of a stateless city, the existence of which made everybody feeling a bit uncomfortable. In October of the same year the Soviet area is being transformed to the German Democratic Republic, with East-Berlin as its capital.

In 1961 began the erection of the Wall that would divide the city in two; West-Berlin was now a de facto part of West Germany, yet inside the East. Since the erection of the Wall a distinctive era begins, during which the two parts of the dissected city started to develop new characteristics. During the Cold War, East and West-Berlin were at the center of the world.

In their border was materialized the confrontation of two different ideological systems, of two different ways of management and allocation of the goods.

Pause. Let the historical knowledge about Cold War be ignored. West and East, notions that regularly during human history collide with each other, representing different value systems and different ways of governing the common wealth, surround this time a random city part, a part that took its shape via the diplomatic consultations of the war’s winners. This part is located inside the physical space

2.2 Map of Germany’s occupation areas.

of the East, but in a transcendental level belongs to the West. In it, because of the special circumstances, namely this double existence, new ways of life are being developed, new value systems, new models of social organization. The old identity is being vanished -the majority of the historical buildings are located in the East. The new identity, free from the historical burden, is so distinct, that the claim can be made, that West-Berlin did not belong to any of the two worlds that were fighting around it. It was a Third one of its own.

What happens to a city when you fence it? There are stories about West-Berliners driving on the Autobahn -the motorway of Germany- who could not have a rest stop, since the cars where crossing East Germany and the borders of the road were being guarded. Other stories tell about western U-Bahn

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IN THE SHADOW OF THE WALL

2.3 West Berlin (white-grey area) amidst Eastern Germany (beige area).

KREUZBERG AND FRIEDRICHSHAIN: NEIGHBORHOODS OF THE UNORTHODOX

stops -namely metro stops- that were under eastern territory, but were still functioning as interchange stations. As the train doors opened, the passengers were watching and teasing the armed men that were guarding the stairs, the exit to the foreign land.

Stories like these help to understand the dystopic paradox of the geographic condition. Abandoned from the prosperous social layers, the functions of the capital and the strict supervision that comes with them, West-Berlin became a pole of attraction for the strangers, the poor, the weird and the outsiders, a huge decadent urban laboratory. The following elements are being recognized as constitutive of Kreuzberg’s culture, the most explosive district of West-Berlin.

With the end of the war, mainly since 1960, Turks started to arrive in Berlin, the so-called “Little Istanbul”. Their cultural element and the eastern way of life can be recognized in many locations throughout the city, with their population in certain neighborhoods exceeding 38%, according to a research of the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper.

(Tröger, Pätzold, Klack, Wendler, & Möller, 2014) The cause of the great immigration was mainly the search for work and, indeed, many of them were working in factories and construction sites. However it would be a mistake to understand the Turkish population as an entirely industrial labor power.

A big part of the immigrants opened local cafes, corner shops and fast food restaurants that offered kebab and kefir, since their number was sufficiently large to reconstitute and reproduce their traditions and everyday habits. (Beer, Deniz, & Schwendler, 2006) The Turkish women, belonging to a different cultural context than the German women, took care of the affective labor of the family, staying constantly in the neighborhood. Consequently,

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the children were growing up playing and running in the supervised by the neighbors streets. A rich collective life was created and the districts of Berlin were filled with eastern music, smells and tastes, provoking the German inhabitants to participate in a new way of urban habitation. To understand the atmosphere of the Turkish neighborhoods in Berlin during the ‘60s and ‘70s, one can refer to the familiar contemporaneous Greek provincial cities. As to which were these neighborhoods, the answer is the expected: the cheaper, the ones with the uncertain future, these that were bordering with the locus of the possible spark of the Third Nuclear World War. Kreuzberg.

It is a fact that no sane person would wish to live in Kreuzberg. So, beside the poor immigrants that had no other choice, there lived the “insane” ones. The unorthodox reality of the city attracted inhabitants marginalized and peculiar, who found there an abandoned dystopic paradise. The exemption of Berliners from the military service appealed to the radical and insubordinate youth, which could not fit into the normalized context of West Germany.

Furthermore, due to the low cost of living, people from the lower social layers were constantly moving to the city. The little-known truth is that Berlin -East and West- was always poor. The destruction of the war was absolute and after 1945 there was neither the heavy industry, nor the labor power to reconstitute the economy and the lives of the inhabitants. The houses that were not in ruins, were empty shells that could be inhabited only with great difficulty. Though, it was exactly this condition of wreckage that allowed the survival of the immigrants, the poor and the excluded.

During the ‘70s the formal housing policy focused on demolishing the old houses and replacing them

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with contemporary, expensive buildings; as a result the young people of the city and those that were being displaced from their affordable habitat, rioted.

The motto was “Squats everywhere!”. Student groups in search of a different way of life occupied the empty and unused building shells, repaired and restore them providing personal labor and tried to legalize their possession. (Benning & Zoumbou, 2014, p. 7) This process was not without hurdles.

According to Karidis, “the inconsistency between the aims of property capital and the pre-existing uses of certain buildings and areas, amplified by the socio/ political issues that were related to the presence of economic immigrants” led to brutal clashes and street fights with the police. (2008, p. 389) Kreuzberg was the battle field and was receiving the support of the whole German youth, during the days that were

2.4 Turkish grocery store in Kreuzberg.

characterized more violent and more explosive than the signifier of European youth revolts, May of ’68.

The turbulent atmosphere of the wild Kreuzberg days was completed with punk music and culture.

The unconventional artistic orgasm that the city experienced during the ‘80s had as a cause mainly one element: the Wall. The isolation of West-Berlin in the middle of the “red sea” gave to its inhabitants a feeling of collective decadence, of an “island” that, denying the normality both of the eastern and western culture, was building one of its own. “Berlin is a ruined place; so is its music.” This observation of the music producer and photographer Jim Rakete explains the explosion of the city’s punk scene. In contrast to the conventional ensembles, the punk musicians of the western side did not have any interest in their market impact, but were instead

2.5 “We are the terrorists, we greet the tourists.”

KREUZBERG AND FRIEDRICHSHAIN: NEIGHBORHOODS OF THE UNORTHODOX

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experimenting with eerie sounds and participating simultaneously in many groups, forming in the end “a huge, united band”. (Hoppe, Lange, & Maeck, 2015) The violent music functioned as a pole of attraction for the alternative youth of the western world, drawing to the city people that would spread and narrate about the Myth of Berlin. No one had the intention to ruin the Wall; after all, it was the life insurance of West-Berlin, the frame of the unlimited freedom.

The escalating riot of the city’s youth started to get out of control, while the clashes with the police were making the situation even more difficult to handle. So, the state decided to retreat, mostly because during the Cold War the West ought to project a humane face, in an effort to prove that capitalism could be compatible with social policies. West’s frontier city

could not be a battle field -such a situation would only strengthen the arguments of the opponent.

(Benning & Zoumbou, 2014, p. 64) A compromise came with IBA 1987 (Internationale Bauaustellung, International Building Exhibition). The ambitious program was searching for a successful strategy for the mild renewal of the city, being concentrated mostly on the borderline district of Kreuzberg; today one can see experimental social housing units lie quite central in the European capital. (Brandlhuber & Hertweck, 2015) IBA consisted of two parts, IBA-New and IBA-Old, which were focused on construction and reparation of buildings correspondingly. The two parts affected the way that Berliners perceive urban development and promoted a strong aspect of German culture, that of self-help.

As part of IBA-Old’s program, tenant communities

2.6 Squat in Kreuzberg.

2.7 Punks in front of a local bar.

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were invited to design and perform the radical reparation of their buildings, collaborating equivalently with the responsible architects. The practices and the architectural approach that were followed referred to the principles of the postmodern stream that was focused on everyday life, on locality and on self-organization, in the context of participative architecture. (Fezer & Heyden, 2004, p. 18) Emancipated tenants loaded with their toolkits, were climbing scaffoldings, painting walls, tearing down and repairing their houses, while simultaneously were negotiating constantly the differences and disagreements that were emerging among them. IBA’s success was great. There are however many objections that criticize not only the intentions, but also the methods of IBA. The squatters and many members of self-help groups feared that this tactic of the Senate was aiming to manipulate and stabilize the political scene, bringing social peace through the tenants’ unpaid work, who were repairing their houses without acquiring any property rights on them. (Orlowsky, 1984, p.

7) Nevertheless, the squatting movement and IBA shared for a while the common belief that the city is a pluralistic and evolving organism that experiences a constant transformation, a never-ending process of becoming, always open and impossible to restrict to a defined and closed architectural dogma. This view suggested that only the minimum of interventions is needed for the improvement of the urban complex and so, inevitably collided with the former housing policy of Germany, which was based on demolishing the old and erecting the new. (Heilmeyer, 2015) The architectural principles of IBA were summarized in the mottos of “Critical Reconstruction” and “Careful Urban Renewal”, respectively for IBA-New and IBAOld. (Bodenschatz, et al., 2010, p. 12) The two terms

took root in Berliners’ consciousness deeper than what was thought in 1987.

To resume, the characteristics that shaped Kreuzberg from 1961 to 1989 -the Turkish immigrants, the housing squats, the punk scene and the self-help practices of the tenant community- constituted a powerful and distinctive culture, a unique way of life. The Turkish community enriched Berlin with the habits and rituals of the eastern neighborhood and the social networks that are essential for the survival of the most vulnerable city inhabitants. The squats added the element of rebelliousness and the practice of appropriation, according to which, if something lies inactive, can be used by whoever needs it. The explosive punk music made known to the rest of the world what was happening in Berlin during the ‘80s and created a Myth, crystallizing the city’s identity.

Finally, the culture of self-help and participation, empowered by IBA, created a spirit of emancipation and expelled the notion of delegating responsibility to state or private institutions. As different as they may be, these four elements contribute equally to the formation of Kreuzberg, to the construction of a neighborhood with an unusual, untamed identity that operates with appropriation and emancipation, based on the community. This identity pre-exists, contains and is imposed on whatever may follow.

And what follows after ’89 is extremely dangerous.

But before the analysis of the contemporary threats, the completion of the story that leads to them is needed. On 9th November 1989 the Wall falls. The premise for the creation and preservation of the Myth of West-Berlin is being torn down with it. The future scenarios for the united city could be two: either Berlin would become the global capital of immigrants, poor and misfits, or the dominant western ideology would transform the untamed city

KREUZBERG AND FRIEDRICHSHAIN: NEIGHBORHOODS OF THE UNORTHODOX

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2.8 May Day in Kreuzberg, 1987.

to a proper European capital. Few were expecting that both of them would happen simultaneously.

During the ‘90s, when punk was decaying and the western squats were losing their radicalism, a new subculture was emerging from the eastern district of Friedrichshain* that borders with Kreuzberg, under the sound of electronic music. East-Berlin appeared to the West as a chaos of gaps, cracks and empty surfaces, a destroyed urban imagery that was in absolute need of reparation. However, it was perceived from the city’s youth and its artistic and music scene as a brand new adult-playground, full of abandoned buildings, empty industrial

* Fragments of the alternative milieu of squats and punk music existed in East-Berlin since the beginning of the ‘70s. They were of course trivial and hidden, in contrast to the fierce scene of West-Berlin. (Schömer, 2015)

shells and -mostly- a very unclear property status.

(Heilmeyer, 2015) A reason for that fact was that in 1961 the immovable property of the Westerners on eastern ground had been transferred to the German Democratic Republic, which in 1990 though had fallen apart. Furthermore, with the opening of the borders, many eastern inhabitants abandoned their houses during their flight towards the West and many apartments ended up vacant. At this point the Zwischennutzungen appeared, namely the intermediary uses. Klaus Overmeyer explains that, with the term “intermediary use” something temporally restricted is being mentioned, a Between that defines a Before and an After. These uses, spontaneous and unplanned, are connected to the corresponding intermediary spaces; in the temporal and spatial voids that appear often during cities’

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evolution, spaces emerge with trails from former activities, waiting for new ones that have not yet appeared. Lastly, the intermediary uses demonstrate materially the failure of the owner’s expectations. This happens because a certain property is destined for a specific purpose; the intermediary use that surfaces though does not correspond to it, either because it is not bringing the expected profit or because it does not provide the desired program. (2004) Aside from the vacant buildings of East-Berlin, a vast unexploited area was the “no man’s land”.

It is known that in 1961 the Wall was erected, a 200-kilometer line. Yet, what is usually being ignored is that in 1962 a second parallel wall was constructed, in a distance of 100 meters eastern of the former, defining the so-called “death strip” between East and West. (Benning & Zoumbou, 2014, p. 13) In the

area that concerns this study, the “death strip” was the river and a strip of land on the eastern bank, 35 meters wide. And while on the west of the western political border the inhabitants of Kreuzberg were living in close proximity to the Spree, on the east of the eastern face of the Wall there was the void. With its fall, the natural location of the free land looked like an open invitation to the party scene that was starting to rise, while punk was fading and the first awkward experimentations with a new music genre -techno- were beginning to appear. (Hoppe, Lange, & Maeck, 2015) In that way, in 1990 Berlin found itself at a crossroads. The formal culture of visibility that was necessary to the institutions and functions of the new national capital was colliding with the milieu of the invisible, of the dark techno clubs that opened

2.9 “No man’s land”. Today, central Potsdamer Platz is located on the area of the image.

KREUZBERG AND FRIEDRICHSHAIN: NEIGHBORHOODS OF THE UNORTHODOX

secretly to the strangest of places inside the city, in underground toilets, in stolen containers, that were moving from month to month following the obsession for the discovery of the weirdest party sites. Stories say that the urban adventurers would stalk empty buildings, with the hope that no light would switch on for three days in a row; then, they would break the doors and would enter into their new paradise, establishing the lustful realm of electronic music. Love Parade of 1989 -months before the Wall’s fall- signaled this new, united through music society that consisted of happy individuals, under the motto “Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen” - “Peace, Joy, Pancakes”! (Schömer, 2015) At the same time, immigrants from Eastern Europe moved in the city, enriching the cultural mixture with new milieus and relationships. The potential for Berlin to become an alternative European capital that would offer an emancipated urban experience, based on the principles of the osmosis of difference, was just emerging. The scholar of Eastern Europe Uwe Rada mentions the words of Matthias Greffrath, who supports the opinion that Berlin after the fall of the Wall failed to be the metropolis of hope and instead became the metropolis of the hopeful, a contested space between the “citizens’ society” that rests on islands of prosperity and the “cheerful barbarism” of those in search of a new beginning. With the cancelation of the last direct flight to New York because of low demand, the only transcontinental direct connections were to Pyongyang and Ulan Bator. The Eastern Train Station (Ostbahnhof) in Friedrichshain was already an important intersection for Eastern Europe, having train routes from Moscow, Krakow, Warsaw and Tomsk. Berlin was closer to the East than what its authorities would wish to believe and instead of a global city that ought to be

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developed, it could be seen as a desolated industrial center, as a metropolis of the new fortune hunters.

(Rada, 2013) There is an expression that appears in many events today in Berlin as a way of attracting customers: “umsonst und draußen”, meaning “free and outside”. The popular phrase, aside from its commercial use, renders an excellent picture of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain in the beginning of ‘90s, the neighborhoods that questioned the price of urban living and nourished a collective mentality, realized only in common spaces, “outside” or maybe “beyond” the dominant social condition. All these were just about to change.

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IN THE SHADOW OF THE WALL

2.10 Love Parade, 1999.

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2.3 Permeable threshold and vast void During the era of the Wall and the first years after the fall, the two sites that interest this study were influenced by and maybe influenced themselves the urban history. On the banks of the Spree flourished the milieu of West and East-Berlin that was destined to become a Myth. The Wall -though on the bank of Kreuzberg was only an immaterial political limitfunctioned as an inhabited paradoxical border, parallel to which unexpected behaviors developed.

With its fall, it was transformed to a threshold, to an invisible line separating two -still distinct- situations.

Pelin Tan, referring to the possibilities of encounter with the Other in cities and buildings, explains that the limits can be spaces of urban confrontation, conflict and negotiation of the difference, with their form functioning as a structure that opens up towards heterogeneous localities. Limits, as long as they remain permeable, can be spaces that doubt the hierarchical relationships and the stiff identities, can be spaces of oscillation between the poles of the dipole host/guest, between the notions Me/ Other. (2014) As Stavrides emphatically highlights, thresholds, by uniting and simultaneously separating, by distinguishing and simultaneously connecting, can create circumstances of entrance and exit, can manipulate and give meaning to the negotiation of their passage. Their peculiar spatiality renders them irregular places, places of possible encounters with the heterogeneous. (2016, p. 5) Such was the role of the fallen Wall in the torn urban fabric. As long as it existed, in its shadow -or maybe thanks to its shadow- a culture disobedient and introvert was developed.

At the same time, Dragoner Areal, the big vast plot of the old barracks, was located on a greater

distance from the border of West-East and was experiencing Kreuzberg in a milder way. Because of the site’s seclusion, it did not have the ability to develop the rich life of the Spree’s banks. The vast area was housing small industries, garages and the abandoned barracks, remaining in a “potential” situation. According to Lieven de Cauter, the beauty of Commons is their sheer potentiality when they are in a state of emptiness, without a sign, intact from interests and demands, as neutral voids inside the city. (2013) The plot of Dragoner Areal was waiting for the realization of its possibilities; its fragility is such, that with the smallest action, the “potential” can be destroyed.

Kreuzberg as a common place pre-existed of the

2.11 Performance on the Wall, 1986.

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IN THE SHADOW OF THE WALL

speculation and corruption that followed, due to the interaction between its unique geography and the social groups that inhabited it. The enclosure of West-Berlin produced peculiar relationships that in turn gave birth to neighborhoods, squats, music scenes and self-help reparations. The space itself, either as heterotopic threshold or as potentially appropriated, was first common.

2.12 Hidden corner, Dragoner Areal.

3. Global cities and neighborhoods under threat

I mistrust grandiose overall designs; they usually destroy the soul of the place.

John Hejduk, “Berlin bei Nacht�

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3.1 Space in the era of neoliberalism Common wealth -although it preexists- is being corrupted and destroyed, through its restriction and control. The degeneration of common goods by public and private institutions is inevitable, not only in the present conjuncture, but also during the entire history of human societies. This process of mutation concerns both the natural common -the air, the sea, the forest- and the artificial common -culture, knowledge, relationships- that tends to concentrate with greater intensity in the cities.

Lieven de Cauter warns: today the common is under threat! The appropriation of the North Pole from states and multinationals, the patenting of seeds by Monsanto after 10.000 years of sharing between the farmers around the planet and attempts of acquiring copyrights on words are examples and symbols of the material and immaterial danger that the vulnerable common wealth of the world faces today. (2013) According to the neo-marxist David Harvey, urbanization and economy are two closely interwoven notions, since urban complexes were initially formed due to the geographical and social concentration of surplus product. “Hence”, Harvey explains, “urbanization has always been an expression of class relationships, as the surpluses have been extracted from somewhere and from somebody, while control over their usage typically have been located in the hands of a few.” The former general principle is still valid -though with a different dynamic- in contemporary western economy: capitalism is producing perpetually the surplus product that urbanization demands - urbanization is necessary to capitalism for the absorption of the perpetually produced surplus product. In that way the internal relationship between the city and the capitalistic

growth emerges. (2013, p. 40) Of course the study of the two notions needs to be constantly renewed, since they are being altered rapidly, not only as sole meanings, but also as dialectic couple. The update and the revision of their relationship in the contemporary era is seen as imperative. In what way is the appropriation of the common being realized today and how important is it as a process for the survival of the capital? How is this process connected with the cities? How does the capital take advantage of the new characteristics of the neoliberal economy and production to intervene in space and corrupt the character of the common?

To answer these questions, the shifts in the relation between production and space have to be studied first. One of the new data of the productive process, crucial for Hardt and Negri, is the rising creation of immaterial goods, such as images, concepts, information, knowledge, affects, codes and ideas, instead of the conventional assembly line of material objects inside a factory. This new way leans toward an “anthropogenetic model”, meaning the production of human by human: the object of creation is now a subject or affects a subject, establishes a social relationship or a form of life. The biopolitical turn of the economy, as the phenomenon was named

by Hardt and Negri, places living beings and the construction of their behaviors at the center, setting in motion human competences and knowledge that were accumulated outside the working environment, such as the ability to communicate, to care, to lead, to interact with automated productive systems etc.

(2009, pp. 132-133) Immediate consequences of these new aspects and trends, of this new way of acknowledging reality is the increase of perplexity

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3.1 Fluidization and signification of homogeneous space.

SPACE IN THE ERA OF NEOLIBERALISM

in space and the alteration of space’s semantic characteristics. The need for navigation in the cities via GPS without orientation and consequently without understanding of the urban fabric, the surveillance of public space through cameras and temperature sensors, the use of augmented reality technology for the mapping and projection of space, the standardization of architectural language throughout the world for the signage of capital’s activities in the cities (Papachristopoulou, 2016), the architectural production of rendered images that create false realities or even false expectations from reality are examples of how space today is being intricate and affected by the new production, while in its turn affects, normalizes and disciplines its users in the new panoptical* reality.

The structure of global order has irretrievably changed. The world currently experiences a transitional period, an interregnum between the death of traditional imperialism and the

* Panopticon: Panopticon is a type of prison building, designed

by the English philosopher and sociologist Jeremy Bentham in the end of 18th century. The circular plan of the building and also the circular arrangement of the cells in the diameter allow the surveillance of all prisoners by one guard in the center of the plan inside of a closed tower. Although the guard cannot see all the cells at the same time, the fact that the inmates don’t know if they are being watched or not, means that they will behave constantly as if they were watched, controlling successfully their behavior without outside intervention. Michel Foucault in his book “Discipline and Punish” uses the idea of the Panopticon as a metaphor for the contemporary discipline of societies and their tendency to intrude, to survey and to conform.

(2011) Panopticon is transformed to an idealistic architectural representation of contemporary power, expanding in all life and work spaces, creating a sense of always-visible and abolishing the need for violent forms of control.

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emergence of a new Empire. (Negri & Hardt, 2009, p. 219) Deborah Stevenson suggests that the global economy is now more urbanized than ever, since it is constituted of cities and connections between them and is being defined by the labor produced inside of them. So, cities and their economies are being enmeshed in a network of global processes, streams and currents of capital, being nods of people, ideas and services. The new global grid is based on hierarchies that distinguish between a center and a marginalized periphery. As a result the competition between cities for the highest ranking in influential urban league tables increases, while the indicators that define the place in the league represent a controversial notion of growth. (2012, pp. 120-121) Capital takes advantage of that competition and now has in its disposal a wide range of options for locating the factories, the headquarters and the markets of its products, according to the benefits of legislation and tax regulations in each area. In that way, new modern zones are being shaped, this time not inside the boundaries of a city, but around the globe. The inhabitants of the attacked areas do not have to confront the local -and consequently familiar, tangible- capitalist, but instead abstract, immaterial corporations that are being managed from far away continents.

In the context of globalization, according to the insightful analysis of Hardt and Negri, the workforce -regardless of the kind of labor that performs- is expected to be flexible and available, to immigrate from continent to continent, transforming the job market to truly global. Nevertheless, the immigration routes often are not free, but highly dangerous and constrained to specific patterns. (2009, p. 134) The effect on the cities is clear: the inhabitants, knowing that they will stay temporarily in a place, don’t

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recognize that place as “theirs”, don’t create strong local bonds -thus, community- and mostly don’t care about what will happen after they depart, producing in that way neighborhoods with expiration date. The second blow that neighborhoods experience has to do with time. (2009, p. 133) The requirements of current labor-again, regardless of the kind of it- attack free time, liquidize and split it in awkward hours between part-time jobs or completely eliminate it by working overtime. Neighborhoods don’t have any more common departures for work in the morning, tea and coffee drinking in the afternoon, stories with the daily news in the evening. Neighborhoods don’t have any more neighbors!

In contemporary cities the state does not disappear, but shifts, loses its social characteristics and transforms itself. The state institutions do

not function by prioritizing social prosperity, but instead make decisions and take initiatives aiming for the maximum profit. Construction works of infrastructure, housing policies, erection of institutional buildings and the configuration of public space are being defined by this corporate, neoliberal behavior. State institutions are being transformed into agents, performing inside the financial, investing, real-estate environment. This approach of state towards urban environments was successfully named “entrepreneurial urban governance”. As Harvey explains, urban governance seeks new ways to foster and encourage local development, hoping to lure financial and consumption flows into space.

The submission of global economic and productive relationships to that target leads to the formation of a broader coalition of forces, namely mixed

3.2 Augmented-reality technology.

SPACE IN THE ERA OF NEOLIBERALISM

organisms that are constituted by local governments, corporations and ultra-national institutions. A new consensus for the application of the entrepreneurial strategy between public and private sector emerges in developed capitalistic economies, according to which cities that conform to the demands of the global market and become agents within the speculative field, will benefit from the advantages.

(1989) The term “governance”, in contrast to the term “government”, refers to a more complicated and hybrid management and organization structure.

As a notion, it appears in two different narrations and genealogies. The first derives from corporate discourse, which suggests new authority structures and mechanisms of managing human resources, based on competition, precariousness and discipline.

In the second, according to the work of Michel Foucault and Niklas Luhmann, a new positive concept of governance is being investigated, which opts for open negotiation processes with flexible decision-making structures, that will include state and non-state actors, facilitating their collaboration and emphasizing on bottom-up procedures. (Negri & Hardt, 2009, p. 224) After all, it seems that the inherent and dominant characteristic of neoliberalism is that it doesn’t produce -in contrast to traditional capitalism- but it redistributes, restoring the power of the dominant classes. (Harvey, 2007, p. 159; Negri & Hardt, 2009, p. 266) It doesn’t generate new cities, not even bedroom towns, but intervenes in already existing ones and corrupts or alters their common wealth, imposes the dogma of urban austerity. (Ferguson, 2014) By changing functions, enclosing areas and excluding social groups, neoliberalism controls spatially and temporally the access to the common good that space is, either as resource or as means

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for the creation of other common forms. Perhaps the term “development” signifies the priority of profits over human needs, the uneven distribution of goods that results to extreme wealth and extreme poverty, the destruction of natural and artificial common.

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3.2 The strategic contradiction of Berlin’s destruction Back in Berlin. In 1990 -one year after the fall of the Wall- the world was trying to get over the first initial shock. Parties were becoming wilder day by day, immigrants from the former USSR were arriving in large numbers. In a dark room, far away from Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, perhaps in Bonne, sits the political leadership and discusses about the future of the united Germany in a smoky atmosphere. The attendees realize that Berlin is starting to get out of control; “the subculture of Kreuzberg is a dangerous role model for the German youth”, somebody will claim, “now that Berlin is the capital again”. The plan goes like that: Berlin will be modernized! It will become a normal city, just like the others, and maybe in a few years, maybe in 1999, it will be capable of hosting the headquarters of the Federal Government.

“Modernization of course demands capital”, stress the gentlemen responsible for the economics, “demands investments and development, global corporations to believe in our plan.” And investments -or better yet, investors- demand security and guarantees, demand a city peaceful and delighted with their arrival. Definitely, this city doesn’t have wild squatters and techno freaks. Definitely, it possesses and demonstrates shiny new buildings and big construction sites, which will convince the world that Berlin changed, is not anymore what they knew! Everybody is quite pleased with the closure of the discussion and their vision of the new “Berliner Republik”.

Like that -or somewhat like that- since 1990, Germany started to fund the big plan. Until that time, its western part didn’t follow the neoliberal model that was being applied in England the last 11

years by Margaret Thatcher. After the unification of the divided country though, the political leadership thought that Germany had to catch up with the global advancements, namely to have a competitive economy, which would be expressed in its powerful capital, and -slowly, but steadily- to abolish the characteristics of Welfare State, thanks to which the poor social groups of Berlin were able to survive.

Thus, the national vision for a politically strong and economically prosperous Berlin was created. The application to host the Olympic Games in 2000 was a strategic move that was trying to reestablish the city in the national and global scene. Great expectations, such as an anticipated population growth of about 5 millions of qualified employees in the next 10 years, the settlement of international companies’ headquarters in the city and the creation of a thriving economy that would offer opportunities for investment equivalent to London, Paris and New York, were dominant in the public discussion. (Bernt, Grell, & Holm, 2013, p. 23) There was no time to question these narrations, the hectic pace of the conjuncture didn’t allow it. Economic development and modernization were presented as imperative prerequisites for the reintegration of the poor city in the global grid, in accordance with the dogma TINA (There Is No Alternative). There were of course critical voices -that seemed quite ill-timed and banal- which supported that this kind of development favors a small minority, that this kind of modernization leads to a grim future.

Large amounts of money were spent -both from the state and private investors- for the extension of the city’s network and the construction of ambitious projects. Redesigned Alexanderplatz -the center of

THE STRATEGIC CONTRADICTION OF BERLIN’S DESTRUCTION

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3.3 Model of Alexanderplatz, by H. Kollhof.

3.4 Model of Potsdamer Platz.

former East Berlin- turned its back on the East (Kil, 2013), Potsdamer Platz was purchased as a “no man’s land” by Daimler Mercedes Benz before (!) the fall of the Wall and was colonized by pompous towers (Karidis, 2008, p. 445), while office and housing complexes were erected across the city in a frenetic tempo. Unfortunately (?) they remained empty. During the second half of the ‘90s it became obvious that the plan of modernization had failed.

Berlin went bankrupt in the early ‘00s, because of the outrageous amounts of money spent on failed construction works and also because of a public bank conglomerate that participated in real estate speculations. The dogma of development however wasn’t fully abandoned. It remained in the subconscious of the political leadership as a latent dream. A big plan on the riverside, the so-called

Mediaspree Projekt, had already begun and the hopes for economic growth were resting on it. At the same time, speculation in real estate business was starting to become popular in Berlin, in the circles of both German and non German investors.* Such practices are being identified with a

* Proof of the speculative mania offers the analysis of Andrej

Holm, professor at Humboldt University. Holm presents the evolution of purchase and sale activities concerning the 2413,7 sq.m. building in Linienstraße 118. According to evidence, the building was sold in 1997 to a couple from Hamburg for 700.000 euro (290 euro/sq.m.) In 2011 it was sold to a real estate company from Vienna for 2.400.000 euro (1.000 euro/sq.m.) In 2013 it was sold for the third time to the company Jachimowicz for 5.520.000 euro (2.300 euro/sq.m.) Finally, in 2013 the separate apartments were sold via a real estate company from Berlin for about 8.000.000 euro (3.400 euro/sq.m.) (Holm, 2013)

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3.5 One of Berlin’s “hip” places.

hardcore destruction strategy of Berlin’s common wealth and contradict with the softer approach that in the end proved to be more effective. The political and economic leadership, as it couldn’t eliminate the common that in the course of time had been collectively produced by the Berliners, decided to do something worse: corrupt it. The campaign that was embodied in the famous phrase of the 2004 mayor Klaus Wowereit -“Berlin ist arm, aber sexy”, namely that Berlin is poor, but sexy- had begun years before. The narration of the new city was created as a fantasy of what simultaneously destroyed. (Maak, 2015) The promotion of poverty, decadence, dirt, decay and anarchy, the projection of squats as “a walking tour in the original dangerous neighborhoods”, of immigrants as “a multi-culti environment”, of underground and unknown clubs

that experimented with new sounds as “a dark night to remember”, the advertisement of Kreuzberg by local hostels as “the alternative neighborhood with lots of graffiti, dark gas lanterns and dog shit” (JETpak, 2013) are fragments of the paranoia that started with the inventive commercialization of the Myth. This strategy aims at two scales; first at the global, using city branding techniques that try to attribute to the city a distinguishable identity and second at the local, concerning specific places in Berlin that are being sold and altered. Example. 2003, corner of Schlesische Straße and Falckensteinstraße, neighborhood Wrangelkiez, Kreuzberg. In the ground floor of the housing complex that Alvaro Siza designed during IBA-New there is a local bar with the name “Pizzeria La Romantica”, where the tenants gather and drink cold beers in the evening. 2012, same

THE STRATEGIC CONTRADICTION OF BERLIN’S DESTRUCTION

place. In the ground floor there is now the Mexican food franchise “Que Pasa”, the tenants complain that until 4 in the morning the noise pollution from the tourists is unbearable. The common culture, the human networks, the collective living and the alternative entertainment are being corrupted and lose their fragile character, the ability to transform and produce new, common ways of cohabitation.

At this point an interesting contradiction is being observed. The city survives until now by commercializing its dirty, wild character. At the same time, the city tries -and slowly succeeds, by overcoming its financial crisis- to attract investors and development projects. The two strategies of the political leadership and the national and global capital are not compatible, actually the one sabotages the other! The obsession of attracting global investments and the measures that are being taken for the achievement of development are undermining the city’s qualities that right now are keeping it financially alive, through the corruption and commercialization of its most unique characteristics. As Hardt and Negri explain, capital and its political representatives seem incapable of managing the contemporary contradictions of production and economy, as they insist on an aggressive economic approach, trying at the same time to integrate in it the commercially charming image of an anarchic city. (2009, pp. 290295) A decision has to be made quickly to avoid the destruction -and probably will not include any of the two approaches that were presented.

The music industry of Berlin provides an interesting example that helps understand this argument. The techno scene, which started as experimentation in the face of punk’s crisis during the early ‘90s, would not have blossomed, if there wasn’t for the vacant playground-space inside East Berlin’s abandoned

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industries that enabled the subculture’s growth.

(Bernt, Grell, & Holm, 2013, p. 16) Underground illegal clubs located in deserted factories, having the minimum budget and the weirdest audience, were trying out new electro sounds. (Hoppe, Lange, & Maeck, 2015) Each improvement of the style was happening because of the open source of sounds, of the cooperation between musicians and the exchange of styles and ideas, thanks to the local meeting points that enabled the acquaintance, the connection and the communication of the artists.

The music industry could not ignore this wealth.

Universal Music, MTV and other global colossi, as part of Mediaspree Projekt, built their headquarters at the junction of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, on the Spree’s river bank, a few meters away from the Wall’s ruins. Now the local music labels, which can apprehend and observe developments of the scene, contact the artists that have stood out through the techno community and promote them to the bigger company, becoming themselves integrated into the global network of cultural economy. However, the presence of global music enterprises, the commercialization of the scene, the competition between the artists and the high cost of entrance in the clubs have started to destroy whatever was common, whatever initially produced the musical wealth. As Bader and Scharenberg ask, how significant is urbanity -and, more precisely, the distinct urbanity and subculture of Berlin- for such a productive process? (2013) Another example is the known concept of gentrification. Andrej Holm analyzes successfully the expressions of the phenomenon in the city. But first, he states, when the much-discussed term is being mentioned, caution is needed. The pattern of urban upgrading and revaluation of former poor districts

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universally doesn’t signify that gentrification is just a “global urban strategy” that functions with the same dynamic, motives and effects around the globe.

On the contrary, as Berlin proves, gentrification is highly embedded into specific local contexts and frameworks. (2013) Different variations of the phenomenon can be found in the city, for example the construction boom of luxurious housing complexes in the neighborhoods of Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte can be recognized as “new build gentrification” or “super gentrification”, the displacement of poor populations in Neukölln because of the pressure that derives from the gap between long-term rental agreements and new contract rents represents the trend of “rental gentrification”, the transformation of rental housing into holiday flats in Kreuzberg can be seen as “tourism gentrification”. These variations can be studied properly only if they become integrated into a specific local, historical, political and legal context.

Returning to Wrangelkiez, two gentrification strategies are being observed. In the first belong the alternative and creative pioneers that chose the neighborhood because of its bold and reckless character that fitted their bohemian lifestyle and their limited financial resources. As they settled, the neighborhood’s prestige rose and is currently being perceived as one of the “hip” city districts.

Consequently, the rents increased and today the first wave of gentrifiers cannot live in Wrangelkiez.

In the second, more violent case, W.F., a social worker of the “Day Care Center for the Homeless” in Wrangelkiez, stated in an interview that real estate companies knock on the doors of old and poor inhabitants, offering them a few thousands euro for the cancellation of their rental contracts.

Unfortunately, the people that need immediately the money accept the offer and end up homeless after a

while. The apartments become holiday flats, costing 55 euro/night -so, 1.650 euro/month (Skowronnek, Vogel, & Parnow, 2015), while in their previous state they were rented for 200 euro/month. In any case, the common wealth is being lost and that affects even those that indirectly or directly eliminate it. The first wave of soft gentrifiers has no longer the ability to live in the area because of its revaluation and the hardcore speculators of real estate, by raising the rents and displacing the original inhabitants of the neighborhood, destroy the atmosphere that wish to take advantage of.

THE STRATEGIC CONTRADICTION OF BERLIN’S DESTRUCTION

3.6 Expressive posters against Airbnb.

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3.3 Riverside projects and luxurious complexes The two projects of the companies “Regionalmanagement Mediaspree e.V.” and “Dragonerhöfe GmbH” are being now perceived as attempts of the global capital to exploit the positive conditions that Berlin’s entrepreneurial urban governance created, aiming to the expropriation of the common wealth on the Spree’s river banks and inside the plot of Dragoner Areal.

In the case of the river’s banks, emphasis should be put on the selling procedure of the initially publicowned plots to the highest bidder through “urban development contracts”. These contracts were signed during the ‘90s, only the last years though have started to be capitalized upon, because of the general financial recovery. (Holm, 2014) Thanks to these

friendly to the investors agreements, the building and planning legislation was overridden, while the exact content was never published, despite the regulations allowing the allocation of public subsidies. In 2001 a development management group was founded with the name “Regionalmanagement Mediaspree e.V.”, a public-private partnership constituted of plot owners, investors and representatives of the Senate and the District Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain. The conglomerate managed to secure further public funding, due to its “public interest” status, although the majority of its members were striving for the satisfaction of their personal interests. (Dohnke, 2013) The plan of Mediaspree belongs to the category of waterfront projects, which the last decades

3.7 The harbor of Mediaspree Projekt. Some of the depicted buildings have already been erected.

RIVERSIDE PROJECTS AND LUXURIOUS COMPLEXES

tend to develop along the sea or river sides. The ports that these projects affect used to be of great financial, social and symbolic importance, being the trading hubs and multicultural condensers of cities. However, the conduction of trade has been radically altered; old ports near to city centers were abandoned and gradually decayed, since they could no longer support the change in the scale of commerce. Near the empty facilities remained only the social groups that had no other choice but to preserve their livelihoods with difficulty by engaging with obsolete harbor activities. Since the second half of the 20th century though and thanks to multiple restoration plans started the revaluation of the postindustrial waterfront imagery, praising the charm of the abandoned silos and rusty cranes, in the context of the overall evaluation of the cities’ industrial past.

3.8 The complex of A. Piepgras in Dragoner Areal.

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This tendency is governed by common principles and is characterized by specific results, such as the redefinition of waterfront’s importance within the urban fabric, the alteration of harbor’s image and the regeneration of the economy. Nevertheless, the ulterior motive of such interventions seems to be the formation of a commercially attractive picture, recognizable in global level, in the framework of inter-urban competition for capital and tourism.

(Papachristopoulou, 2016) The construction of luxurious commercial and cultural centers, restaurants, hotels and housing complexes has as a result the displacement of the local population and the old functions.

In the case of Dragoner Areal, the state played again an important role in facilitating the investor.

Germany decided to sell the federal property to the higher bidder, ignoring the participation of public companies in the procedure and the yearlong housing crisis of the area. This decision is political and not financial, since the Federation prioritized profits over social policy, providing an excellent example of state’s neoliberal behavior. The Senate’s reaction against the Federal Government’s decision is another indicator of the fluidity of governance, according to which corporations, national governments and local institutions are being entangled, conforming opportunistically their policy to current interests.

(Karidis, 2008, pp. 436-440) The proposal of “Dragonerhöfe GmbH” for a complex with services, shops and luxurious apartments offers to the investor the ability to easily extract profit. According to the general rule, the erection of complexes that combine consumption, office and housing facilities has as a result the raise of the whole plot’s value, through the Differential Rent II, namely through “the comparative advantages

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that are being inscribed inside the area’s boundaries that the real estate capital takes advantage of, and which [the advantages] emerge from the conducive interrelation of the functions.” (Karidis, 2008, p. 393) Such complexes, being gated controlled enclaves, offer a miniature of production and reproduction in neoliberal societies. Often they provide to the cities semi-public (or semi-private?) spaces-forconsumption, which function by excluding the Other and are constantly under surveillance and/ or policing, eliminating the surprises and the unexpected encounters that rich urbanity entails, staging carefully the now tamed and predictable public life. (Stavrides, 2016, p. 140) It is being clear that the case studies are not two urban movements with exclusively local reference.

Of course they are closely interwoven with two places, however the practices that capital chooses to attack these places are common, international, almost cliché. Because of that integration in the global context, the counter suggestions are worthy of analysis. Since capital’s strategies are being justifiable and absolutely compatible with the economy and production patterns of the era, the movements’ stand is equally timely, trying to answer the contradictions of contemporary biopolitical society.

4. The wealth of life by the river

When the child was a child it walked with its arms swinging, wanted the brook to be a river, the river to be a torrent, and this puddle to be the sea.

Peter Handke, “Lied vom Kindsein�

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4.1 How can you measure solidarity?

4.1.1 The biopolitical production in Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain Why did the people that formed the initiative “Sink Mediaspree!” decide to devote their free time and energy to protest and design an alternative urban development scenario? What was the motivating power that led them to such a sequence of actions? The majority of the initiative’s members were inhabitants of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, so to answer these questions, a research on the two neighborhoods’ characteristics and their way of function in connection with the consequences of Mediaspree Projekt is essential.

Can perhaps the two districts be seen as a system of expanding commons? According to Stavrides, these systems, in contrast to enclosed common worlds, have the ability to perpetually welcome newcomers and, by including them in the commoning process, to transform themselves.

Their fundamental characteristics are multiplicity, translatability of difference and prevention of power accumulation from a person or a group. (2016, pp.

31-61) The social pluralism of the two areas, the harmonious coexistence of the theoretically most incompatible identities and the general equity in concentration of wealth, power or status, allow Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain to be understood as a system of expanding commons. These characteristics -multiplicity, translatability and equality- seem to be simultaneously the prerequisites for the two neighborhoods’ function.

The understanding of the two neighborhoods’ function and everyday life is simplified, if seen from

a biopolitical perspective. The notion of biopolitics is met in Foucault’s analysis about bodies and power (2011), according to which bodies constitute the elements of the biopolitical grid of existence. In this grid, power is being constantly negotiated, while bodies resist and struggle, in order to exist.

So, biopolitics ascribe a physical, somatic tone on social antagonisms. Hardt and Negri develop this notion further ahead and define the Other of the dominating power as the alternative production of subjectivity, that not only resists power, but is also becoming autonomous from it, as “a partisan relationship between subjectivity and history”. (2009, pp. 56,61) Continuing in this spirit, they explain that today the results of capitalistic production tend to be mostly corporeal subjects, social relationships and forms of life, codes, images, ideas, knowledge and information; production tends to become biopolitical. (2009, p. 131) One of the fundamental qualities of biopolitical production, found in the neighborhoods of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, is the increasing tendency for autonomy from capital, interwoven with the intensified role of the common both as productive force and as product of productive procedures. (Negri & Hardt, 2009, pp. 150-151) This common can’t be measured with classic finance’s indexes, so it is usually being characterized as an “externality”, an element that can’t be calculated in proper economic relations.

Hardt and Negri claim that, to understand the term of biopolitical production this perspective has to be inverted, namely to internalize the externalities, placing the common in the center of economic and

4.1 (left) Atmospheric collage of the Spree’s banks, personal production.

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productive activity. Thus, development will not be identified with the rise of financial indexes, but with the growth of social forces; development will be identified with the progress of society, the blossom of its senses, thoughts and feelings. (2009, pp. 280285) Biopolitical production in Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain is based on the system of expanding commons, on equality, multiplicity and translatability.

Two elements are simultaneously prerequisites and effects of biopolitical production. The first are the various and entangled networks of diverse communities that inhabit the neighborhoods. As presented, the networking between techno artists, audience and owners of small local clubs renders possible the finding of a studio, the osmosis of sound and rhythm, the enrichment of musical vocabulary, the personal promotion and mainly the music production. A similar network has been woven by the Turkish community, by developing a plethora of commercial activities, resulting in the overall presence of spicy tastes, colorful images and Arabic melodies.

The combination of the immigrants’ nostalgia and the Turkish neighborhoods’ micro-economy had as a result the opening of grocery stores, bakeries, boutiques and coffee shops that awaken memories of the East. Immigrants from other countries created similar networks, turning Kreuzberg into a collector of goods and customs from all over the world. The exceptional aspect, however, is not the sole presence of each network, a fact that could lead to the formation of ghettos or to the toleration between different, clearly defined communities.

The exceptional aspect is the coexistence of the diverse networks and their inter-contamination, the translatability of each group’s difference to the language of all the others, the fact that habitués of

gay clubs take their breakfast in Turkish bakeries after a night of partying. Such pluralistic networks could not exist without equity in wealth concentration, since internal hierarchies would complicate the coexistence and communication between different elements; in the end a social group or a productive branch would monopolize the districts’ capital. The networks of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain maintain the autonomy of the neighborhoods and embody the alternative practice that Hardt and Negri describe, according to which “the common exists in and is put to work by broad, open social networks. The creation of value and the accumulation of the common, then, both refer to an expansion of social productive powers.” (2009, p. 283) The second element -prerequisite and effect of biopolitical production simultaneously- is the neighborhood’s rich urbanity that would not exist without the three characteristics of expanding commons, if for example it was homogeneous (total of same elements), without the ability of translation (total of isolated subjects or enclosed groups), hierarchic and unequal (enforcement and submission instead of coexistence). Indeed, the neighborhood of Wrangelkiez that was studied during the course* “Spatial Commons 4”, demonstrates this wealth and brings to mind familiar images of villages of the Greek countryside. The spatial elements that evoke that feeling are the square and the street. The week of the course’s final workshop a workspace had been provided to the research team inside

*

The course Spatial Commons 4 was held during the spring semester 2016 in Technical University of Berlin, under the supervision of professors Katharina Hagg, Dagmar Pelger and Anna Heilgemeir. During the course, the commons of the neighborhood Wrangelkiez in Kreuzberg were researched and thoroughly mapped.

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the Neighborhood’s Center, which was located in a passage-like square within a block. In this square, where the team spent many hours, friendly fellowships, elder Germans, Turkish mothers with their babies, homeless people that were leaving from the “Day Care Center”, us -a dozen of tired architects, tourists with maps that were trying to discover the “authentic Kreuzberg” passed, ran, stood, sat or slept throughout the day. The groups were distinguishable because of their external characteristics, but mostly because of their way of using the public (or common?) space. However, their difference didn’t prevent them from coexisting and mildly interacting.

In the nearby street, Falckensteinstraße, an interview was held with H.S., owner of an atelier and member of one of ‘80s squats, who is for many years resident of the neighborhood. During the interview that took

place on the bench of his shop, people were passing by, carrying bags with the daily shopping, bikes with kids, backpacks with laptops and were greeting warmly H.S. The diverse urbanity, the familiar figure of the shop owner, the daily recurrent routes and stops of the neighbors are reminiscent of the image of an old Athenian neighborhood. Could this be the social expansion of senses and emotions that Hardt and Negri search for?

There are three “externalities”, according to classical economics, that the two neighborhoods however have completely internalize, basing their daily function on them. The first one is trust, meant not as a transcendental moral notion, but as compliance with informal agreements that benefit the whole. For example, the purchase of the daily shopping from small local grocery stores constitutes

4.2 Cultural pluralism in Wrangelkiez.

4.3 Rich public space in Wrangelkiez.

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a necessary precondition for their survival; the stores in their turn orient themselves to the local community. The importance of trust becomes clear if the cancellation of the agreement is studied: if the residents started to shop from central stores, then the local stores would close, likewise if the local stores decided to address groups that don’t belong in the neighborhood (e.g. tourists), then the higher prices would render the products too expensive for the mostly poor inhabitants. Another example offers an observation from the course “Spatial Commons 4”.

Opposite from the Neighborhood’s Center, there is a playground that was crowded with children during the afternoon. The children were playing unattended and often were entering the Center to drink some water, with the help of a woman working there -or even ours when she wasn’t present! Without that culture of trust, their parents -mainly their motherscould not take care of productive or reproductive activities during the afternoon. Such a culture exists thanks to the informal understanding and translation, thanks to the lack of competitive relationships among the inhabitants. A third example of trust -with the meaning of informal agreement- poses the collection of empty beer bottles by the group of Roma. In Germany, the return of glass packaging to supermarkets corresponds to a monetary price, the so-called “Pfand” that could be translated as pawn.

Pfand, reaching even 30 cents is not to disdain, if one considers the number of beers that are being daily consumed by the users of Kreuzberg’s parks. Roma wander in these parks, observe who have finished their beer and ask for the bottle. The drinkers offer it willingly. The result of this ritual is that on the one hand the unique population of Roma survives financially, while on the other the bottles are being recycled and the park remains clean -the garbage

cans could not possibly fit the produced volume of empty beer bottles.

Second “externality” is solidarity or the “gift”.

According to Stavrides, apart from the typical exchange of presents that has a character of an explicit or latent obligation and implies an asymmetry of power, there can exist forms of sharing that would transgress individual or group calculations and would tend to different expressions of collectivity. Maybe in that commoning scenario some would need to offer more than others or more than they would receive, contributing without expecting a balanced relation. Solidarity thus becomes prerequisite, practice and result of egalitarian sharing. (2016, pp. 48-49) The neighborhood’s everyday life could not exist without the gift between diverse groups, which is connected both as practice and as condition with the communication of the difference, with the negation of wealth’s concentration, with the will for the selfless sharing of each commoner’s surplus power. Two experiences from Wrangelkiez maybe explain better this argument. The 85-yearold Greek that lives for decades in Berlin visits each Wednesday and Thursday the “Day Care Center for the Homeless” to help serve lunch. The trees’ beds of the neighborhood are planted with flowers and vegetables. The residents cultivate them -one or two beds each- as a personal initiative and without formal agreement. Small incidents, that however are indexes of a collective care culture and that definitely cannot be measured with quantitative criteria of a capitalistic economy.

Finally, memory becomes a resource, “externality” that can be used in a positive or negative way, since it can function as mechanism that secures the existence of expanding commons, but simultaneously can reproduce an enclosed identity, attracting only

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4.4 The Myth of Berlin. Snapshot from May Day, 2014; reality or fantasy?

elements similar to it. For example, in interviews that took place during the course “Spatial Commons 4”, it was many times explained by passersby that the reason they moved in Wrangelkiez -and Kreuzberg in general- was its culture, a subculture that was reproduced as a Myth. (Lang, 1998) The interviewees supported both the ‘80s squats and the current movements for the right to the city. Of course, because of the same Myth certain people perhaps didn’t decide to move to the neighborhood.

Does the system regulate itself by accepting people capable of respecting its qualities or does it function in an elitist way, excluding whoever doesn’t fit to its strict identity? K., who lives at Wrangelstraße 66, can provide an answer. In the beginning of 2016 she, along with other tenants, participated in the effort to prevent the sale of their building’s apartments to

private owners. The struggle of the residents in the end was successful, but -according to K.- only because of its coincidence with the struggle against the eviction of Bizim Bakal, a small Turkish grocery store in the same street. The neighborhood, determined to protect the local store, stood together forming a movement and the inhabitants of the house at Wrangelstraße 66 found in Bizim Bakal’s assemblies the public podium to present their problem, receiving solidarity and support from their neighbors. In this case, the memory of the neighborhood and its heritage of struggling gave birth not only to new movements, but also to new movements inside the movements. It seems that collective history functions as an instrument to sustain multiplicity, coexistence and equality, that it just repels those not ready to respect the rules of expanding commons.

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At this point it is worth mentioning that the word “resource” usually stands for an element to be exploited, the reserve of financial, material or immaterial factors that can be used, aiming to add financial value. People, space, natural elements and abstract concepts are recognized in western societies as commodities that can be used, purchased, sold and valuated, always corresponding to their exact calculated qualities and quantities. The access to “goods” and their “benefits” becomes an object of financial negotiation, since a scarcity principle that renders the objects evaluable is presupposed.

However, human, space, nature, culture, knowledge are not subjects to the logic of scarcity, cannot end or become consumed. (Stavrides, 2016, pp. 52, 259) In the context of this paper, the word “resource” is not used with the financial hue that was described, but with the meaning of a broader common possession, of the motive for a collective praxis.

Having clarified the notion of “resource”, space constitutes in some of the above references such a resource for the social groups that use it, for example the club, the local grocery shop, the old squat, the Neighborhood’s Center, the “Day Care Center for the Homeless”. In other references, space functions as a prerequisite, as means, it is the common ground that solidarity needs to be practiced and community to interact. Places of memory, institutions, trees, the squares and streets of Kreuzberg surround the rich social life that exists in, on, around and thanks to them. A last notice is that biopolitical production is not constrained by the logic of scarcity, doesn’t diminish the raw material from which wealth was produced; on the contrary, it sets bios in motion without consuming it. (Negri & Hardt, 2009, pp.

283-284) In other words, solidarity, trust, networks, memory, community cannot end. The more the

inhabitants network themselves, reminisce and develop bonds of solidarity and trust between them, the more the common wealth increases, the more people’s ability of commoning raises. The system expands itself.

4.1.2 The corruption of the river’s commons It has been proved that biopolitical life, the necessary for survival elements and social relationships among the inhabitants of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain are in a large extent based on the system of expanding commons that the two neighborhoods constitute and the fundamental characteristics that define it: multiplicity, translatability and prevention of wealth and power accumulation. This system has by default the ability to transform itself and to accept newcomers that in common reinvent constantly its way of function.

(Stavrides, 2016, p. 39) Thus, the space of the two neighborhoods is rendered common before anything else and is being inscribed as such in the consciousness, the everyday life and the inhabitants’ practices. Whatever attempts to alter or corrupt that character, will be confronted exactly with that initial inscription.

It is becoming clear why Mediaspree Projekt could not be accepted. The enforcement of the material and symbolic aspect of neoliberalism exactly on the sensitive space that the two districts’ threshold defines, in combination with their touristification, had disastrous results on the neighborhoods and their residents. Two groups intruded in a non organic way and unwilling to respect the area’s qualities. The powerful companies, by housing their headquarters within the buildings of Mediaspree Projekt in strategic points of the city, affected the financial equilibrium of the neighborhoods and created an asymmetry

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4.5 Twin Towers, 1997 (Mediaspree Projekt).

4.6 Treptowers, 1998 (Mediaspree Projekt).

of power. Tourists, by swarming in the -long since gentrified and not so dangerous- Kreuzberg, usually don’t attempt to translate their difference and perceive the harmonious coexistence of the multiple identities as another exhibit of an “alternative walking tour”. The preconditions that kept the system in operation collapse. The open networks deteriorate, trust, solidarity and community disappear, since the local stores and the old inhabitants are being displaced because of the direct or indirect raise of the cost of living. Memory becomes segmented and is transformed into a touristic sight.

Construction work begins. In 1993 and 1995 two industrial facilities were transformed into office complexes as part of Mediaspree Projekt, while in 1996 the first newly constructed building of the project was erected. The following years national

and international companies settled in four former industrial shells and four new business centers were erected, until the restoration of the building of Universal Music. (Wikipedia, 2008) Construction work in this building, funded with 10 millions by the Senate, was completed in 2002 and the fully renovated shell, which in the past served as a coldstorage facility for eggs, welcomed the company. Both the building’s restoration and Universal’s settlement constitute the first crucial moment of the history. The event attracted media companies of the same range and size, resulting in Berlin’s gradual establishment as the “creative capital” of Europe. (Stange, 2012) The city’s inhabitants -especially those of the two riverfront neighborhoods- experienced three losses with the beginning of the headquarters’ function.

First was the symbolic loss of space, because the

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4.7 Universal Music, 2002 (Mediaspree Projekt).

4.8 The Universal building, the Wall, the river.

company settled on the neuralgic nod of the two neighborhoods, next to the central Oberbaumbrücke bridge and the historical S-Bahn and U-Bahn station “Warschauer Straße”, on the Spree and only a few meters away from the start of the Wall’s ruins. The second loss refers to the damage that the local economy suffered, since one of each most productive branches was the music scene. Universal took -and is still taking- advantage of the local network of artists that was constituted through decades of internal procedures and experimentations. The third loss was mainly political. The multinational corporation of the global mainstream music incarnated in the eyes of many the ghost of the globalized neoliberal economy that profits at the expense of local communities.

It was expected that the scattered disagreements would start slowly to form an overall critique on

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Mediaspree Projekt. In 2006, during Christopher Street Day, namely during Berlin’s Pride Parade, one of the first analyses against the project can be located. (tCSD, tCSD 2006, 2008) In it, gentrification in Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain is being mentioned, as also the enormous size of Arena Berlin, the unreasonable state funding, the tax facilitation of many constructions, the presentation of the neighborhood as ghetto and the promotion of a corresponding “urban lifestyle”. In the end, a phrase from Mediaspree Projekt’s campaign is being commented: “The plan, thanks to the measures we take, derives from the synergy of all the main agents of the area.” According to the analysis, this phrase is not false, but as “area” is being now perceived the immense Mediaspree complex and not the two neighborhoods that surround it. The analysis concludes that the residents are the main agents and this fact needs to be understood. The struggle against Mediaspree Projekt had just begun.

The reactions of the inhabitants are being perceived as the expression of their indignation due to the elimination of the unique biopolitical characteristics that constitute and reproduce the neighborhoods and the human relations. For the inhabitants of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, the prevention of Mediaspree Projekt was imperative for their survival.

4.1.3 The equivocal power of the common The residents’ reaction was an expected result.

This does not explain though the great step that followed; the design and the formation of another suggestion for the shape, the function and the structure of the city. Maybe the appearance of this step is tightly linked with the fact that these neighborhoods were not enclosed, but open and

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perpetually expanding. Their inherent quality to be transformed through the course of time has transfused to whomever passed by and lived within them the ability to imagine possible variations of life, dynamic and transformable, according to the needs that emerge in every spatial and temporal conjuncture.

Maybe also this step -the vision and the proposal for a city beyond the existing- appears when the expanding commons have another characteristic: love for life. Love is being perceived not as a romantic feeling, but as the equivocal power of the common; the power that the common exerts and also the power that constitutes the common. (Negri & Hardt, 2009, p. 189) Love urges to the design and fantasy of another reality, by being the catalyst that transforms the seemingly impossible to a concrete spatial utopia, which can be realized and manifest itself in the city.

(Ferguson, 2014, p. 15)

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4.2 Sink Mediaspree!

4.2.1 A day in the life of the river’s friends The first critical voices against Mediaspree were judging the intentions, the consequences and the general policy that such a project expressed. The inhabitants of the two neighborhoods, however, didn’t confine themselves to accusing the opponent, but, following practices of the commons, expressed themselves creatively and envisioned an alternative urban development. Every practice initiates based on the existing common resources, but eventually alters and evolves, due to the inherent tendency of expanding commons to be transformed, being influenced by newcomers and new needs that emerge. So, the practices fluctuate between the tendency towards an ideal situation and its mutation by the hierarchical and capitalistic world.

The beginning was reluctant and happened with quite an expected way: demonstrations in the city. This practice has been imprinted in collective memory, as part of the rich legacy that the turbulent decades of ‘80s and ‘90s left to the neighborhoods.

Memorable is the march and the hour-long turmoil on May Day 1987 that started a tradition of dynamic and vigorous protests every 1st of May, which continued for many years. (archiv.squat, 2005) Apart from this special event though, clashes on the streets between protesters and the police have been closely connected with the era of squats, since the ones that didn’t manage to be settled, were violently evicted, usually more than once, as the persistent squatters were reoccupying the building that hoped it would house their dreams. Outdoor protests are connected

4.9 Demonstration in Kreuzberg, 1987.

4.10 May Day in Görlitzer Park, Kreuzberg 2003.

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4.11 Demonstration on the river, July 2008.

4.12 Canoes, inflatable boats and lifejackets, July 2008.

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with pre-existing commons, with Kreuzberg’s culture that is successfully summarized in the phrase “umsonst und draußen”; free and out. Living in the urban countryside for a large part both of day and night is usual and can be traced in many local parks, where people of all social groups enjoy Sterni -Berlin’s cheap beer, play music, practice acrobatics, walk their pets, purchase and sell suspiciously smelling cigarettes and organize illegal barbeques. However, the classic outdoor demonstration in the city was transformed with the expansion of marchable surfaces: with marches in the river. Specifically, on 1st July 2008, twelve days before the referendum, a protest with inflatable boats was organized in the Spree, the so-called “Spreeblockade”, aiming to prevent the investors’ navigable tour of the waterfront plots. (Schertel, 2012, p. 57) The perception of what was usually referred to as “environment” was converted. According to Lieven de Cauter, nature and its elements are perceived -when not exploitedas resources to protect, as reserves that have to be maintained in sterile enclaves, without coming in contact with practices of human appropriation. (de Cauter, 2013) Even though Universal Commons (Amazon rainforest, North Pole, Sahara desert) need to remain intact, the rest of them can only be protected with practices of appropriation by those that use them, care for them and share them with respect. Thus, they can be transformed from reserves-under-protection to motives, means and instances of common wealth’s expansion. In that way, as in the Spree’s example, they acquire signs, users and uses, their expropriation is hindered.

In 2007 the initiative “Mediaspree Versenken!”

(Sink Mediaspree!) was formed. Obviously, Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain had seen before collective projects, squat assemblies, political organizations

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and self-help groups. The initiative’s difference lies in the coexistence of the radical left community with the alternative and creative youth of the city. Their -unfortunately temporary- partnership produced ideas and created ruptures in both identities, by challenging and reconstituting them. The side of the radical left was forced to accept a way of action less bound by ideology, to experiment with new forms of addressing society, maybe more sensible, to accept horizontal discourse without hierarchies and to question political issues that maybe before seemed resolved. The side of the alternative youth came in touch with coherent collective action, with politically refined ideas that may tend towards a greater than the neighborhood picture, with the challenge of confrontation and composition of multiple opinions, with the awareness that individual subjectivities, who compose an initiative, can form in the end something greater than their sum. (Negri & Hardt, 2009, pp. 165-169) The exceeding of established identities and the practices that they carry, the judgement of people not with prejudice based on internalized stereotypes, but with a fresh view for each new encounter are difficult, but crucial steps towards the world of commons. The marching towards this direction will not occur through personal navel-gazing, but only through the inter-mutation of different subjectivities and cultures, only through the mutual support for the abandonment of the familiar and the adventurous discovery of the perpetually altering.

The initiative, thanks to its inclusive identity, attempted to address the local community by organizing Idea Workshops for the riverfront areas.

Similar actions have been realized during the years of IBA, when many houses in Kreuzberg were collectively renovated and restored by their residents,

with the assistance of architects. (Hertzberger, 2002, pp. 42-43) Of course, in the case of “Sink Mediaspree!” there is an important difference: the autonomy of the participants. Without state validation and the intervention of specialists, the inhabitants improvised, having as guidelines their needs and lifestyle, discussing every time the plans and the axonometric drawings on the areas that they studied. However, according to commentary that was published some years later, the Idea Workshops were not entirely equal, as they seemed to be manipulated by the architect C.J., central figure of the referendum and creator of the drawings that represented the initiative’s proposal.

The above actions were climaxed in the referendum of 13th July 2008. The process of conducting a referendum about a local issue

4.13 Idea Workshop at the Eastern Harbor, 2008.

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that the inhabitants pose after the collection of a certain number of signatures in a District or a State is common in Northern Europe. Specifically, the initiative collected in the administrative District Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg 16.000 signatures* and brought to the ballot box 35.000 citizens, namely 20% of the registered voters**. Of course, the institution of the referendum doesn’t involve actively the participants in the formation of a common proposal, but merely invites them to vote between two already formed, concrete frameworks. Nevertheless, it offers the chance to the so-called “public opinion” to express itself about the current developments of each conjuncture. The initiative tried to open a public discourse with the neighborhood and to shape in a collective way its proposal. It won the referendum with the overwhelming 86,8% and, as it is already mentioned, its demands were never implemented.

What could have possibly gone wrong?

4.2.2 How to get trapped in a committee After the win of the advisory referendum -that may was the initiative’s final target, as its members weren’t prepared for the aftermath- a Special Committee was constituted, consisted of nine representatives of the District and four members of “Sink Mediaspree!”. This move signified the beginning of the end. Violating the basic principles that led to its success, the initiative was trapped, delegitimized, divided and in the end dissolved. (Dohnke, 2013) The main mistakes committed were three. The first was the appointment of four representatives.

*

Limit for a referendum’s conduction: 5.500 signatures (Der Tagesspiegel, 2008)

4.14 Referendum ballot paper.

** Limit for a referendum to be valid: 15% of the registered voters (Wikipedia, 2011)

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The dynamic and open to newcomers body of neighborhood’s inhabitants automatically was abolished and in its place appeared four persons -obviously static- that possess the power of expertise, since through the committee acquire access to information. Their opinion becomes more important than the other members’ and the initiative loses its egalitarian character.

The second mistake was the pause of any action until the achievement of consensus. The Idea Workshops had stopped and the marches had ended.

Maybe this move seems logical, as an example of trust and good will from the residents’ side, however such a practice would be meaningful only between equal in power and authority opponents. Hereto the initiative trusted the state mechanism, an entity with completely different logic and function. By coming to standstill, the collective relinquished the autonomy that created and reproduced it as an independent movement that envisioned space without state intervention. Inert and submissive to an alien system, without receiving new influents, the initiative was losing -along with its autonomy- its metabolic ability.

The last mistake, direct consequence of the two others and maybe the one with the most serious repercussions, was the detachment from the neighborhood’s space. The isolation of the four representatives inside a state office and the pause of the initiative’s rest actions led to the estrangement with the productive places of the commons. In every former expression of reaction and planning, in the marches, the group meetings and the Idea Workshops, the river’s space played a decisive role; in it, the corporeal encounter and the spatial concentration of communication was realized. The presence of the collective protected the river’s banks, by giving them signs, uses and

users, while simultaneously the collective and the rebellious inhabitants, by using the space as reproductive means, were meeting, discussing, disagreeing and inspiring one another. The rupture of the bond left the river and its banks unprotected, delegitimized the representatives that seemed -and were- distanced from the neighborhood’s worries and in the end allowed to conduct the clash on the opponent’s ground. The discussion was revolving around technocratic and bureaucratic issues, without reference to the direction of urban development, to the city’s needs.

The scene is transferred to a public services building, one of the three that exist in the District, all located at least 1,5 kilometer away from the Spree. It is October 2008, the celebrations of the victory have faded, reality has arrived uninvited. The atmosphere is frozen, the nine state representatives of the political parties that are elected in the District sit in front of the four numb representatives of the initiative “Sink Mediaspree!”. The newly constituted Special Committee convenes to explore the implementation possibilities of the referendum’s requests. Members of the Greens, the Left and the Socialists seem quite willing to achieve some sort of consensual agreement and congratulate the citizens for their democratic behavior and diligence. Starting the conversation, after the compliments, the problem is explicitly stated: “Most of the riverfront state plots have already been sold to the companies that will be housed in future office buildings. In many of them, construction work has already begun. Of course we can demand them back, but imagine the amount of money that we would have to pay as compensation to the investors, let alone the tensed atmosphere that would be created! You can understand how such a development would harm our city, which only

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the last years has entered a trajectory of financial growth, being a reliable business partner… Berlin would lose its credibility in the eyes of the global business community and we would go bankrupt for the fourth time in a hundred years! So, let’s leave aside our idealisms and let’s examine realistically the situation. We hear that one of your problems is the luminosity of the sign of “O2 World”, the light pollution that it causes. Well, that’s something we can discuss about!”

Leaving the public service building, the four representatives are shocked. They could not believe that a year’s work and the victorious referendum could be cancelled so easily. Passing in front of a Turkish newsstand, they take a glimpse of the newspapers’ headlines. One of them states: “Local rioters block AGAIN the investments!” Subtitle: “Until when will lawless Kreuzberg decide for all of us???”

Capital’s narration had just been constructed. The state was used as a lever, the four representatives were trapped in technocratic financial conversations, led by the dogma TINA (There Is No Alternative) and the initiative was presented as a stereotypical minority, from which Berlin should finally disentangle itself. The argument of “the development that is threatened” because of the political discourse proved to be strong; it touched Berliners’ innermost worries, since they were afraid that their city would fall behind (but behind of what?) in the global urban ranking.

This procedure lasted until December 2009, one year and two months. The results of the Special Committee’s discussions were poor, comparing them to the great victory of July ’08. The four representatives resigned from the committee, since they were called to sign its meaningless results as a successful application of the referendum’s requests

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and to legalize in that way interventions of lesser importance, betraying the wider discourse that had begun about the direction of urban development in the city. In a few words, defeat could not be presented as victory. With the resignation of the four, the Special Committee was dissolved. The initiative found itself in the beginning of 2010 facing a dilemma, concerning one proposition of the former representatives that had been accepted by the authorities. They had suggested addressing the local community with a “Call for Ideas” about three plots of the southwestern bank, the bank of Kreuzberg.

A part of the collective -the alternative- persisted on supporting the proposition and attempting even in this confined area to create a counter-example of architecture and urban planning. (Initiativkreis Mediaspree Versenken! AG Spreeufer, 2010) The other part -the radical left- supported that they should not participate in the “Call for Ideas”, but instead level heavy criticism at whatever reformist procedures, that the damage caused in the rest 1.600.000 sq.m. could not be compensated with half-measures and that in that way the defeat of the initiative would be officialized. (Spreepirat_innen, 2011) The collective was divided and each group continued its monologue, affirming self-referentially its identity.

At this point is perhaps useful to draw conclusions for the future movements of the commons. The initiative carried from the start an inherent fragility.

Its mutation with the dominative capitalistic world that perceives people and human relationships through firm identities and established hierarchies had caused fissures among the participants since their initial formation. Of course this problem would and will always exist, since the presupposition for any attempt to go beyond this world is to start from within

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4.15 The intact plots of the southwestern bank.

it. However, this collective -and all the collectives that are being shaped in urgent circumstancesdidn’t have the time to become competent and self-sufficient against the experienced opponent that has learned through centuries to manage its contradictions successfully.

Furthermore, there is a relative incompatibility, concerning the coexistence of commons and capitalistic society, as they are two systems that function in different ways. When one of them-hereto the system of the commons- attempts to exist and be reproduced inside the other, with alien terms and requirements, failure seems quite possible; equality, multiplicity and translatability cannot survive inside a hierarchical, discriminative and enclosed system.

Does that mean that the systems of expanding commons should ignore the existence of state and

capital, acting like small gated utopias? The answer is, no. The complex problem of the absorption of commons is integrated in a field of negotiations and collisions that demand each time evaluation according to the specific framework and scale. (de Angelis, 2013, p. 132) Thus, in every entanglement of the two systems, it is essential that the side of the commons understands its difference and secures, simultaneously with the contact with whatever corrodes, the unhindered reproduction of the common character’s requisites for existence.

Finally, a useful conclusion is that the creation and defense of common spaces can only happen by implementing common practices within them. As long as space is being used not only as a protected reserve, but also as a condition for the commoners’ existence and as long as its use is happening as a commoning process, then this space will simply be reproduced! The understanding of space as still life that is being externally protected and the perception of its defense as a hierarchical and dominative relation, corrupt the system of expanding commons and -because of their interdependent relationshipdestroy simultaneously the collectives that are interwoven with it. The practices of sharing and loving among commoners and the understanding of the space-to-defend as an equal member of the system constitute both the necessary requirements for the maintenance of common spaces and at the same time create the conditions for the existence of expanding commons.

Common space should always be approached with care and sensitivity to remain open; it can be destroyed too easily. (de Cauter, 2013) An example offers the beautiful story of Cuvrybrache, which means the waste land, the desert of Cuvrystraße.

The empty private plot on the Spree’s southwestern

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riverbank, was housing an improvised village of tents, inside of which lived homeless, activists and Roma. The village in the newspapers’ headlines was referred to as “the slums of Berlin”. On its southern boundary there were two sidewalls that in 2008 were covered with the Cuvry-Graffiti, the famous murals of the Italian artist Blu. In September 2014 though, the village was burnt down during a violent eviction by the police, since on the plot was planned the erection of luxurious private apartments, as part of Mediaspree Projekt. According to the new plan, the complex would turn its back to the neighborhood, making the view and the access to the river private. Blu’s graffiti would be visible from the luxurious apartments and would also be used as an advertisement for the attraction of customers. To protest against the situation and mostly to symbolize the opposition of Kreuzberg’s inhabitants to the dominant direction of

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urban development, Blu agreed on the destruction of the two murals that were painted over with black color in December 2014. While the graffiti were there, on the top right corner of the southwestern sidewall was the sign “RECLAIM YOUR CITY”. After their destruction, on the black walls were ironically left the words “YOUR CITY”. Common space, if not functioning as such, is destroyed by its creators, to avoid the corruption.

4.16 The slums of Berlin and the graffiti of Blu.

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4.17 The destruction of the graffiti, the last defense of the neighborhood. Your city.

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4.3 The demands of the referendum The study of the referendum’s requests will help to understand the common spaces of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, which -no matter how small or insignificant may seem to classical urban analysisconstitute necessary preconditions for the two neighborhoods’ existence, function and everyday life.

4.3.1 Fifty meters from the riverside “New buildings will not approach the Spree’s riverbanks in a distance less than 50 meters in the district Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg (from the Michaelbrücke bridge to the Elsenbrücke bridge, including Lohmühlinsel island).”

From the collective’s rich work on the specific plots*, three cases are chosen to be presented, indicative for the threats that not only Berlin, but also many other cities face currently, as a result of global capital’s and neoliberal state’s policies. The first one is about the endangered cultural places, the places that created the Myth of Kreuzberg’s alternative culture. Most of them used to be under the regime of intermediary use (Zwischennutzung), as they were temporarily subleasing state property. Clubs as Maria am Ostbahnhof, Bar25, Tresor, Kater Blau and Ostgut, the meeting place of African culture YAAM, projects of alternative living inside Indian tents and wheelhouses -the so-called Wagenburgen- and abandoned factories like Eisfabrik compose the kaleidoscopic image of Kreuzberg’s and Friedrichshain’s riverbanks.

*

In the leaflet “Spreeufer für alle!” (The Spree’s riverbanks are for all!) the initiative’s proposals for the specific places are presented in detail. The direct quotation has a value per se and can be found in chapter 7.1 The Spree’s riverbanks are for all!

As different as the above projects may seem, they all have confronted the threat of eviction. The desire of city’s authorities for maximum constructional exploitation led to the shutdown, the enclosure, the displacement and the corruption of the alternative spaces, despite the effort of the initiative to redesign, maintain and promote local life.

The second case refers to a more offensive realestate strategy, which doesn’t care for individual points of the urban fabric, but seeks large surfaces that function in an urban scale, affecting not only whatever they contain, but also a greater area around them. Such an example offers the Anschutz and Post area. A surface of 523.000 sq.m., in close proximity to the ruins of the Wall, was sold in 2002 to the Mexican multimillionaire Philip Anschutz -the contracts of the deal remain unpublished. The excessive design includes, among others, five towers, a mall and the famous Arena. The example highlights the weakness of small, local movements -such as the initiative “Sink Mediaspree!”- to influence decisions and plans in such a scale of construction and capital, manifesting both the antidemocratic character of that policy and the need for the articulation of wider demanding requests, proportional of that range.

In 2015 O2, the first management company of the huge complex went bankrupt and the built mass passed on to Daimler Mercedes Benz, which had cooperated with Mr. Anschutz on a respective project in Shanghai. According to inhabitants’ testimonies, in one night’s time the annoying advertisements of O2 were replaced by similar of Mercedes Benz.

The third and last case of global capital’s and neoliberal state’s intervention concerns the exploitation of architectural history. The buildings

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4.18 Sign at the legendary Bar25, after the three-day-long closing party: “THE BAR IS DEAD”.

that used to house the facilities of the Spree’s Eastern Harbor were exquisite examples of early 20th century industrial architecture and also (former) property of the State. The area was impaired by the extensive superficial restorations that maintained only a historicist façade and restructured completely the interior of the buildings, in combination with the erections of dissonant forms. The initiative attempted also in this case to form an alternative proposal, open both to the neighborhood and the city that would develop a green, public, riverside space. Unfortunately, their proposal didn’t manage to convince the Special Committee.

Wandering in the historical past, a project that may surpass even the worst architectural nightmares is presented. East-Side-Gallery is the longest maintained part of the Berlin Wall and was painted

in the early ‘90s with beautiful graffiti of artists from around the world in a spirit of global unity. In this location was designed also in the ‘90s a chain of buildings by the river, which in its northern part would climax in a 67m tower and a bridge that would connect the tower with the opposite southwestern bank of Kreuzberg. These two structures were the only elements that had been preserved as possible realizable plans in 2009. No one wished for the construction of the tower, neither the public institutions, nor the architect and the owner company “city-bauten”. A predicted fact, since the tall volume of “luxury & wellness” apartments, without nearby neighborhood or infrastructure, amidst the greatest monument of a whole era had no hope for integration and sale of its expensive units. For that reason, the initiative concluded that there was no

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4.19 Construction work in Anschutz and Post area. In the background, the imposing Mercedes-Benz Arena.

need to propose something for this location, since the tower was not going to be built. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always make sense. The tower was built in 2014, its name is Living Levels* and constitutes

*

The project’s description explains: “Just on the Spree’s bank, in the heart of Berlin one of the most exciting immovable properties of our times is located, which provides a new perspective in life and living. Glass walls that touch the ceiling of each floor and white elements on the façade ornament the 14-story object with an apparent lightness, negating geometry’s strictness. On the bank’s newly shaped promenade there is a café. The workmanship of the most expensive materials and the application of high technology even in the smallest details characterize the experience that is named LIVING LEVELS. A night illumination concept directs the sculptural scenery of the architecture. LIVING LEVELS will be completed by the end of 2015.” (City & Home, 2015)

the cultural equivalence of building a “polykatoikia”** inside Parthenon. It is located 5 meters away from the Berlin Wall and to render it accessible two parts of the historical exhibit had to be removed under police surveillance and be relocated inside a fence next to the tower. The door of the building is

**

Polykatoikia, literally meaning multi-house, is the most common type of multi-storey building met in Greek cities, praised for its ugliness. However, the flexibility and adaptability of the type are responsible for the social and cultural mixture, the fast urbanization and -one might say- the democratization of construction in Greece. The type blossomed during ‘70s and ‘80s, because of the “antiparochi” system, a uniquely Greek arrangement, whereby the owner of a building plot was compensated with apartments in lieu of payment for the land that he relinquished to the contractor who built an apartment block -a polykatoikia- on it.

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literally the Wall -or maybe the Wall’s gap. A threeroom apartment (138.2 sq.m.) on the 9th floor costs 2.850 euro per month, namely 20,6 euro/sq.m. At the same time, the rent for a social housing unit is defined on 7,5 euro/sq.m. The profound definitions of architecture tremble: sometimes architecture can be just a prank.

4.3.2 Bridges only for pedestrians “Instead of a road bridge above the Spree, only a footbridge will be allowed to be built.”

4.20 LIVING LEVELS, the Wall and the entrance gap.

Berlin’s relationship with the automobile was always intense. In the end of the ‘50s, when most of the buildings were vacant and the internal courtyards were moist and dark, the city dreamt of a modern, bright, automotive future. In this direction, many old buildings (Altbauten) with internal courtyards (Hinterhofwohnung) were demolished and a lot of narrow alleys were widened. (Salas, 2014) In 1969 the construction of the federal highway A106 was designed, which would start from Schöneberg and would end up in Sonnenallee, traversing Kreuzberg and threatening with demolition whole blocks.

Oranienstraße, the central road of Kreuzberg that today pulses with colors, sounds and smells, would be one of the highway’s axes, having a huge roundabout exactly on the lively square of Oranienplatz.

Fortunately, this scenario was never realized; the squats’ wave was opposed to the ‘60s cold modern urban planning and demanded another type of city.

This request was partially satisfied with the start of the sensitized and postmodern IBA. Returning to the Spree, it is observed on the map that many bridges cross it, such as the Jannowitzbrücke, the Michaelbrücke, the Schillingbrücke, the Oberbaumbrücke and the

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4.21 Oranienstraße, 2014.

4.22 Plan of Oranienstraße, 1969.

Elsenbrücke. With the exception of the central Jannowitzbrücke and the beautiful Oberbaumbrücke, the rest of them have been planned as motorways, leaving to the pedestrians narrow inhospitable sidewalks. From the ‘90s design that had foreseen the erection of a building complex on the current location of East-Side-Park, had remained in 2009 -along with the idea of the 67m tower- the proposal for a road bridge, which would connect Kreuzberg with the above mentioned complex and specifically would end up exactly on the tower’s base. After the referendum, the road bridge’s plan was cancelled and in 2010 it was proposed by the initiative to construct in its place a footbridge for pedestrians and bicycles.

The state authorities that insisted on the road bridge suggested in a consensual attempt its use only for public transport. However, after the rejection of that

idea, they counter-proposed the construction of a second road bridge, 250m northern of the former.

The referring location, namely the southwestern bank of the Spree between the above mentioned bridges, is crucial and sensitive, because it is the part of Kreuzberg’s bank that has not -yet- received neither the intervention of Mediaspree Projekt, nor the implementation of the results of the initiative’s “Call for Ideas”. The decision for the bridge’s type could influence future developments. In a desperate attempt, the collective’s representatives proposed to the Special Committee a second footbridge, according to the Idea Workshop of 2008, which would connect the Eastern Harbor with Lohmühlinsel island, closing a gap of many kilometers. For the time being, none of the three much-discussed bridges has been constructed.

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4.3.3 Up to twenty two meters high “Buildings higher than 22m will not be allowed to be built between the railway and Köpenicker/ Schlesische Straße.”

4.23 The two neighboring -of unknown type- bridges.

4.24 The three bridges of the discourse.

The last request of the referendum is also related to the planning visions of the ‘60s. Both parts of Berlin, eastern and western, had chosen post-war modern architecture to express two contrasting ways of life. Evidence for this paradoxical phenomenon provide the standardized housing complexes, the massive institutional buildings and the futuristic technological constructions that can be found in both sides of the Wall’s trace. Seems that both cities wanted to demonstrate their modernization and celebrate modern life. (Berlinische Gallerie, 2015) In its name, of course, many and great monstrosities were made. During the ‘90s though, the mistakes of late modernism were repeated in Alexanderplatz.

Hans Kollhoff’s proposal included the erection of ten 150m towers, along with the demolition of newly renovated DDR buildings. Indicative of the plan was the opening of the square towards the West and the construction of an ostentatious barrier towards the East, a fact that the poor residents of former East Berlin received as a message that the separation would not end that easily, that -as in every war, so in the Cold one- there would be winners and losers. (Kil, 2013) Since then, the Senate launched a new appeal towards towers that was no longer referring to modern architecture, but to the identification of the tall buildings’ image with neoliberal entrepreneurial development.

As part of Mediaspree Projekt, many tall buildings have been erected and constantly more are being constructed. Berlin, as the German writer Karl Scheffler said, is a city condemned always to become

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and never to be. (1910) Even if that quote can be understood in many ways, surely expresses the vast, dystopic construction site that has colonized the urban landscape. However, Berliners do not agree with the constant erection of towers and skyscrapers.

It has been reported by members of the initiative “Sink Mediaspree!” that the basic contributor to the referendum’s win weren’t the Idea Workshops, the demonstrations or the everyday work of the collective; it was the poster that presented the built city, in the case of the unaltered implementation of Mediaspree Projekt. The feeling of the resulting space under the imposing skyscrapers, the loss of the sky’s view and the disturbance of the neighborhood’s skyline were in the end the elements that led the residents of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain to vote for the initiative’s proposal.

If one overall architectural critique for the abstract ideas and the concrete proposals can be formulated, if one general tendency of the design principles can be detected, this would be the sensitivity towards the unique place that is called Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain. The study of the plots per case, the deep understanding of the projects that are already housed within them, the respect towards the layers of the city’s history, the constant worry for the creation of spaces open and inclusive, the care towards the river and the buffer zone that it needs, the concern for the delicate bridging of the two banks, the desire for the sky’s feeling and the preservation of the atmosphere of each neighborhood are characteristics of all the above mentioned proposals and demonstrate the collective’s penetration in the fragile life of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, in the place’s essence.

4.25 The poster that “won the referendum”.

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4.4 A deeper analysis of the demands After the study of the initiative’s proposals, it is needed to research what is being implied with each one of the three requests, what are the deeper pursuits hidden behind them and what is their importance for the commons of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain.

The main accusation that one could charge to the collective’s proposals is that of urban conservatism.

A supporter of Mediaspree Projekt could say that “such ideas don’t promote the development and evolution of Berlin, which always was in a process of transformation. On the contrary, they are obsessed with a specific image of years long passed and have a difficulty understanding that the world changes, that along with it the built environment is altered. Instead of opposing to whatever positive energy happens with great effort in our city, it would be better if their advocates came down to earth and faced reality, abandoned their utopias and helped reconstruct next day inside a realistic framework, that -for better or for worse- doesn’t include anymore squats, wheelhouse camps, illegal basement clubs and neighborhoods for poor immigrants. The future is ahead of us and consists of the new entrepreneurship, innovation, multicultural youth that comes here to generate new ideas and alternative tourism that is enchanted not by monuments, but by the authentic urban culture.

And -for better or for worse- the future will be housed in headquarters, in Airbnb apartments in the heart of Kreuzberg, the future will be found in the new rental contracts that necessarily are more expensive than the old ones, since the new immigrants belong to a higher class. Life in Berlin changes and the time has come for it to change too.” Could the passionate supporter be right?

No. The proposals of the initiative are not conservative, they do not try to keep alive the -long since dead, but still so charming- Berlin of the ‘80s.

They only try to set some ground rules for the system of expanding commons that this place is, so that the common products and the means that produced them will not be stolen or alienated. They try to maintain life.

The three demands of the referendum didn’t have the character of general guidelines that needed to be unquestioningly implemented. The initiative, either within the Special Committee, or through the Idea Workshops studied each riverside space carefully and designed it according to its importance and its users’ needs. The historical industrial zone of the harbor can’t be confined by office complexes, depriving the surrounding neighborhoods of the ability to walk by the river or to rest in a square in front of the old buildings; the common resource of architectural heritage must not become private. Spaces like Maria am Ostbahnhof, Bar25 or YAAM, more or less common, are the spaces where the neighborhood’s culture breathes and even though each of these projects has a private sublease contract, they contribute indirectly to the common re-production of life in Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain. After all, this is an attribute of the commons: independently of the legal property status, the usage and possession expands to greater groups and even the ones, who don’t use or possess, benefit from the multiplied immaterial and material products of the spaces. For example, the owners of YAAM are few and finite in number, however the usage and possession of the place every day and night flees from their control and passes on to the customers. Residents of the area that aren’t

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regulars of YAAM, as the Turkish population or the elderly Germans, benefit from its existence, since its sole presence in the neighborhood contributes to the maintenance of rent levels low and to the general protection of the system from malicious speculators.

In East-Side-Gallery the situation is complicated; the space can’t be seen as common, at least not as long as it neighbors with the oversized complex of Daimler Mercedes Benz. Still, the Wall, even though it has lost the ability to raise objections, to challenge the desire for exceedance and to provoke delinquency in its shadow, remains a historical exhibit signifying an era and is the reason of the unique life’s formation in the areas that used to divide. Unfortunately, the obvious is stated: history, even corrupted, cannot be privatized and ruined for the benefit of few. Lohmühlinsel island and the near sterile land of Cuvrybrache belong to the neighborhood of Wrangelkiez, a spatial condenser of commons that derive from the past, but are constantly under transformation process, due to the newcomers’ contribution. The eviction and destruction of Cuvrybrache, its enclosure after centuries that was preserved as free vacant surface by the river, are heavy casualties for the neighborhood, which, when cannot resist otherwise, tragically becomes selfdestructive. Kreuzberg’s bank on Köpenickerstraße remains intact -for how long?- and observes from the Spree’s balcony the neighboring bank of Friedrichshain being transformed into something alien and strange. The initiative tried to precede the developments and intervene, by designing space and creating scenarios of its use.

Camps with wheelhouses or Indian tents, projects of anarchic or lgbt communities, abandoned factories that became legends for the secret meetings that took place inside them, illegal basements with weird

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music and unorthodox rules of entrance, so many unique places constitute the mosaic of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain. The impression is given that all these spaces with their contradictions and multiplicity form a “wetland habitat”, being directly connected with the river, from its practical use such as waste disposal to their inscription in collective memory as interconnected image. Could they have been developed, had they not their backs secured by the Spree? Had they not given the impression and feeling of a hidden utopia that functions in another framework? This condition of sensitive multiplicity was what the referendum tried to protect, by claiming “No new buildings in a distance less than 50 meters from the coast!” or otherwise “Free access to resources and means! Maintenance and support of life developed thanks to and inside them!”

Studying the demand for the construction of a footbridge, an exclusively ecological request is being perceived. But it’s not about that, or at least not only about that. To understand the fundamental problem of the road bridge, the following question has to be posed: how can one access public space in a city dominated by the high velocity of private automobile and how in a city of pedestrians, bicycles, public transport and light traffic? In the first case, the answer is that the access becomes difficult, even impossible. The 50m wide crossroads create a strict and impenetratable natural limit, isolating the sensitive spaces that exist in their corners. A neighborhood like Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain cannot function like that. The small, complex spaces are dispersed and fragmented, like urban islands, remain though porous as they are coming in contact with one another and manage to stay open and perpetually transforming through a creative intermutation. Today their rigid encirclement by the

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4.26 Building on Kreuzberg’s bank. The memory, the appropriation, the reconciliation of antitheses.

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4.27 Canoes on the Spree.

urban sea (Stavrides, 2016, pp. 25-30) leads to the extinction of multiplicity and communication, leads consequently to their end.

A point that needs to be commented upon, in relation to the search for the bridge’s location, is the superficial worry of Mediaspree Projekt’s supporters about the connection of the two neighborhoods.

Their stress that Cold War dismantled the bond between Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain doesn’t seem logical, not only because of the rich life that blossomed in the dead-end alleys that met the river, but also thanks to the communication that thrived from one bank to the other after the Fall of the Wall. Inflatable boats, swimming in the river, optical and acoustic communication, islands and balconies created an enriched archipelago through the delicate and respectful connection of the banks.

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The overall design of Mediaspree Projekt, the perception of space as an undifferentiated surface, the erection of skyscrapers and the reconstruction of the riverside areas constitute a new, impervious Wall that discriminates and divides not according to the occupation zones of 1945, but according to the social class of 2010. Many interesting proposals have been submitted to support the two neighborhoods’ connection, starting from the assumption that this already exists, as for example the proposal of the Technical University of Berlin (Technische Universität Berlin) for a bus-boat that would float in a twisting route between the banks. (Initiativkreis Mediaspree Versenken! AG Spreeufer, 2012) In any case, the Spree needs to be understood as an ambivalent border (Tan, 2014), as a permeable threshold, a porous filter that would facilitate the appropriation of Kreuzberg’s and Friedrichshain’s banks. (Stavrides, 2016, p. 67) The second request states: “No new road bridge!”, but could be recognized as “Equal access to the porous, common space and insightful handling of the two neighborhoods’ connection!”

The third request is about the limitation of the new buildings’ height to 22 meters. This demand is neither about a historicist perception of architecture that wishes to resurrect forms established in concrete conditions*, nor about the creation of a staged,

*

The characteristic height of the 22 meters, that corresponds to 6 stories (5 + basement) of a typical tenement (Mietskaserne) in Berlin, originates from the fear of Karl Ludwig von Hinckeldey, chief of the police in the years 1848-1856. The phobic policeman created the first professional fire department in Berlin, since he believed that the continuing population growth would cause at some point a great fire. In 1851 he presented the first fire regulations for buildings, according to which the maximum height would be that of 6 stories, since that was also the height that a firefighter’s ladder could reach at that time. With the

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picturesque urban scenery. The basic problem is the scale, the large and dominant volumes that create a suffocating atmosphere above the neighborhood.

Studying the data though, becomes clear that the dimensions of each building are linked to the scale of the function that the building houses. Hence, the problem is about the concentration of material and immaterial power inside the built mass. The neighborhoods are being destroyed, since a new pole out of scale -literally and figuratively- disturbs the equilibrium, which in this case cannot be restored; the new pole neither originates from the system, nor same logic he ordered the inner courtyards to have an area of at least 5,3 sq.m., the least surface that a fire truck needed to turn. According to Aldo Rossi, “block structures derived from the police regulations of 1851, constitute one of the most integral forms of exploitation of the urban lands”. (Salas, 2014)

4.28 Plan of a block in Kreuzberg, IBA-Old.

desires to be integrated in it. So, the third request that supports: “No new building in height greater than 22 meters!”, could be stated as: “Respect to the existing scale of life and the buildings that contain it!”

The two latter requests remind vividly the history of IBA-Old, the state initiative that received harsh critique by the ‘80s squatters as a compromising and consensual project, as a voluntary offer of the tenants towards the owners. Even if in a great extent the accusations are verified, it is needed to recognize the value of IBA-Old’s manifest regarding “Careful Urban Renewal”. The care for balanced urban centers in relation and interaction with physical environment, the persistence for a mixed and diverse urbanity, the concern for permeable public spaces in human scale, the valuation of old forms both for their aesthetic and functional merits are elements of the postmodern movement that unfortunately are not always appreciated. Hereto, seems that, apart from the critique that received, IBA-Old managed to imprint itself on the Berliners’ collective memory and to bequeath them the sensitivity needed for a careful renewal of the city. (Bodenschatz, et al., 2010, pp.

126-127) The demands are altogether opposed to the new entrepreneurial architecture and express the collective’s resistance against the urban imagery that the political leadership desires to establish as dominant. The attempt to present Berlin as a global business center doesn’t affect only the specific places that are destroyed, but shapes also both the image that the city transmits and the image, with which the city perceives itself. The new narration, from the moment of its conception, can easily be reproduced, since it attracts different people that will feedback with their settlement the immaterial construction.

The referendum tried, beyond the protection of

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4.29 The “cheap and alternative” Berlin. The graffiti on the sidewalls are aligned with the new identity.

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common spaces, to prevent the formation of Berlin’s new Myth as the “cheap & creative” innovation hub of Europe.

The will to conduct a referendum is recognized as a fourth, hidden demand. Surely, the use of a state’s legal institution that has only advisory characteristics and the interaction with the representatives of another system didn’t help that much. However, the citizens’ desire for participation in the composition of the city and its image is unquestionable. This demand could hint, under alternative circumstances, towards a biopolitical era, towards the exodus to an autonomous world, the inhabitants of which would decide together the future of its heterogeneous neighborhoods, making decisions according to the needs for the production of common wealth. (Negri & Hardt, 2009, pp. 301-306) The spatial conditions of the three demands were not obsessed with a specific imagery of past years, were not incapable of understanding that the world changes. On the contrary, they tried to contribute to the preservation of the three principles of expanding commons, to the protection of life, to the transformation of the system and its metastasis through its image to the rest of the world.

5. The vast possibilities of the empty barracks

We become aware of the void, as we fill it.

Antonio Porchia

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5.1 The former common grassland is facing a dilemma 5.1.1 Space-time discontinuity There are places inside cities that didn’t experience the organic evolution of Kreuzberg’s and Friedrichshain’s riverside neighborhoods. Places that never found users and uses, that followed the alternation of the eras trying to sense the next step, that like silent viewers observed the different acts of the urban drama. These places and their noncontinuous narration demonstrate that history is not a linear chain of events, but rather an irregular shifting flow, influenced by critical turning points, by repeated ruptures with the past. (Stavrides, 2016, p.

91) The plot in Dragoner Areal (Area of the Dragoons) is one of these places. Its first mention can be traced in 1780 and proves that until that time it was a common, it was Upstall. This word, of Flemish Brabant origin, means a defined part of land that is being used by the village community as a common area of pasture during the summer nights. In other areas of Germany the word Nachtweide is used to refer to this place, which literally means “night meadow”. (Wikipedia, 2012) The data that verify this first, common use is a painting of Friedrich Wilhelm Schaub and also the fact that the barracks of the Prussian Cavalry that were built in the place of the pasture land were informally named as Upstall-Kasernen, UpstallBarracks. (Upstall Kreuzberg e.V., 2012) In 1855, 88 years after the announcement of Frederic II for the imminent expansion of the military forces, the first buildings of the cavalry’s barracks were being erected -stables and a hippodrome- implementing the first expropriation of common resources in the

plot’s history. The plot was then located outside of the city’s borders, southern of the contemporary U1 metro line that was designed to follow the trace of the city walls -the name of the neighboring station “Hallesches Tor” means actually “Hallesches gate”.

Until 1909 the complex was equipped with a second hippodrome, an officers’ restaurant and a farriers’ building. However, the timing was quite unfortunate, since the cavalry’s barracks’ construction coincided with the prime of industrial revolution in Germany; after a few years the hippodromes, the stables and the smithies would be useless. In January 1919 another page of history would be written on a barracks’ wall. The defeat of the Spartacists’ uprising, namely of the general strike and the armed battles that took place in Berlin the first days of ’19, had as a consequence the execution of members of KPD, the Communist Party of Germany. Among the executed were Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Seven of their comrades were shot at the old barracks’ wall.

The interwar period smoothed the tenses and fed the city with new dreams. The complete change of the plot’s functions in only eleven years demonstrates the excitement that modern life was bringing to the western world. In 1921 part of the old stables stored motor vehicles used in World War I. In 1923 the building that formed the façade on the central street -Mehringdamm- housed the Financial Service of Kreuzberg, which still remains there. In 1925 the German State, being the plot’s owner, started to rent parts of it to local businesses. The same year in the northern side of the area a gas station was planned to be constructed. In 1927 some of the

5.1 (left) Atmospheric collage of Dragoner Areal, personal production.

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5.2 F. W. Schaub, Upstall Tempelhof, 1780.

5.3 Plan of the barracks, 1863.

cavalry’s buildings were used as garages. In 1929 a modern market was constructed in the northeastern corner, named Rheinlandhaus. The horses’ infirmary was transformed to a canteen and the old farriers’ building to a garage. In 1930 a car wash and a gas station were constructed, both property of “Translag GmbH”, which remained the main tenant of the plot until its bankruptcy in 2009. Finally, in 1932 the stables were transformed to host a lubrication facility for heavy automobiles.

It seemed as if life in Dragoner Areal was flourishing and a lively world with the necessary modern infrastructure was developing, malls and cinema plans next to garages and gas stations. In the end of the ‘30s everything changes. In 1938 the Jewish owners of stores that housed their businesses in the plot are forced to sell them. In the years 1939-

1944 the place functions as a forced labor camp and four German companies obligate the internees in compulsory work. According to some sources, one of them was “Translag GmbH”. Inside the camp were staying at least 100 prisoners, mostly Ukrainians, Belgians, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Czechs and Jews.

(Der Tagesspiegel, 2013) This fact was found difficultly for the research needs and doesn’t appear anywhere during the wandering in the place. The absence of references could perhaps suggest a repulsion of the dark past’s memory?

The end of the war and the division of the city found the plot in decadence. In 1966 Rheinlandhaus was demolished, in the effort of Hans Scharoun to reshape the neighboring square of Mehringplatz, by erecting a residential complex and redirecting the local streets. The immigrant population of

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5.4 Armed battles in Berlin, group of Spartacists.

5.5 Gas station of “Translag GmbH”, 1938.

the surrounding areas was rising steadily, with its percentage reaching currently in Mehringplatz 67%.

(Tröger, Pätzold, Klack, Wendler, & Möller, 2014) Small local stores started to appear in Dragoner Areal. Today within the plot are housed seven garages, a taxi school/garage, a marble workspace, a furniture workspace, a discotheque and a club, a promotion agency, a beverage store, two ateliers, a kitchenware reparation workspace and an application development office. (Mieter*Innen auf dem Dragonerareal, 2016) The last years, ever following the zeitgeist, a biological products market opened in the building that housed the gas station, next to the club Gretchen. The modern ‘30s structure is included in Monument Protection since 2013.

The first commons of the preindustrial era, their eviction by the Prussian regime, the defeated

uprising, the modern urban life, the labor camp and the awkwardness of divided Berlin constitute the experience of history in a specific place through fragments, through the observation of characteristic, non-continuous moments. The functions’ and users’ change and the effort to find an internal balance are continuing until today in Dragoner Areal.

The space that surrounds the peculiar plot is also heterogeneous and non-continuous. It cannot be characterized as a neighborhood, but rather as a surface encircled by many, different boundaries.

Eastern of the plot, opposite from the central street of Mehringdamm lies one of Berlin’s cemeteries. On the north one meets the natural boundary of the river and the artificial of the metro line, next to the old walls’ trace, while on the west starts the “Park am Gleisdreieck”, the park on the railway triangle, that

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5.6 Dragoner Areal (center). From right to left, the cemetery, the metro and the river line, the park, the avenue.

forms a double limit, because of the railway and the large green surface. Finally, on the south the central street of Gneisenaustraße divides the neighborhood of Bergmannkiez and the plot of Dragoner Areal. This neighborhood is the only one in the area that has similarities with the spaces studied on the Spree’s banks and just a few years ago was thought to be one of the most degraded city districts. Today belongs to the “up and coming” neighborhoods of Berlin and hosts many cafés, little restaurants and bars.

Arriving in the plot, space and time seem fragmented. Remains of buildings from different eras, functions, places and cultures form an unusual image. The inferior structures of the garages neighbor with the Prussian hippodromes, the old gas station that forced into labor prisoners of the Third Reich today hosts a popular bio market, behind the

imposing Financial Service lies the brick wall with an ephemeral note on it that could state the following: “Here were executed on 6th January 1919 seven members of a condemned uprising”. And beyond the weird coexistence of functions and eras, dominant everywhere is the void, the sensation of the desert.

Long, narrow corridors, without the possibility of escape from their axis, connect big openings surrounded by neglected buildings. Arriving in them, the lone wanderer of the urban landscape, the flâneur, as Michel de Certau (1984) defines him, seeks the continuity of its route and as he finds -with difficulty- a getaway, he realizes that this leads him to a point that he hadn’t understood that existed or that he didn’t expect to reach or that by reaching it, recognizes that it’s a dead-end. During his route, he doesn’t meet familiar figures and actions. Metal

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sounds and the noise of machines are being heard behind closed blinds. Perhaps, swirling inside the complex, he may encounter some bizarre people in small and unexpected festive gatherings. This space, non-continuous in all of its expressions, seems in the end like a montage of moments and actions, a heterotopy that the wanderer can never exactly define and grasp, a place that always for a bit escapes from him.

5.1.2 Desert or alana?

Is, after all, the plot empty? Whose concern should it be, since it’s not incorporated in a specific neighborhood? Is it logical or illogical to oppose to an intervention in an empty space? Why its current situation should be the one that has to be respected, considering that it has changed so much in the course of the years?

The attempt to answer these questions starts with another one. What are the neighborhoods made of? There is a common representation about these spaces in people’s minds, a fundamental thoughtimage (Stavrides, 2016, pp. 209-226), according to which neighborhoods consist of green squares full of children playing, streets with familiar faces greeting one another, daily repeating scenes that are taking place in bakeries and grocery stores. This image is not false, it is however deficient. Neighborhoods are not only this, they also have dead-end alleys, backyards with garbage bins, blind sidewalls, underground garages, pipelines and yes, empty plots with ruins, plots that lost their function or never found it. The invisible spaces of the neighborhood are equally crucial with the leading ones for its preservation.

Of course, some of them are being understood as infrastructure, as necessities. The void though is not included in this category; it is being perceived

5.7 Vast opening, Dragoner Areal.

5.8 Endless corridor, Dragoner Areal.

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5.9 The void in Tempelhof, 2016.

5.10 Alana in Rome, 1961.

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as surface that needs to be planned, optimized, utilized, without ever understanding its importance.

Neoliberal logic judges and classifies according to the dipole useful/useless, disregarding the need for vacant space and vacant time in human societies.

“Void” becomes an enemy and has to be eliminated.

Two different narrations about void present another possibility. The first perceives empty space as a reservoir of commons and attributes this behavior exactly to this quality -their intact existence, their vastness, their impossible definition. Lieven de Cauter offers a tangible example talking about Tempelhof, the former airport of Berlin that today functions as a park. (2013) He explains that, despite any attempt for spatial organization, Tempelhof remains “an empty, open, vacant space”. The vast area of four square kilometers in the heart of the city, without trees or buildings interrupting the sight, gives to the visitor the feeling of the ocean, of the desert, of a gigantic urban gap. The former airport belongs to the Senate of Berlin and it is open between 8am-10pm.

However, as de Cauter supports, Tempelhof seems to be capable of representing the idea of common as a vast, realized utopia. With space for everybody and therefore for nobody. “The almost nothing of the common, and therefore awesome like nothing, a feeling of everything, like at the seaside or in the desert. Something almost cosmic, a gigantic void, a crater, a vastness of possibility, simply free space.”

These spaces, according to de Cauter, should remain intact, even from those that try to protect them, they just should exist.

The second perception presents empty space as the community’s clandestine places, as places that host an informal, invisible life. Their understanding as “terrain vague”, as deserts that however are not empty, adds to them a special value; by being

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indefinite, they become impregnated with unknown possibilities, while at the same time offer refuge to the expressions of life that want to be hidden. Stavros Stavrides gives the familiar example of the “alana”, of the empty shapeless -and however for its users so well defined- space of the neighborhoods. It’s true that outdoor and loose alanas were demonized by the middle-class imaginary, since according to this morality only troublemakers and vagabonds, the “alania”, could be their temporary inhabitants.

(2016, pp. 85-86) Nevertheless in these spaces, for example in the alana of the Refugee Buildings on Alexandra’s Avenue, kids played freely, couples had their first dates, lonely people took an evening walk. The alana was integrated into a rich network of intermediary common spaces that were used informally by the whole community. Places like these, seemingly useless and empty, are or could be places of the commons, if inhabited and experienced as urban thresholds, as places that defy and question established practices and relationships, as places of osmosis of the newcomer with an alternative social framework.

5.1.3 The violent acknowledgment of the vast possibilities According to the above references, the already existing space of Dragoner Areal cannot be understood as dead land, on the contrary the wealth of the humble life that houses and the seclusion that offers have to be recognized. Now the first questions can be answered, the plot is not empty and addresses not a specific neighborhood, but a greater network that needs vacant space. In a different way than the Spree’s bank, space was initially common.

It may never had the lustful and explosive everyday life of Kreuzberg’s and Friedrichshain’s boundaries,

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5.11 Figures amidst void, Dragoner Areal.

5.12 Urban mountaineers, Dragoner Areal.

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but it remained open to everybody, perhaps mostly to whoever sought a refuge from the urban chaos, by being a large empty desert protected behind the barracks’ buildings. This spatial sensation will preexist, in spite of any corruption attempt that may follow.

The scenario of the future privatization, the publication of the extravagant sale price, the assumptions that followed concerning the type of project needed to amortize the cost of the investment and the first plans that were leaked along with information about the program provoked heavy reactions. These could be recognized as a negation of any form of development; however such an approach would be false. Restating de Cauter’s analysis about the vast possibilities of empty space (2013), Solà-Morales’ about the pregnancy of urban deserts (1995, p. 122) and Stavrides’ about the transformation of alana-like spaces to urban thresholds (2016, p. 87), it is becoming clear why the three local initiatives focused furiously on the exploration of different ways of design and habitation of the plot after the announcement of its sale. The cancellation of the vast possibilities caused their violent acknowledgment and the desire from the side of the neighbors to realize the potential of the space-to-be, of Dragoner Areal. The mechanism of “defacement” was set in motion; the imminent spatial disfigurement distorted the existing image of space, generated shocks in the inhabitants’ memory and produced revealing comparisons between what existed before and what would follow. (Stavrides, 2016, p. 185) In a few words, the plot isn’t empty, but even if it is being understood as such, it is possible to function through its loss as a catalyst for the recognition of future scenarios.

During the last years Berlin is suffering from a

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deep housing crisis. Former eastern areas that in the early ‘90s were cheap and affordable, have been in a great extent gentrified. Correspondingly, poor western neighborhoods have acquired a touristic character with many houses being transformed into holiday apartments*. (Holm, 2016) Within this socioeconomic framework and thanks to the multiple and diverse projects that try to prevent evictions (Schulte-Westenberg & Coers, 2014), a discourse has begun in the city, that supports that housing is not a commodity or a luxury, but an indefeasible right. In a society that already suffers from the lack of affordable and qualitative housing, the construction of luxurious complexes is expected to inflame reactions and inspire alternative proposals, as it excludes and threatens indirectly the majority of Berliners by constituting a city for the few.

Can the plot change its use and be readjusted for yet another time in its history? Change itself doesn’t carry a sign, positive or negative; the real question is to which direction it will be conducted. Who has the right to decide? The higher bidder and the German Government thought that, because of the absence of inhabitants and apparent important functions, an intervention that would address the few and would benefit even fewer could be realized. The neighbors thought that this space, non-continuous and fragmented, could be the beginning of venture to the creation of an alternative inhabitation, social and collective, designed by the inhabitants themselves.

The plot’s vastness functioned as a white page, allowing both sides to believe that they had a saying in its formation.

Dragoner Areal is full of history’s fragments.

* Only in July 2016, there were 24.000 apartment offers in Berlin in Airbnb.

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5.13 List of the neighbors’ wishes for Dragoner Areal, stuck on a barracks’ wall. Their spontaneous recording was realized during the Dragonale festival, on 17th July 2016, under the sounds of accordion.

“Space for the non-commercial Dance and music studio, stage ATELIER No redevelopment A lot of green, little beton, social spaces A LOT OF BETON, A LOT OF GREEN, A LOT OF GLASS, A LOT OF WOOD Sport facilities (eg. beach volley court) MANY OLD HOLEY FLOORINGS Cafe, pub Bicycle workspace (self-managed), computer workspace (maker-space)”

Maybe the dilemma that the plot faces currently signifies towards the greater picture, towards the image of Berlin’s future development, towards the choice between a city-for-the-few and a diverse, heterogeneous, egalitarian city-of-the-many. The plot always searched for an internal balance that maybe possessed only as Upstall, as common space of Tempelhof’s shepherds. However in the contemporary biopolitical era, balance could be perceived differently, as the potential of continuous expansion, transformation and readjustment within the multiple common networks. In such a scenario the construction of a strict, enclosed system that excludes and corrupts the space’s common wealth is unsustainable and condemned to fail. Or, as eloquently Hardt and Negri state, “capital’s strategies and techniques of exploitation and control tend to be fetters on the productivity of biopolitical labor”.

(2009, p. 149) Maybe the attempt to design another way of living in Dragoner Areal has already the spatial advantage, as the composite plot resembles a mosaic of heterogeneous moments and actions, much closer to the world-of-the-commons than the enclosed system that corrupts it.

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5.14 “The city is no cut-out to be sold, it consists of 1000 layers and we have produced it.”

Installation during the “Reclaim your city!” exhibition in Dragoner Areal, December 2014.

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5.2 Upstall - Dragopolis - City from below: a synthesis of difference 5.2.1 Three distinct departures The plot of Dragoner Areal is a non-continuous space, empty and vast; dispute is raised over the identity of its owner. This happens with all the realcommons, the Commons, the universal commons of all categories and substances, material like the air, the sea, the seeds and immaterial like ideas, language, emotions. Commons belong to everybody and therefore to no one, whoever is insolent enough can enclose and corrupt them. These commons are -according to de Cauter- the weakest, since without property, their defense is deemed quite difficult.

(2013) This is the case in Dragoner Areal.

The capital and neoliberal state exploited the absence of a cohesive community to claim the plot as theirs. The relationship of the awaited business project with space is authoritarian; the demolition of all the buildings not included in Monument Protection and the renovation of the barracks as products-to-be-consumed in the context of a themepark architecture have already been announced.

(Piepgras, 2014) The investor isn’t interested in a deeper understanding of the unique urban landscape, but in the profits his investment would yield.

After the announcement of the bidding procedure for the plot’s sale, three different initiatives were formed, aiming to defend the space and to counterpose a scenario, a prototype for an alternative housing policy in Berlin. The characteristics, the formation motives and the perceptions about space differ greatly. First in the timeline is “Upstall”, a group of scientists consisted of five architects, an urban planner, a cultural manager and a physicist (!). The

group was formed right after the announcement of the imminent privatization, since its members, already being acquainted with one another and having a common ideological perspective, believed that the plot could be designed differently. They envisioned a “solidary, open city with affordable rents, a diverse and lively neighborhood that would be inclusive and sustainable, taking into account the concerns of the already existing tenants and Monument Protection’s regulation, completing carefully the existing buildings along with the District’s, the investors’, the inhabitants’ and the specialists’ cooperation.” (Upstall Kreuzberg e.V., 2012) Their theoretical work and research shapes a very useful database, since it provides all the design proposals devised for the plot since 1855, data for its environment, information about Monument Protection regulations, legal provisions that concern the area and a very detailed chronicle that records the developments in the case “Dragoner Areal” from 2011 until today. Furthermore, “Upstall” organized a design workshop, which produced “Upstall-Charta”, a plan with three concepts about the plot. The first one is named “Mixed City” and supports that “the neighborhood is a diverse urban space that should allow different functions, affordable housing and employment, fostering the collective life of the residents and visitors.” The second is called “Careful Urban Renewal” and explains that “the neighborhood is an alive, urban territory with recognizable genius loci and visible history.” Finally, the third one, “2000Watt Society”, supports that “the development of the neighborhood should be self-sufficient and oriented

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5.15 Sketches from the workshop “Upstall-Charta”.

towards the prototype of 2000-Watt, which is being developed in Switzerland as energy policy model.

Through the fair and sustainable use of resources the environmental targets could be accomplished.

2000-Watt Society is a vision towards a sustainable future, in which the consumed energy would be truly as much as needed.” (Upstall Kreuzberg e.V., 2012) Despite the useful and thorough work, the group functions as an architectural office that has great social sensitivity and is being motivated not by the desire for personal profit, but by value codes, aiming to a consensual architecture, to a social design -produced by specialists- capable of creating an open and fair city.

The second group is the collective “Dragopolis”.

The name refers to the word “Monopoly”, the popular game that reproduces the dominant model

of a city oriented to profit. The members of the group are mainly middle-aged Kreuzbergian activists.

One of them, P., explained during an interview that their culture originates from the glorious ‘80s and that currently they feel -in some degree, justifiablydisappointed by reality. The basic request of the group concerns the integration of a neighborhood’s center in the program of the future complex. Their attitude entails the contradiction that, while they react to the practices of global capital that displace the lower social layers from the old neighborhoods, they perceive neither that the conventional public housing cannot offer a solution, nor that the architectural language, the produced space and -mainly- the procedure of design and planning are decisive factors for the future of the area.

The first two collectives don’t appear to be quite

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useful for the composition of an expanding commons system in the plot’s area, being two closed groups that although wish for their possible expansion, don’t aspire to it or can’t find the right way to achieve it.

Both of them, the first with the fixation on specialists’ design and the second with the focus on high politics, ignore the dynamic and wealth that could be emitted, if the future inhabitants of the proposed complex got involved in their respective fields. In a curious way, if the two approaches become exaggerated, they end up being poles of the dipole space-ideology.

The first group believes that the important task is to design the complex (space) responsibly and its proper political use will eventually emerge from the design principles, while the second thinks that if the financial guideline corresponds to a fair conceptual framework (ideology), then the space that would be produced by it would be deductively social. They are both led by the logic of expertise; since either space or ideology are recognized as dominant factors of each approach, they can’t be abandoned to be resolved or designed by common people that wouldn’t be connoisseurs of the stakes. However, this polarization that could be recognized as the dipole everyday life-politics doesn’t exist anymore, because according to Hardt and Negri in contemporary societies these two notions merge and abolish their distinguishable boundaries. (2009, p. 267) The appropriate way to practice politics is through everyday life occasions and the right way to confront everyday life is to render everything political. Space can be designed only through negotiation between conflicted interests, while ideological doctrines can be materialized only by planning and acting.

The third initiative, “Stadt von unten” -“City from below”- answers better to the needs of the era. It was constituted in 2014, a few months before the

second sale attempt of the plot, since the first one had failed because of the initial buyer’s inability to fulfill his financial obligations. The initiative expressed the growing concerns of the surrounding inhabitants about the expected rent rises; its motives were indignation and necessity. The heterogeneous collective is a colorful mixture of participants, as it numbers professional architects and activists along with elderly inhabitants among its members.

Diversity and the contact with the local community have enriched its practices. As the collective matures constantly through its actions, it has acquired the ability to pose greater questions about Berlin’s housing policy and has managed to connect with similar projects of the city. Its basic request demands the construction of a complex “of 100% rental apartments, of 100% permanently secured and truly social rents”. (Stadt von unten, 2014) It is a joyous occasion that the three initiatives, despite their differences and distinctive objectives, don’t compete with each other, but on the contrary are cooperating harmoniously, respecting each one’s peculiarities. As Massimo de Angelis explains, the establishment of such common relationships is a field of value production and requirement for this production is the participation of people with different worldviews in the common creation of new value systems, in the creation of values that are common to all. (2013, p. 88) 5.2.2 Five ways to bond with a plot The three collectives’ desideratum is the transformation of the introvert plot with the fragile life into an open, expanding system of commons. Five kinds of practices are detected and it will be attempted to examine the wideness, the transformability and the inclusion potential in each

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one of them.

The practice that appears first in the timeline is the one that will be named Habit. To Habit belong a movie night, a protest rally during a visit of the investors and the representatives of BImA in the plot and two events for the acknowledgment of the seven executed Spartacists’ history, namely a memory walk and a collective reading under the sounds of music. (Stadt von unten) These actions surely have noble motives and intentions, however it seems that they derive from familiar and overused movement forms with limited potential. The protest rally and the events for the revolutionaries’ memory can be recognized as angst about the visibility and representation of the opposing inhabitants, about the recording of the history of the oppressed. The two actions present a situation already formed and completed, without margins for osmosis or permeable thresholds. Finally, the movie projection inside a room of the complex demonstrates the need for the exploration of new ways, but simultaneously doesn’t engage newcomers, doesn’t create relations and ruptures in space and doesn’t invent new ways for space’s perception.

The second practice will be named Fantasy. It includes the deposit of one (1) gigantic, paper-made euro to BImA the day of the second bidding procedure and the mass sending of e-mails to the Ministry of Finance the day that the decision about the definite privatization of the plot would be published by the Finance Committee of Germany. (Stadt von unten) The two actions were quite successful and compatible with the zeitgeist. The first produced a powerful symbolical image -maybe on the limits of being simplistic- that easily could be understood and reproduced, while the second, through an everyday activity engaged many people in the initiatives’

5.16 Protest rally at the plot.

5.17 On the way to deposit the one euro.

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5.18 Models of the proposals of TU Berlin students about Dragoner Areal.

request. The two actions, based on symbolism and technology, are a positive sample of the members’ collective inventiveness, however have deficiencies concerning the emancipation of the newcomers that they attract and the interaction with space, which remains empty and detached from the operations.

The third practice is about Expertise, namely the two architecture schools that were assigned to design the plot. The Technical University of Berlin (Technische Universität Berlin) during the winter semester 2014/2015 dedicated a design studio to plan an alternative social housing scenario inside Dragoner Areal, in cooperation with the initiative “City from below”. The seminar “Spatial Commons 2_selfmanaged and communal” was running parallel to the studio, hoping to expand “the self-managed and selfinitiated work and living projects with experimental

programs, aiming to the long-term security of the inhabitants, for a positive urban development model.”

(Chair for Urban Desing and Urbanization, 2014) In the same logic, during the winter semester 2015/2016 eight diploma projects about Dragoner Areal were conducted in the University of Arts (Universität der Künste). The projects present exquisite delicacy and deep understanding of the microcosm that survives protected inside the old barracks. (Upstall Kreuzberg e.V., 2012) The invocation of Expertise enables the conclusion that yes, an alternative architecture is possible! Furthermore, the contact and the design with reference to a contemporary urban movement create sensible and down-to-earth architects, benefiting the two universities that had the honor and luck to compose for the lively society, inside of which they exist. However, the space produced

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remains a space of Expertise.

The fourth practice is called Networking and concerns the collectives’ ability to function on multiple levels and different systems, using the appropriate addressing techniques. On 24th-27th September 2015 they attempted to participate in the festival of the collectives that are active in Berlin regarding housing and urban development issues.

The festival, which was called “Reclaim Your City Congress”, was inviting “to the first great summit about the alternative interventions in urban space.

After ten years of artistic and urban activism the time has come to retrospect. We want to know where art and culture are at this moment in the context of urban development and towards which direction they should head in the future.” (RYC Kongress, 2015) The decision for participation demonstrates the desire for interconnection with the network of small initiatives, that together though create a broader movement that demands another kind of city. The call for a neighborhood assembly, under the title “Social Mixture - Displacement through the Back Door” on 6th April 2016 was the second networking attempt of the initiatives, addressing this time the neighborhood. The sixty inhabitants that participated, produced collectively the declaration*, which was the initiatives’ statement in

*

The declaration that was composed by the assembly demanded a viable city and was opposed to the use of the term “Measures for Social Mixture”, since according to the residents’ experience it has always been used to dislocate poor populations from their neighborhoods. It supported that 100% affordable rents can guarantee the pluralism and coherence of the area, that measures towards this direction produce inclusive places with quality -not ghettos. It requested to combine the declaration of the broader neighborhood as “Redevelopment Area” with the funding of social housing, without any public

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the “Information Event” that the Senate organized.

This event was aiming to prepare the investigation about the classification of the broader neighborhood in Berlin’s “Redevelopment Areas”. (Stadt von unten) The initiatives managed the parallel networking with the inhabitants and the state institutions and participated well-balanced, taking a clear stand in both levels. After the state investigation the neighborhood was declared as “Redevelopment Area”, obligating BImA to attempt a sale agreement with the city of Berlin in a reasonable price. However, for the time being the Ministry of Finance refuses to withdraw from its former agreement with the company “Dragonerhöfe GmbH” and has sued the State for unilateralism. The three initiatives seem to be capable to maneuver among the movements, the neighborhood and the state. Nevertheless, interaction with space and its transformation into a system of expanding commons remain unrealized.

The fifth and last practice of the initiatives, the most hopeful of all, is named Love. It includes the symbolic squat of a barracks’ building, the game of Dragopoly, the neighborhood’s festival Dragonale and the -seemingly innocent- story of a garden.

(Stadt von unten) These actions approach space in a different way, use its potential and its attributes and respectfully transform it into a space of commons, into a common space. Act one. On 7th December 2014 the initiatives proceeded -along with artists- to the occupation of the barracks for the needs of the exhibition “Reclaim your city!” and declared, among property privatization and with the citizens’ wide participation.

It demanded the creation of a space inside Dragoner Areal for the encounter, the acquaintance and the self-organization of the inhabitants, for the contact with the neighborhood’s past, for the planning of workshops that will design the future urban development from below.

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others, that “land is not a commodity, because it isn’t produced by anybody. This unique piece of land belongs to the public -to all of us- and we are overdue in confronting rental policy and resident displacement. We shout: We want here a prototype project for a city from below! Social and self-defined!

For the 100%! […] Have fun wandering around the barracks, exploring both the evident and concealed works!” (Reclaim Your City, 2014) Act two. On 14th May 2015 a feast was organized inside the plot. An alternative, three-dimensional game of Monopoly was planned in that context, which attempted to simulate the relationships between the financial agents of the city, namely between the investors and the inhabitants that, when don’t have the required amount of money, end up being imprisoned (!).

Act three. On 17th July 2016 the three initiatives had arranged a festival, named Dragonale, to celebrate the plot. Apart from the food, the drinks and the live music that were collectively organized, a treasure hunt was also prepared. The questions referred to the past and recent history of space, to its hidden secrets. For example, the question about a historical uprising led the participants to the wall of the execution of the seven Spartacists; there the attendees sang under the sounds of accordion a German poem about the January Uprising. Other stop points were rewarded with painting on the ground or bubble blowing. Break. All the above practices are taking the first steps towards the shaping of a space open to the inhabitants, the neighborhood, the city, the movements. Thanks to the inventiveness, the festivity and the play, ruptures are being created in the usual representations of space and the conventional practices developed inside of it. The exceptionality of space is being fulfilled, through the theatrical experience, the sculptural representation

of social conflicts and the reference to childhood, through a magical way of refuge to the unusual and the imaginary. The non-continuous plot doesn’t simply host a stage, but becomes itself one of the performance’s leading actors, it is being transformed from resource to means for the construction of this community-in-the-making, it is being transformed simultaneously with the people that appropriate it.

In the end, according to Stavrides, space becomes common, when inhabited. (2016, p. 124) Even -or maybe even more?- when inhabited noncontinuously.

The tragically optimistic story of Dragoner Areal’s garden is left to be narrated. According to Francesca Ferguson, the act of recrafting urban nature to create common spaces in neglected areas may require only slight alterations that guide the eye to the previously invisible. (2014, p. 15) Act four -definitely not the last one. On 4th June 2016 the initiative “City from below” organized the construction of a small neighborhood garden, right in front of the seven Spartacists’ execution wall. They used crates to plant flowers and wooden pallets to construct the furniture of their urban living room.

One of the reasons to proceed with this action was the decision not to pause the further appropriation of space because of the Senate’s and the Federal Government’s difficulty to achieve an agreement concerning the plot’s privatization. According to the initiative’s announcement “the planting activism took place in the summery heat unobstructed. The garden can now grow! We invite the neighbors and anyone interested in gardening to water, take care of and expand it!” (Stadt von unten) A skeptic could claim that “a garden can neither prevent a 36 million sale, nor dishearten the Ministry of Finance of the Federal Republic of Germany. The thought

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5.19 Accordion and bubbles during the Dragonale festival.

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that its construction could bear any kind of stigma, influencing the negotiations between Berlin and Germany, is naïve.” Still. In the beginning of August 2016, BImA announced that it won’t withdraw from the sale of the plot to private owners and a few days afterwards evicted the neighborhood’s living room.

In its announcement about the incident the initiative complained that “we had shaped a public space, so that it could be used, we had started making a new social space in the city. What exactly can’t BImA accept?” With admirable persistence they invited the neighbors on 14th August to rebuild their garden. At the same time they sent a letter to BImA, requesting to let them keep the living room, independently from the final decision on the plot’s privatization.

The received answer was a second eviction of the garden. In a letter, it was explained to them that “the illegal occupation of a non public plot is a prohibited intervention”. In its new announcement the initiative posed the following questions: “Non public plot? It seems as if BImA has already sold the area, ignoring the decision of the parliament against its privatization.

Occupation? That’s right, we say yes. The plot is under public occupation and possession. Prohibited intervention*? Outrageous, these autonomous and empowered citizens…” After two attempts of flower and vegetable planting, after two evictions of the above mentioned leafy organisms, after the exchange of announcements full of reserved indignation, BImA admonished the initiative “to abandon further occupation disturbances or property damages inside the plot.” The initiative though, having the

* In German the legal word used for intervention in this case is “Eigenmacht”, which literally means “self-power” or “power of the self”, stating actually that the self-power, the empowerment of the residents is prohibited.

right amount of nerve, advised BImA “to abandon further disturbances of the design process from below and to proceed with the withdrawal from the plot’s privatization”, concluding with the quite optimistic statement: to be continued… again and again! Aside from the innate fondness that the small indomitable Gallic villages always provoke, the above event is notable for yet another reason.

BImA was intimidated by three muddy crates and some shabby furniture from rotten wood. Because, after all, these are the most powerful means in the -seemingly unequal- struggle. The action of the eviction, although it would seem unreasonable to the initial skeptic observant -what power does a garden have?- is fully logical, if studied accordingly.

The garden and the outdoor living room were the first attempts of anyone to establish a permanent, non financial relationship with space, perhaps being preceded only by its function as Upstall, as common pasture land in 1780. If the garden and the living room were preserved for a long time, space would acquire signs, people would feel it as theirs, they would have memories and traces from it, it would be much easier to defend it as “the garden of our neighborhood”. Now the garden doesn’t exist. But as the indomitable Berliners said, the story continues.

The above mentioned practices have accomplished, for the time being, mediocre results. Definitely they have had an impact on the District Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, but also on the Senate of Berlin, that is currently involved in a great confrontation with the Ministry of Finance, having already been sued by the Minister Wolfgang Schäuble. However, even in the optimistic scenario that the State of Berlin buys in a reasonable price the plot, only 50% of the residential units would be of affordable rent. Of course this would be a victory,

UPSTALL - DRAGOPOLIS - CITY FROM BELOW: A SYNTHESIS OF DIFFERENCE

compared to the percentage that the investor was obliged to provide, namely 33%. However, the demand for 100% social housing is a fundamental and non negotiable request of the initiative, which defines as “social” rent price 4 euro/sq.m., instead of the law-defined 7,5 euro/sq.m. The conflict between Berlin and Germany is a frustrating issue for the plot’s collectives, since it is conducted on the level of so-called high politics, in which citizens’ initiatives can hardly intervene. Only through the networking of similar urban movements, through a change of scale in the demands could their voice be heard.

Such a networking would express the request for an entirely alternative housing and urban development policy, both in poor Berlin and the rest of Germany, exposing the deep social controversies that exist in the country.

To conclude, the collectives’ beneficial practices are perhaps those that create common spaces and simultaneously produce the community-in-themaking within the space of the commons. They are those that don’t perceive the plot as a placeto-colonize or to-be-imposed-at, like the private company “Dragonerhöfe GmbH” does, but as a place that needs a delicate approach, preserving the broadness, the fragility and the eerie quality that characterize it. The harmonization with the space’s sensation is important, no matter how complex and enigmatic may seem. Because the only way for any intervention to be successful is the actions and the ends to comply with the atmosphere and the peculiarity of the space that contains them.

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5.20 The garden of Dragoner Areal. On the banner: “NO-MONEY NEEDS ALSO SPACE”.

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5.3 Nonnegotiable 100% Is it after all important to create in this forgotten part of Kreuzberg an open system of commons? Do the three collectives head towards this direction?

These questions can be answered by studying the proposals of the initiatives in relation both to program and space. With the term “program” is meant the sum of the ulterior and strategic objectives of whoever desires to plan, organize and realize a project, embedded in an ideological approach and a specific location.

The basic, clearly stated request of the collective “City from below” in terms of program that traverses all of its announcements and statements, is the demand for 100% social housing. However, before the analysis of this concrete claim and the ideological context that accompanies it, it is needed to study the corresponding suggestions of the investor and the Senate, so as to ascertain whether or not they could be characterized as viable. According to BImA’s plans, the plot would be sold to the private owner and “project developer” Arne Piepgras, already known to the city because of its entanglement in real estate speculation scandals. (Wir bleiben alle!, 2014) Based on the few data published regarding Piepgras’s complex in Dragoner Areal, certain conclusions arise.

The sale price (36 million euro), almost double than the market value of the plot, leads to the prediction that the rents would be respectively high, so as to extract immediate profit and render the investment meaningful. The above assumption was confirmed by the investor: hotels, offices and ateliers were planned in the plot, with rent prices ranging between 14-16 euro/sq.m. -and only 66 social residential units (33%) in a surface of almost 50.000 sq.m. (Piepgras, 2014) Such a functional program would disturb the

equilibrium of the area, as new affluent inhabitants and users would arrive, owners of power and wealth in relation to the surrounding poor neighborhoods.

From the side of the investor and the architects (“Patzschke & Partner Architekten” that usually undertake projects of luxurious classicist architecture) there was hardly any reference to the area, neither any intention to connect and communicate with it.

On the contrary, the investor described during his interview in Immovable Property Newspaper, titled “Art, commerce and children’s laughs”, that his goal would be the creation of a supervised, gated, happy community, equipped with picturesque streets and parks, having aesthetic similar to the charming barracks; an enclosed urban enclave of wealth.

The investor referred to the plot as “its youngest baby”, that “looks like a fallen Brandenburg Gate”, reminding more an inexperienced collector rather than a manager of constructional projects. For the current situation in Dragoner Areal, the only comment was that “today, there are among the old bricked buildings [of the barracks] myriads of disgusting shacks and sheds full of screwdrivers and petty handymen.” (Piepgras, 2014) In the case of the complex’s purchase by the State of Berlin, the social residential units would constitute 50% of the whole, according to the announcement of the “Senate Department for Urban Development and Environment”. (Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung und Umwelt, 2016) Such a proposal would create of course some additional affordable apartments, it wouldn’t prevent though the power concentration, since the rest 50% would possess more rights inside the plot’s space. It is observed in private or public housing projects

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realized in the city, the effort to include -or better yet, to juxtapose- many social groups, in specific arbitrary proportions of the X or the Y category, so as to characterize the final result as “mixed”. Such practices prevent the egalitarian coexistence that leads to the unexpected encounters, to the blurring of strict identity boundaries and to the enrichment of life. Inequality and segregation are intensified, as in the example of Groth Projekt in Mauerpark, where the student, the social and the elderly residential units, located next to the train rails, are functioning as a soundproofing wall for the private, luxurious apartments located by the side of the idle park. In the name of social, pluralistic, politically correct mixture.

The creation of a gated community, of a disciplined and sovereign island of wealth is not rejected only because it doesn’t answer to the city’s

5.21 The social mixture of Groth Projekt.

needs, only because it excludes and discriminates between an Inside and an Outside according to hard financial criteria. (Stavrides, 2016, pp. 18-25) It is not rejected only because it opposes the open free networking, the rich encounters of urbanity and the sharing of ideas, relations, spaces and information that today tend to acquire a central role in economic production. (Negri & Hardt, 2009, p. 151) It is also rejected because it expands its negative influence into the broader neighborhood; crossing its strictly supervised boundaries, threatens indirectly the area with gentrification, with rent rises and evictions.

Having excluded as non beneficial scenario any kind of percentage and the distinction between cheap and expensive apartments, the hypothetical case of the exclusively state-funded social housing will be studied, according to the known conventional models of the Welfare State of the ‘60s and ‘70s. During this period many public housing complexes were built in Berlin -both West and Eastproviding affordable rents and favorable contracts.

Nevertheless, currently most of them have decayed and even during their glorious days never fulfilled the vision of their designers for an equal, collectivistic living, despite the multiple communal facilities that they provided. (Stavrides, 2016, pp. 108-120) These complexes failed in such a degree that became the symbols of the Fall of Real Socialism (in spite of their wide erection also in the western world), the symbols of a homogenized, dull society. One of the main problems of these types of housing complexes was that space was offered as yet another public good to a total of inhabitants that was perceived by default as cohesive and active, because of the common class and social characteristics. No one would undertake the management and care of communal facilities or the intervention outside the limits of the defined

NONNEGOTIABLE 100%

private housing unit. Common space was an abstract entity; no one was responsible for it, but the ideal structure of the State. The residents, without the need to negotiate, to devise and to solve everyday problems, were never transformed into a community, never developed a communal life.

None of the above models is capable to answer the needs of the city, the area and the era for an open, communal, egalitarian habitation, for a space of networking and sharing of knowledge, information, relations and ideas. The familiar forms, either the sovereign private apartment of the nuclear family or the gated enclaves of wealth or poverty, seem unable to serve the demand for the exceedance of the city of multiple asymptomatic layers and the development of a fluid, rich urbanity. With the assumption that today another housing paradigm is vital for the satisfaction of current needs and the resolution of old problems, it is further examined if the initiatives’ proposal with reference to Dragoner Areal tends towards such a direction, towards a habitation as an expanding system of commons.

The text “Model”* (Modell), written in 2014, is used as a base to analyze the initiative’s “City from below” program. Nonnegotiable demand is the term for 100% affordable rental housing, fully secured in the long-term, without the option to invest personal capital in order to acquire a larger portion of space.

The insistence on affordable rent prices ensures the participation of all the possible interested persons in absolute equality, while at the same time does not predestine the social groups that will inhabit the complex, for example by proclaiming housing units only for the recipients of public benefits. On the

*

The text “Model” is published on the initiative’s website, as also in chapter 7.2 Model Dragoner Areal.

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contrary, it is being emphasized upon that whoever desires to live in Dragoner Areal will be able to do so, without having to confront any financial barriers.

The negation of private ownership as regards the apartments and the clear preference for their leasing is tightly connected with a mentality quite strange in Greece, according to which it isn’t possible, needed or desired for every family to own a private house, as long as vacant, unused public or private apartments exist. Apart from the environmental sensitivity and the foresight for a sustainable society, such a mentality presents another way to perceive the house, reconciling the residents with the idea that other people were using and will use their most private spaces, cultivating in that way the practice of temporary appropriation. A similar tendency can be located in many expressions of German culture, for

5.22 “New Frankfurt”. Architect Ernst May, 1926.

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example in the sale of second-hand clothing or used furniture. Thus, a society is being crafted that goes beyond the classic property relationships, which suggest that every object has to belong exclusively and in perpetuity to its user. The concept of long-term security that is being referred to in the initiative’s text proves to be especially important, since it tries to confute the belief that the lack of private property leads to precarious living conditions. Despite the adequacy of German legislation regarding rental housing, problems still appear, mainly when the tenants belong to the lower social layers. (SchulteWestenberg & Coers, 2014) To summarize, the basic demand of the initiative refers to the equal participation of all the potential newcomers in a secure, leased housing complex.

The collective however does not restrict itself taking measures that relate only to the possible inhabitants of the plot. It recognizes the wider request for an alternative urban development and acknowledges that today the practiced policies prioritize the profits of global capital over the interests of local communities. Berlin, being by default a poor city, always hosted temporary inhabitants that experimented with subversive ways of life. Because of this trait is being perceived as a good base to produce a prototype counter-example; the poor and the newcomers are the ones that constitute the core of the city. According to Hardt and Negri, the poor are not characterized by deprivation or misery, but by possibility, productivity and inventiveness, by the ability to construct informal, common networks of information, knowledge, codes and relationships in order to survive. (2009, pp. 39-45) At the same time, according to Stavrides, the newcomers and a system’s ability to integrate them in its procedures, transforming both itself and the people participating

in it, is the most important prerequisite for commoning to exceed the limits of enclosures.

(2016, p. 39) The alternative Berlin suffers from a great, intensifying housing crisis, caused by financial poverty and the constant flow of people, but maybe exactly these characteristics entail the solution to the problem, rendering imperative the production of alternative life spaces and feasible the ability to materialize them.

These are the spaces that the initiative attempts to describe. In its effort, space is being understood mainly as resource for the development of certain infrastructure, however quite a few interesting practices refer to space as means for the production of common relationships among the inhabitants and the people working in the plot’s small stores.

Notable in the text is the activists’ desire for the glow and the bright external look of the project. These two points need to be perceived both materially and symbolically. On the one hand they demonstrate that affordable, social housing should not sacrifice its aesthetic qualities in the name of austerity, since they are equally important with the functional ones to the residents’ eyes. On the other hand the way that the activists envision the function of the complex as a model inside the city is being understood: the complex will perform through the radiation of its example. The initiative however doesn’t limit its interaction with society to the complex’s view, but refers clearly to its intention to form solidary bonds with similar projects in Berlin that demand another housing policy. In the text are requested the basic provisions that are currently missing (housing and working), but also whatever would make the residents happy and proud for their common house (aesthetic, image to the city).

Lastly the initiative attempts to set some ground

NONNEGOTIABLE 100%

rules that would ensure the compliance with its basic principles. In an effort to predict the possible dangers of a hostile environment, the institutions searched try to establish practices for the common management and development, try to define a common property status. The long-term security of these institutions and regulations is aspired, as also the prevention of profit extraction through the exploitation of any surpluses produced within and through the specific project.

Based on the above, the assumption can be made that, indeed, a complex that could possibly function as a system of expanding commons is being described.

The financial regulations that the initiative prescribes as conditions, namely the affordable rents and the low purchase price from the Senate of Berlin, allow anybody interested to participate, without excluding by economic or other criteria. Procedures are foreseen that could enable the collective decisions on space management, facilitating the translation and communication among the inhabitants and users.

The negation of private ownership, the abolishment of spatial advantages deriving from private capital and the prevention of profit extraction from the complex obstruct power concentration. The members of the initiative do not perceive the complex as an enclosed utopia, but rather care about similar projects, being actively solidary towards them. They recognize the greater scale of the city and the urgency for an alternative urban development and housing policy, of which they hope to be a part.

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5.4 Thoughts for an alternative housing scenario None of the three initiatives active in Dragoner Areal has articulated a concrete spatial plan.

However, the architect, cooperator of the Technical University of Berlin (Technische Universität Berlin) and urban activist A.H. narrated during an interview about the members’ thoughts regarding space’s structure and provisions. These thoughts have been classified and are presented, in order to examine if the envisioned space has or tends to have open, common characteristics.

The first idea regarding the future space is the principle of incomplete. According to this, the social housing complex -and anything else built inside the plot- should be erected in a slow pace and without strict deadlines, in order to incorporate the residents’ wishes and be molded by them. Thus, the construction will not be signified by a final purpose, but rather will be open and permeable both to life’s needs and its unexpected turns. This way of perceiving the architectural work is opposed to the dominant perspective towards a project on two levels. First, it does not recognize the building as a commodity, as a completed product that attributes to its owners prestige and high esteem, being produced through a rigid design procedure that traverses the project from its load-bearing structure to its construction details.

It defies the concept of the perfect composition and the idealized figure of its creator. On a second, deeper level, it challenges the core of western architectural thought, Renaissance principles of Alberti, which have become so dominant, that are rarely being questioned. It opposes the concept, which defines that the ideal harmony of a structure is accomplished when nothing can be added, subtracted or altered, but for the worse. (Watkin, A History of Western

Architecture, 2009) The principle of incomplete demands for an architecture that will not be interested in the commercial or transcendental perfection, that will not produce buildings-commodities, but spacesin-the-making. It desires an architecture constantly redesigned and transformed that will define as priority the participation and the needs of its users.

The architect will lose the project’s reins, won’t produce spaces-that-are-imposed or spaces-thatare-offered and won’t transmit deductively his or her authority to space. Hence, common spaces-in-themaking are being collectively crafted, spaces that participate in the common (space as a commoner) and transform into a community the subjectivities that attempt to design them (space-commoning).

Of course, during these procedures should always be taken into consideration the invisible authority exerted among the participants, since, no matter how well-intentioned everyone is, they remain members of a hierarchical society that discriminates according to gender, class, origin, education, verbal and physical ability or temporal availability, creating inequalities and concentrations of power that are hard to fight.

The second spatial request refers to the care for the place and the existing environment. The collective’s proposal for a future, alternative housing complex wishes to respect the neighborhood and prevent the rent rises in the surrounding area, having as ulterior objective not to function as a gentrification factor. It wishes also to respect the space that will contain this complex, namely all the layers of the barracks’ history, the small stores that exist already inside the plot and the peculiar atmosphere that characterizes it. Specifically, in the interview that took

THOUGHTS FOR AN ALTERNATIVE HOUSING SCENARIO

place during a walk around the plot, A. observed that the sensation of this space, deriving from its narrow passages and the grass sprouting from the asphalt and the stone walls, is an element that everybody desires to maintain. This proposal originates from IBA’s heritage and more precisely from the demand for “Critical Reconstruction” of IBA-New. (Bodenschatz, et al., 2010, pp. 128-129) Thus, the initiative acknowledges that anything that is about to be constructed, will be integrated in a specific place that has already existing users, architectural landscape and multilayered history. With the aim to respect, preserve and reinforce the above mentioned characteristics, the future complex demonstrates the intention to influence and be influenced, to be inter-contaminated with its environment. It could be assumed that the complex will not only be open to newcomers coming from an Outside, but will also receive newcomers from a Before, or maybe it will functions itself as a newcomer, willing to follow the rules of the system that it enters, as long as they don’t violate the conditions of its own existence.

The third proposal is about the significance of multiplicity and the coexistence of different subjectivities in the initiative’s venture. According to that intention, the individual private apartments should not be designed based on standardized plans, but rather should be adaptable to the tenants’ needs and foresee diverse life scenarios. This idea, although is not an architectural innovation, enables the difference inside the complex, as it doesn’t shape a homogenized community, but assists for the inclusion of families, single persons (e.g. young or old) and groups without family attachments (e.g. young couples, friends, stranger roommates). Furthermore, refuge spaces are being proposed, in case that somebody wishes to be isolated, for example “a

5.23 Asphalt, bricks and grass in Dragoner Areal.

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teenager that can’t stand his or her parents or a couple that breaks up”. Thus, the utopian image of an idle collective, in which every moment of life is being defined by coexistence, is abandoned, since such a scenario doesn’t correspond to the real needs of people, who always seek for seclusion. However, it is important to notice that these refuges are common and not of exclusive use. The asylum doesn’t recognize individual identities, but subjectivities that need also to exist as such inside the whole. (Negri & Hardt, 2009, pp. 325-344) The fourth demand concerns the priority of all the expressions and scales of common space. Regarding the neighborhood, it is foreseen to design the traversal of the plot, namely to enable the transition from the western road to the eastern, transforming the whole area into a passage, into a permeable, porous threshold. It is also suggested to shape new public spaces, which would address both the broader area of Kreuzberg and the whole city. As for the tight community of the residents and the permanent users of the complex, the formation of multiple and large communal spaces is proposed. These would prevail in importance and priority over the private apartments, which would have the minimum dimensions.

The general tendency of the proposals (that are not an official statement of the initiative, but abstract thoughts of its members) could be summarized as the search towards an open, cooperative, pluralistic habitation. The complex described can be perceived as a system of expanding commons, since it receives newcomers by being open to diverse forms of life, offers opportunities to communicate through its communal facilities and ensures equality through its collective design process. It desires to be connected with the atmosphere and the history of the existing environment, with the neighborhood and the tenants

of the small stores of Dragoner Areal, understanding, preserving and empowering the characteristics that render it what currently is.

6. Attempt for conclusions

Through its buildings, pictures, and stories, humanity is preparing, if it must, to survive civilization. And, above all, it does so laughing.

Walther Benjamin, “Experience and poverty�

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Completing the alternative narration of the two stories, the answers to the questions posed in the beginning of this wandering in the alleys of Kreuzberg are searched. Are they, after all, two stories of urban resistance or maybe are observations, contestations and conclusions hidden inside them, echoing in a greater distance? Also, what value has an analysis from the perspective of the commons? What notions and tools emerge because of it and what ideas can add bits and fragments to the comprehension of the perplexed reality?

The easy answer refers to the tangible results of the two movements. In the Spree’s riverbanks the developments are rather negative, since the imprint of the two-year struggle and the victorious referendum is only the “Call for Ideas”, which explored alternative scenarios for the bank of Kreuzberg and was realized in 2010-2011 by one part of the divided initiative “Sink Mediaspree!”. Individual, small victories were achieved in the places that neighbor with the river. In the plot of Holzmarktstraße an alternative example of habitation, culture and entertainment -named Holzmarkt- is being currently crafted, trying to abide by and also to expand the referendum’s requests.

The project of YAAM was displaced for the sixth time in its history, but did not withdraw from the Spree’s scene, finding a hospitable space in the former “Maria am Ostbahnhof” area. In 2013 a notable project of collective living and working spaces was constructed in Kreuzberg’s bank, the so-called Spreefeld. At the same time, many of Mediaspree Projekt’s buildings were not constructed, because of the investors’ shortage of resources. However, the imminent erection of East Side Mall that is planned to be built in 2017, next to the Daimler Mercedes Benz complex, inside the Anschutz area is a serious defeat.

In the case of Dragoner Areal a general conclusion

6.1 Holzmarkt, 2014.

6.2 The pluralistic land uses of Holzmarkt.

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ATTEMPT FOR CONCLUSIONS

6.3 YAAM in the plot of Maria am Ostbahnhof.

6.4 The imminent (;) East Side Mall.

can’t be drawn yet, as the negotiations between Berlin and Germany still continue. Surely, the positive stand of the District and the Senate shape an initial victory of the three initiatives. The general feeling that derives from such an evaluation is that two urban movements of mediocre or minimum levels of success were studied.

However, these movements have always been rotating around forms and attempts of expanding commons; their invisible radiation and influence exceeds the recognizable, familiar limits. In 2014 another referendum took place in Berlin requesting the preservation of Tempelhofer Feld as vacant space and the prohibition of housing complexes construction within it. The demand won and until the present day is being successfully applied. The campaign for the preservation of the empty park had started in 2012, titled “100% Tempelhofer Feld”. Who can say in what degree it was inspired by the referendum against Mediaspree Projekt or in what degree inspired afterwards the declaration of the initiative “City from below” for an 100% social Dragoner Areal?

It seems that from any social demand for an alternative way of life, however big or small, revolutionary or trivial, emerge profits that are not directly visible and cannot be evaluated using a measurable notion of “success”.

Significant and useful heritage are the plans created through another kind of design process by the collective Idea Workshops that were realized in the Spree’s banks, by the Workshop that produced the “Upstall-Charta” of Dragoner Areal and by the studios of the Technical University of Berlin (Technische Universität Berlin) and the University of Arts (Universität der Künste). Intriguing is also the public discourse that was initiated in 2008 thanks

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to the initiative “Sink Mediaspree!”, about the role and the importance of the river inside the city.

In the context of this dialogue, during the winter semester 2016/2017 the Technical University of Berlin conducted a course that studied the river as a common resource of Berlin, having the title “SpreeAthen* - The River as Urban Resource” (Chair for Urban Design and Urbanization, 2016) In both case studies, ruptures were provoked in the concrete, rigid identities of each space’s defenders. The cooperation between the radical left and the creative urban youth that formed the group “Sink Mediaspree!”, as also the partnership among the collective of specialized scientists, the people of the neighborhood and the middle-aged activists in Dragoner Areal are patterns indicative of a new wave of resistance, more open, more inclusive, more colorful. The subjects were transformed through their mutual re-production, the Other became from stranger, a co-producer of the life in common. (de Angelis, 2013, p. 114) The people who took part in these incidents and also the people who heard their stories have become carriers of the common experience. Now they move around the world, narrating and reproducing the peculiar relationships that were created and the polymorphous actions that they lived and heard of.

The main protagonists, the spaces of the commons, the common spaces have been inscribed in collective representations as such. They bear the marks and the stigma of the alternative practices,

*

The name Spree-Athen (Athens of Spree) is a sobriquet for the Prussian and later German capital, for Berlin. Erdmann Wircker used first the expression in 1706 in a festive text for the 200th anniversary of Brandenburg’s first university, Alma Mater Viadrina, located in the city of Frankfurt (Oder). (Wikipedia, 2009)

as they were shaped by them and constitute now a generator of future ones. The small garden in Dragoner Areal waits stoically its creation for the third time. The two black sidewalls of Cuvrybrache functioned as a unique activistic screen, when in a recent rally in November 2016 the protesters projected slogans on them. The words flew over the fence through the projector’s beams and landed on the black surface, asking “Were are the homeless?”, “Where is the participation?”, demanding “Dreams instead of evictions”.

Berlin -simultaneously captive of and advantaged by its Myth (Feireiss, 2013)- is altered, partly due to the constantly transformed and continuously contested representations about it. The German capital experiences the flow and the attraction of newcomers that are as contradictory as the reality of the city itself. They are usually young people, without a permanent workplace, flexible to move from country to country. Evidence of their contradiction provides the fact that their own survival is based on the common open networks of relationships, codes, knowledge and information, while at the same time they are characterized by the consumption of identities and life styles, by the participation or even the provocation of gentrification procedures. The demonstration of the contradictions doesn’t aim to judge, but only to stress the risks that expansions, transitions and conflicts always carry. Of course it would be simpler for Kreuzberg to be surrounded by a Wall that would prohibit the entrance to anyone different, to anyone capable to cause the renegotiation of the rules. But the real common can only be expanding, with means that look like the ends. The real common will be defined by sensitivity, by persistence and militancy, by the unconditioned openness, by the constant and exhausting

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6.5 Projection on the black wall of Cuvrybrache. In the foreground, the poster of the future complex.

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contestation and negotiation, by love for creation, love for life.

Two specific places were studied. A neighborhood by the riverfront was presented, which functions in an alternative way, producing and being produced biopolitically through the symbiosis of its residents, through sharing, communication and exchange.

The common as place, the common as memory, the common as relationship among people becomes the cause, the requirement, the mean and the result of life by the river. A seemingly vacant space was also introduced, a Berlin alana with a hidden, secrete life.

Emptiness, terrain vague, belonging to no one and because of that to everybody, the desert, the sea, the space, the vastness of all the possible scenarios that one can imagine, this is the widest expression of the common. The neighborhoods in the limit of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain have functioned for years as a system of expanding commons that today struggles to be preserved as such. On the contrary, the plot of the old barracks was always introvert, nevertheless its transformation to an expanding common seems now feasible.

During the analysis of the two case studies, fragments of a biopolitical -let the reader be lenient with the term- architecture and urban planning emerged, perspectives that tend to an equivalent fantasy appeared. If it is assumed that the expansion, the unexpected, the incomplete, the respect, the network and the transformation are basic notions of such an approach, then maybe an attempt to describe it is possible. It may refer to an architecture of the constant inclusion and the everlasting translation of its users’ needs into space. It may refer to an urban planning of permeation, multiplication and metastasis of common spaces, of the transmission of the virus of commons through the river’s streams

from one bank to the other.

Maybe the question about the value of an analysis from the perspective of commons is the most important. The common is under threat.

With this sentence starts Lieven de Cauter its text “Common Places” (2013) and unfortunately he is right. The enclosure of the common, the control and the constraint of the access to it, its corruption and alteration by the global capital and neoliberal state confirm his grim phrase. The words “development” and “modernization” have lost their meaning and signify a world supervised and fragmented, a world of enclaves of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, characterized by controlled encounters and predicted actions within the urban environment.

Maybe this is one of the greatest dangers that threat the common; the total control of authority on urban life. The conflict between Authority and the ones that it oppresses appears throughout human history. Today though it acquires new characteristics; the neoliberal Empire (Negri & Hardt, 2000) attacks preexisting Commons of thousands of years, spreading its network across the planet.

At the same time, however, the colorful synthesis of subjectivities moves towards the ever-increasing autonomy, participating equally in the global net of communication and cooperation, producing, sharing and caring for the Common Wealth. A contemporary dialogue about the commons could redefine the priorities of social production and social relationships, leaving open the possibility of opposition to old and new enclosures. (de Angelis, 2013, p. 64) According to Spinoza (as referred in Negri & Hardt, 2009, p. 53) the Multitude, the ones that can’t be named, can’t be categorized and don’t erect barriers -national, racial, of class or gender- (Stavrides, 2016, pp. 174-175) through sociality, love and search for the Common

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ATTEMPT FOR CONCLUSIONS

Wealth can surpass their solitude and weakness and be transformed into the basic power for the event of democracy, can realize the Exodus towards an autonomous society of the Commons.

An element that appears both as motive and practice throughout this study, is Love. This term has been so much charged with sentimentality, that seems paradoxical to be used in social researches. Love among different subjectivities, as transformative force, as connecting tissue of networks and communities, as counter-power of the Multitude against the Authority are only few of the many characteristics that render it a central notion in an analysis of commons. (Negri & Hardt, 2009, pp.

179-188) The march in the river, the destruction of the graffiti, the small garden near the execution wall, the festivals and the games, the disposal of so much time and energy for two spaces that neither did, nor will belong to the people that defended them cannot be explained based on classic financial terms, based on a cold logic that explains and perceives the world according to personal interest. Love encouraged the residents and the neighbors to meet and design another way of living in the neighborhood, another way of inhabiting the plot. And through this process, another way of relation was crafted among them.

In the end, did the residents and the neighbors produce space or were they produced as residents and neighbors through it?

Finally, all the above matter, because, according to Hardt and Negri, the metropolis is the place of biopolitical production, is by default the space of the common, of the images, relationships, desires, information, knowledge, codes and habits. The creation of the common is therefore nothing other than the life of the city itself. Thus, the metropolis is deemed as the space of production, socialization

and organization of resistance -like an old factory(2009, pp. 249-260) and acquires a tremendously great importance, by being the one and only place that entails all the everyday activities, the random encounters, the exquisite events, the material and immaterial networks. After all, the design of the city from below is equivalent to the design in action of another society, of another life.

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6.6 Indian tent in the camp of Cuvrybrache.

7. Appendix

7.1 Representation of Mediaspree Projekt. In red, the planned buildings that are part of the project, in green the already existing ones. The hatched area between the banks and the dashed line signifies the limit of 50 meters, which the initiative demanded to remain unoccupied.

7.2 Representation of the Spree’s banks, in the case of the application of the referendum’s requests. Now the red areas signify the surfaces, where an alternative development could be feasible. The distance of 50 meters from the bank (yellow dashed line) secures the river’s space.

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7.1 Spreeufer für alle! - The Spree’s riverbanks are for all!

Der Wortlaut der Begründung zum Bürgerentscheid Unter dem Label „Mediaspree“ ist beabsichtigt, die Spreeufer mit Baublocks bis 10 Meter an die Ufer zu bebauen. Entstehen sollen elf neue Hochhäuser, teure Hotels, Lofts und Büros mit privatisiertem Spreeblick. Für die öffentliche Nutzung sind nur sogenannte „Spreefenster“ oder „Pocketparks“ geplant – kleine Grünflächen, die zwischen den Baublocks zum Spreeufer führen. Am Spreeufer selbst verbleibt der Öffentlichkeit lediglich ein „Uferwanderweg“. Mit diesem Vorhaben wird die historische Chance vertan, Flussuferzonen als wichtige Naherholungsräume zu entwickeln. Denn Berlin verfügt im Vergleich zu anderen Städten über einen geringen Freiflächenanteil an den Flussufern.

Für die Ansiedlung von Unternehmen stehen im Bezirk genügend andere Flächen zur Verfügung.

• Ein Mindestabstand für Neubauten zu den Spreeufern von 50 Metern ist ein adäquates Maß für eine öffentliche Nutzung der Flussufer mit Grün- und Kulturflächen. Bestehende Gebäude sollen in ein Freiflächenkonzept integriert und durch Pavillons mit öffentlichen Nutzungen ergänzt werden können. Die verbleibenden Neubauflächen müssen so parzelliert werden, dass sich viele Nutzer/innen engagieren können und nicht nur wenige Großinvestoren. Vorschläge dazu sollen Ideenwerkstätten erarbeiten. Besondere Beachtung soll die kleingewerbliche Nutzung sowie die Nutzung für alternative/nichtkommerzielle kulturelle Aktivitäten erhalten. Und auch die Privatisierung öffentlicher Liegenschaften muss aufhören!

• Die bestehenden Bebauungspläne sollen auch

bezüglich ihrer Baumassen neu diskutiert werden.

Die Hochhausplanungen (über einer Traufhöhe von 22 Metern) müssen aufgegeben werden. Die künstliche Initiierung einer „Boomtown“ passt nicht in den Bezirk und ist auch aus umwelt- und sozialpolitischen Gründen abzulehnen.

• Die Brommybrücke wird als Steg gebaut. Aber nur 200 Meter weiter ist jetzt eine zusätzliche Straßenbrücke (nur für Bus/ Tram) auf Höhe der Manteuffelstraße geplant. Es liegt nahe, dass sie später für den Autoverkehr geöffnet und diesen in den Wohngebieten drastisch erhöhen würde. Zudem zerteilt die Brücke die möglichen Grünflächen an den Spreeufern. Aus diesen Gründen soll auf die geplante zusätzliche Brücke verzichtet werden. Der öffentliche Nahverkehr kann über die bestehenden Brücken weiterentwickelt werden. Unsere Ideenwerkstatt Osthafen am 30. März 2008 ergab den Vorschlag eines weiteren Fußgängersteges zwischen Lohmühleninsel und Osthafen. (...)

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APPENDIX

Text to justify the referendum Under the name “Mediaspree Projekt” is disguised the intention to colonize the Spree’s banks with solid building blocks, even in a distance of 10m from the river. Eleven towers are planned to be constructed, along with expensive hotels, lofts and offices with private view to the Spree. The so-called “Spree-windows” or “pocket parks” are planned for public use -small green surfaces between the buildings that will lead to the river. Along the bank, a “riverfront promenade” is left to the neighborhood.

Such interventions impede the historical opportunity to develop the river’s banks as local recreational spaces. In relation to other cities, Berlin has a small percentage of free areas by the riverfront. The District however possesses many other plots that could house the companies.

• The minimum distance of 50m from the Spree for any new building is an adequate regulation that secures the public use of the banks, which could be equipped with green surfaces and cultural spaces.

The already existing buildings need to upgrade their public use through pavilions, being in that way integrated. The remaining surfaces need to be segmented in a way that will allow multiple users to benefit from them -not only the investors.

Proposals about this matter could be articulated by idea workshops. The small businesses and the noncommercial cultural functions have to be maintained.

The privatization of public property has to stop!

• The existing plans have to be revised, in relation to their built mass. The proposals for towers and buildings with a height greater than 22m have to be abandoned. The construction boom that Mediaspree Projekt desires, doesn’t fit to the area and is rejected for environmental and sociopolitical reasons.

• The Brommybrücke bridge will be a footbridge.

However, only 200m northern a new road bridge for buses and trams is being planned, at the point where currently Manteuffelstraße meets the river. However, this bridge could later be used for car circulation, increasing the traffic of the surrounding residential areas. Furthermore, such a bridge would fragment the potential green areas of the Spree’s banks. For these reasons, plans for any new road bridges have to be abandoned. The local public transport can be maintained as it is. The Idea Workshop for the Eastern Harbor on 30.05.2008 proposed yet another footbridge between Lohmühleninsel island and the bank of Friedrichshain. (…)

SPREEUFER FÜR ALLE! - THE SPREE’S RIVERBANKS ARE FOR ALL!

A. Osthafen östlicher Platzbereich.

Durch den Bürgerentscheid konnte das Hochhaus mittlerweile wegverhandelt werden, das Gebäude wird nun 24 Meter hoch. Zum Osthafen veranstalteten wir zwei Ideenwerkstätten, deren Ergebnisse Inhalt unseres Antrags waren.

Stichworte: Ende des Medienhafens, Öffnung zum Rudolfkiez, multifunktionaler Stadtplatz mit Pavillons am Wasser, Wohn- und Geschäftshäuser entlang der Stralauer Allee als soziales Modellprojekt einer Wohnungsbaugesellschaft, z.B. der Degewo. Die BVV hat beschlossen, dass auf dieser Grundlage eine Prüfung erfolgt. Staatssekretärin Frau NehringVenus, die am 29.10.08 für den Wirtschaftssenat zu Gast im Sonderausschuss in der Bar25 war, erklärte dort, man wünsche sich konkrete Änderungswünsche vom Bezirk, dann könne man über alles reden. Das Bezirksamt hat seine Bemühungen jedoch auf das Hochhaus beschränkt und der Wirtschaftssenat bekam somit nie die erwarteten förmlichen Änderungswünsche zur weitreichenderen Reduzierung der Baumassen.

Wegen der Bauvorbescheide sollten die Grundstücke bis auf das Hochhaus angeblich nicht verhandelbar sein. Bauvorbescheide, die der Bezirk quasi dem Land Berlin erteilt, sehen wir als revidierbar an.

Der Senat blockierte jedoch sämtliche Alternativen.

Das Bezirksamt hat erklärt, den B-Plan nun so weiterführen zu wollen. Das sehen wir als Missachtung des Bürgerwillens.

Unser Antrag zum Osthafen östlicher Bereich.

Das Bezirksamt wird beauftragt zu prüfen, die Bauleitplanung des aufgestellten Bebauungsplans 2-10 dahingehend zu ändern, dass 1. die Geschossbauten einen Mindestabstand von 50 Metern zu den Spreeufern haben 2. die Gebäude ab dem 2. Obergeschoss für Wohnzwecke genutzt

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werden 3. die Traufhöhe von maximal 22 Meter eingehalten wird 4. die Uferfreifläche einen hohen Grünanteil sowie einen Spielplatz und Strandbereich erhält 5. an der Uferpromenade Pavillons mit öffentlichen Nutzungen entstehen können 6. die Hafenstraße hinter Labels II endet 7. statt der Hafenmauer Bäume, Parkplätze, der Radweg und andere Grüngestaltungen den Gebäuden straßenseitig vorgelagert werden.

Osthafen, westlicher Platzbereich, Osthafensteg.

Für die westliche Freifläche zwischen Nhow-Hotel und MTV haben wir eine Kombination aus Platzbereich, dem geplanten Ponton Spree 2011 und einem aus unseren Ideenwerkstätten hervorgegangenen Hafensteg vorgeschlagen. Die zwei disponiblen Grundstücke bezeichnete der Bezirksbürgermeister als an Hochtief verkauft, was sich ein Jahr später als unwahr herausstellte (nur eines war verkauft).

Die Planung der Blocks geht weiter. Der Rad- und Fußgängersteg, der eine Lücke von 1,3 Kilometern zwischen Elsen- und Oberbaumbrücke schließen und von der Lohmühleninsel eine direkte Verbindung über die Modersohnbrücke zum Boxhagener Platz schaffen sollte, wurde vom Senat als nicht förderfähig eingestuft, weil kein Autoverkehr darüber geht. Sehr klimagerecht!

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APPENDIX

A. Eastern Harbor, eastern sector.

Thanks to the referendum and the following negotiations, the idea of a skyscraper was abolished and the building that is now being planned will have a height of 24m. We organized two Idea Workshops about Eastern Harbor, the results of which are our proposals. Key-words: end of the media-harbor, opening to the neighborhood of Rudolfkiez, functional city square equipped with pavilions next to the water, buildings for housing and shops along the avenue of Stralauer Allee as a prototype social model, constructed by a respective company like Degewo. The Enacting Assembly of the District (BVV) was positive to that proposal. The State Secretary Mrs. Nehring-Venus, who on 29.10.2008 was present in Bar25, being invited by the Special Committee, explained that if certain changes were demanded from the District, then all the potential scenarios could be discussed. Unfortunately, the District Council confined its efforts to the restriction of the tower’s height and the Financial Department of the State never received an application for the decrease of the total built volume. Because of the official licenses (TN. some of which were granted right before the referendum), it is supposed that the plots next to the skyscraper are nonnegotiable. However the licenses that the District granted to the State are perceived by us as reviewable.

Our proposal for the eastern sector of Eastern Harbor. We ask the District Council to examine the application regarding the “Constructional Plan 2-10”, in order to change the following: 1. the buildings’ basements will have a distance of at least 50m away from the river 2. from the second floor and above the buildings will be used as dwellings 3. their height will not exceed 22m 4. the banks’ free surfaces will be planned as green areas, while they will provide

a playground and a beach 5. pavilions with public uses will be placed along the banks’ promenade 6. Hafenstraße will end behind the building of the company Labels II 7. instead of the current fence of the harbor, trees, squares, a bike lane and other green facilities will shape the side to the street.

Eastern Harbor, western sector, footbridge of the Eastern Harbor. Regarding the western, free surface between the Nhow-Hotel and MTV, we have articulated a proposal that includes a square, the Ponton Spree 2011 proposal and the harbor’s footbridge, which was formulated by the Idea Workshops. The two available plots were characterized by the Mayor as already purchased by the company Hochtief, a fact that a year later proved to be false, since only the one was sold. Our actions to prevent the construction works continue. The bridge for bikes and pedestrians that would close a gap of 1,3km between the Elsenbrücke and the Oberbaumbrücke, enabling the direct connection of Lohmühlinsel island to Boxhagener Platz was deemed by the Senate of Berlin as unwanted, because it wouldn’t allow car circulation. A truly environmentalfriendly decision!

SPREEUFER FÜR ALLE! - THE SPREE’S RIVERBANKS ARE FOR ALL!

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7.3 The allowed building heights between the headquarters of Labels II and the Elsenbrücke bridge.

7.3 Die zulässigen Gebäudeabmessungen zwischen Labels II und Elsenbrücke (B-Plan 2-10).

7.4 Results of the Idea Workshops. The colors of the buildings signify their multiplicity.

7.4 Ergebnis unserer Ideenwerkstätten. Die Farbgebung der Gebäudeteile steht für deren Individualität.

7.5 New buildings according to “Construction Plan 2-10”.

7.5 Baublocks nach “Bebauungsplan 2-10”.

7.6 Results of the Idea Workshops. (Eastern Harbor footbridge, free surface) 7.6 Unser Vorschlag aus den Ideenwerkstätten.

(Hafensteg, Freifläche)

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APPENDIX

B. An der Schillingbrücke/Stralauer Platz 29-34 (Maria am Ostbahnhof).

Nachdem der Bezirk im Vorfeld des Bürgerentscheids in einem (provisorischen) Aufstellungsbeschluss das gesamte Grundstück zur Grünfläche erklärt hatte, wies der Senat unter Androhung des Entzugs per Ultimatum die Umsetzung der Ziele des Planwerks Innenstadt an. Weil das Grundstück möglichst teuer verkauft werden soll, müsse die höchste bauliche Ausnutzug gewährleistet sein. Zudem sollen Investoreninteressen gewahrt bleiben. Offensichtlich geht es vor allem um den Schutz von Buchwerten und potentiellen Verkaufserlösen und nicht um die Interessen der eigenen Bürger.

Der Liegenschaftsfonds fertigte einen KompromissEntwurf mit Baublöcken in einem Uferabstand von 20 statt 10 Metern an. Der Bezirk reduzierte auf 12 Meter an der Schillingbrücke (Symmetrie zum Ibis-Hotel) und eine Ausweitung auf 24 Meter am Energieforum.

Ein Schildbürgerstreich: Statt offener Spreeufer entstehen Hinterhöfe und der auf der Abbildung rechts liegende Block dockt mit seiner Rückseite an den Bestandsbau an – das Licht muss „mit Eimern“ herein getragen werden. Zudem ist nun der Bau eines Hochhauses an der Schillingbrücke vorgesehen.

Vor dem Hintergrund des Bürgerentscheids, der sich klar gegen die Privatisierung öffentlichen Eigentums, Hochhausbau und eine Bebauung dicht an der Spree ausgesprochen hat, sehen wir hier einen groben Verstoß gegen den Bürgerwillen. Der Verkauf des relativ kleinen Grundstücks (8.500qm) wird kaum zur Sanierung des Landeshaushalts beitragen. Für die Öffentlichkeit ist der Verlust der Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten an dieser Stelle des Spreeufers von Bedeutung und es verschwindet eine wichtige Adresse der Berliner Kulturszene, das Maria.

Zudem ist der durch Entzugsdrohung erzwungene

Bebauungsplan alles andere als demokratisch.

Ohne Bürgerbeteiligung und ohne Wettbewerb wurden hier Fakten geschaffen und anschließend wird schnell verkauft. Typisch Berliner Bau- und Planungskultur? Eine alternative Entwicklung auf dem dafür am besten geeigneten Grundstück (da in direktem öffentlichen Besitz) ist am Widerstand der Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung wegen kurzfristiger geldorientierter Ziele gescheitert. Unser Vorschlag im Sonderausschuss: Grenzbereinigung durch Grundstückstausch, Sanierung und experimentelle Erweiterung des Gasag-Gebäudes zur Schauspielschule, Punkthaus an der Kreuzung Mühlenstraße (Bruttogeschossfläche ca. 5.700 m2 ), Pavillons mit Spreeterrassen an der Schillingbrücke, Transformation der Maria zum Kulturpavillon an der Spree (evtl. Verkleinerung und. Öffnung zur Spree), Unterführung der Schillingbrücke im Uferbereich.

Es war einmal geplant, die Schauspielschule „Ernst-Busch“ an diesen Teil des Spreeufers anzusiedeln. Unser Vorschlag beinhaltete, diese im erweiterten Gasag-Gebäude unterzubringen. Die Schauspielschule hätte dann eine Kooperation mit dem Maria eingehen können. Grundsätzlich war auch der Eigentümer des Gasag-Gebäudes einverstanden.

Weder der Bezirk noch der Senat haben diese Idee jemals ernsthaft aufgegriffen. Nun entsteht an der Stelle des Gasag-Gebäudes ein weiteres Hotel.

SPREEUFER FÜR ALLE! - THE SPREE’S RIVERBANKS ARE FOR ALL!

B. Schillingbrücke bridge/ Stralauer Platz 29-34 (Maria of Eastern Train Station).

After the District’s announcement right before the referendum that the whole plot would be integrated in the green areas, the Senate issued an ultimatum demanding the application of the “Plan for the Urban Center”. Since the plot was planned to be sold as expensively as possible, its maximum construction exploitation had to be secured, in order to maintain the investors’ interest. Apparently the protection of property value and the prevention of possible financial losses prioritize over the citizens’ needs. The “Foundation for Immovable Property” proposed a compromise, foreseeing building blocks in a distance of 20m -instead of 10m- away from the banks. The District reduced the distance to 12m at the Schillingbrücke -in order to achieve symmetry with Ibis-Hotel- and increased it to 24m at the building of Energieforum. A joke on the citizens: instead of open banks by the Spree, internal courtyards are being created, while the neighboring block overshadows them -the light reaches in with difficulty. Furthermore, the erection of a tower near the Schillingbrücke is planned. Since the referendum was opposed to public property privatization, to tower construction and to high built density near the Spree, a great violation of the citizens’ will can be observed. The sale of the relatively small plot (8.500 sq.m.) will not contribute to the rescue of the Senate’s budget. On the contrary, the opportunity for a resident-friendly configuration of the bank is of great importance to the public interest, as also is the preservation of a notable element of Berlin’s cultural scene, the club “Maria”. The demand to realize the “Plan for the Urban Center” by a threatening ultimatum is antidemocratic. Ensuring neither the citizens’ participation, nor an official

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competition the plot will quickly be sold. Is this Berlin’s typical culture of planning and building?

In the most appropriate -as public property- plot, an alternative intervention is being obstructed, because of the inadequacy to achieve in the short term the financial targets of the “Senate Department for Urban Development and Environment”. Our proposal to the Special Committee: exchange of plots, restoration and experimental expansion of the building of the public company Gasag as a theatrical school, construction of a building on the crossroads of Mühlenstraße (net area 5.700 sq.m.), pavilions with accessible terraces and view to the river near the Schillingbrücke, configuration of the club “Maria” as cultural space (possible narrowing of the building and perhaps opening to the Spree), underpass of the Schillingbrücke at the bank. The “Ernst-Busch” theatrical school has already shown interest to settle in the expanded building of Gasag and to cooperate with the club “Maria”. Also the owner of the building has agreed, regarding the main issues. The District and the Senate never discussed this idea seriously.

So, yet another hotel is planned for this plot.

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APPENDIX

7.7 The proposal of Mediaspree Projekt about “Maria”.

7.8 The proposal of the Idea Workshop about “Maria”.

7.9 Threedimensional representation of the planned building by the “Foundation for Immovable Property”.

SPREEUFER FÜR ALLE! - THE SPREE’S RIVERBANKS ARE FOR ALL!

C. Holzmarktstraße 19-30 (Bar25).

Die Bar25 ist nicht nur eine weit über die Grenzen Berlins hinaus bekannte Party-Lokation, sondern auch ein alternatives Wohnprojekt.

Rund zwei Drittel des Geländes werden bewohnt.

Diese südöstliche Hälfte des Bebauungsplans (Hochhaus statt Bar25) ist das letzte SpreeuferGrundstück zwischen Schillingbrücke und MarxEngels-Forum, auf dem noch Aufenthaltsqualität für die Öffentlichkeit realisiert werden könnte.

Die Zwischennutzungen zeigen, dass ein solches Angebot von der Bevölkerung angenommen wird.

In unserem Antrag im Sonderausschuss haben wir vorgeschlagen, dass das zwischen Straße und Ufer nur 48 bis 60 Meter breite Grundstück eine Freifläche bleiben soll. Temporäre, eingeschossige Pavillons für kulturelle Aktivitäten und Freizeitzwecke sollen das alternative Konzept ergänzen. Als Kompromiss für den Verzicht auf Baufläche hatten wir vorgeschlagen, den nordwestlichen Teilbereich planungsrechtlich aus dem Bürgerentscheid herauszunehmen, da es hinter dem Bahndamm nicht um Spreeufer geht.

Das Grundstück mit seinem bestehenden Baurecht käme als Tauschoption für das genehmigte Projekt „Columbus-Haus“ auf dem YAAM-Gelände in Frage (siehe nächstes Kapitel). Nichts von all dem hat bisher Berücksichtigung gefunden. Der Umgang mit diesem Grundstück zeigt ebenfalls, wie sehr das Streben nach kurzfristigen, finanziellen Gewinnen die Planungen am Spreeufer beeinflusst. Die BSR als landeseigener Betrieb bemüht sich, unter dem Vorwand der Altlastenbeseitigung bessere Verkaufsbedingungen zu schaffen, ungeachtet des Bürgerwillens oder des nicht existierenden Bedarfs an Büronutzungen.

Dafür soll eines der subkulturellen Aushängeschilder, mit welchem der Senat andererseits im Ausland für Berlin wirbt, ersatzlos geopfert werden. Tatsächlich

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wäre aber, laut eines Gutachtens der Bar25, eine punktuelle Altlastenbeseitigung bei Weiterbetrieb möglich. In dieser Zeit könnte in einem transparenten, bürgernahen Verfahren eine öffentliche Nutzung diskutiert und entwickelt werden. Voraussetzung ist aber, dass Berlin zugunsten der eigenen kulturellen Landschaft und einer öffentlichen Nutzung an der Spree auf Verkaufserlöse verzichtet.

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APPENDIX

C. Holzmarktstraße 19-30 (Bar25).

Bar25 isn’t simply known beyond the limits of Berlin as a famous party location, but rather is also an alternative housing project. The southwestern part of the plot is the last surface on the Spree between the Schillingbrücke and Marx-Engels-Forum, which can host a qualitative public space. Its intermediary use (TN. its function as Bar25) demonstrates that such a cultural provision is being welcomed by the local community and the city’s population. In our proposal to the Special Committee we request the plot between the train station and the bank, with a width ranging from 48 to 60m, to remain a free surface. Temporary pavilions with cultural and recreational uses could enrich the space. As a compromise for the rejection of the tower, we suggested the northwestern part of the plot to be excluded from the referendum’s regulations, since it is being located northern of the rails and doesn’t have direct access to the river. This area -along with its Construction Regulation- could be exchanged with the already licensed project of “ColumbusHaus” in YAAM’s plot (see next chapter). None of the above proposals has found a positive response. The management of this plot highlights the degree that the pursuit of short-term, financial profits affects the design of the Spree’s banks. The public company BSR attempted already the sale of the plot, using as an excuse the pollution of the river and the consequent unsuitability of the space for a public use, ignoring citizens’ will. Thus, an irreplaceable emblematic example of Berlin’s local culture is sacrificed, although the city was widely advertised abroad thanks to it. As a matter of fact, according to a report of Bar25, a targeted purification of the river could be feasible and would render the plot capable of receiving public. A transparent procedure that would

aim to the citizens’ participation and the public use of the space could be in that way seriously discussed.

However, prerequisite for such a development is that the Senate will ignore the financial losses, for the benefit of its own cultural landscape.

SPREEUFER FÜR ALLE! - THE SPREE’S RIVERBANKS ARE FOR ALL!

D. Stralauer Platz 35 (YAAM - Young African Art Market).

Das YAAM ist der Pionier der Freiflächennutzung an der Spree und seit 1994 bereits fünf Mal wegen ehrgeiziger Büroplanungen umgezogen -nie ist dann etwas gebaut worden. Es ist offensichtlich, dass das YAAM an seinem idealen Standort in seiner Funktion als ufernahe Kultur- und Sportbegegnungsstätte nicht mehr wegzudenken ist. Stadträumlich wäre das Grundstück die sinnvolle Fortsetzung des Spreeparks von der Oberbaumbrücke bis zum Energieforum. Auf diesem Grundstück ging es uns deshalb nicht um die Reduzierung der geplanten Gebäudeabmessungen, sondern um generellen Bestandsschutz.

Deshalb haben wir hier den Lösungsweg des Grundstückstausches vorgeschlagen. […] Nach einem erfolgreichen Grundstückstausch zwischen Urnova und BSR wäre das Land Berlin Eigentümer des Grundstückes. Das BSR-Grundstück hinter dem Bahndamm ist zwar mit rund 6.100 m2 kleiner als das Grundstück der Urnova (knapp 8.900 m2), doch der B-Plan V-76 erlaubt für diesen Teilbereich eine größere bauliche Ausnutzung (36.000 m2 gegenüber 31.000 m2 auf dem YAAM-Grundstück). Mit diesem Tausch könnte die Firma Urnova, neben zusätzlichen Flächen, auf politisch entspanntem Terrain bauen – die Spreeufer blieben von Maximalverwertung verschont. Das Land Berlin hätte ein für die öffentliche Nutzung kostbares Spreeufergrundstück gewonnen und dabei einen Flächengewinn erzielt. Auf unseren Antrag hin wurde das Bezirksamt aktiv und bekam vom Senat die erwartete Antwort, dass dieser keinem „defizitären Grundstückstausch“ zustimme.

Die Vertragsverlängerung für das YAAM machte der Grundstückseigentümer Urnova von der Verlängerung der auslaufenden Baugenehmigung abhängig. In den folgenden Verhandlungen konnte ein Kompromiss

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erreicht werden: Das YAAM darf bis zu einem Baubeginn bestehen bleiben und der Uferabstand des geplanten Gebäudes wurde um fünf auf ca. 15 Meter heraufgesetzt. Dennoch: Der Widerspruch zwischen maximalen Verwertungsinteressen eines internationalen Investors und lokalen Bürger- und Zwischennutzerinteressen wird so ins Unbestimmte hinausgezögert. Der Zustand der abgewirtschafteten Immobilienbranche und der anhaltende politische Druck zur Rettung der Spreeufer machen einen absehbaren Baubeginn unwahrscheinlich. Gerüchte vermitteln den Eindruck, dass die Firma Urnova das Grundstück weiterverkaufen will. Der Senat plant für das Areal „Stralauer Platz“ eine Aktualisierung des Leitbildes Spreeraum. Ob das YAAM dabei eine Rolle spielen wird, ist fraglich.

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D. Stralauer Platz 35 (YAAM - Young African Art Market).

YAAM is the pioneer of intermediary uses on the Spree’s free surfaces. Since 1994 has moved five times because of ambitious office plans -which though were never realized. It is obvious that its existence as a place of cultural encounter is tightly interwoven with its ideal location by the river. Regarding urban planning, the surface is the logical continuation of the Spree Park, which begins from the Oberbaumbrücke and ends at Energieforum. In the specific plot, the objective is not the decrease of the designed built volume, but the full protection of the existing environment. Thus, we proposed the exchange of the plots (TN. see previous chapter) as a solution.

After the successful exchange between the private company Urnova and the public BSR, the Senate would be the owner of the surface that currently houses YAAM. The plot of BSR (6.100 sq.m.), located northwestern of the rails, is smaller than Urnova’s plot (8.900 sq.m.), however the “Construction Plan V-76” ensures greater construction exploitation to the former (36.000 sq.m. instead of 31.000 sq.m. in YAAM’s plot). With the agreement, Urnova would win, apart from the additional built area, the right to construct in a surface free from political tension, while at the same time the Spree’s bank would remain unoccupied. In the end, Berlin’s Senate would have acquired a plot of bigger area on the river for public use, for free. The District Council was motivated by these data and addressed the Senate, receiving the expected answer: “we don’t agree to any deficient exchange”. The temporary expansion of YAAM’s contract has caused a problem to Urnova, since the construction license is in danger of expiration.

During the following negotiations, this compromise

could be achieved: YAAM could remain open until the beginning of the construction work and the planned buildings’ distance from the bank could be altered from 5m to 15m. However, the resolution of the conflict between the speculating interests of the global investor and the will of the citizens was postponed to the future. The current bankruptcy of the immovable property sector and the continuous political pressure for the rescue of the Spree’s banks render the beginning of the work unlikely. According to rumors, Urnova wants to resale the plot. The future of YAAM seems uncertain.

SPREEUFER FÜR ALLE! - THE SPREE’S RIVERBANKS ARE FOR ALL!

7.10 Exchange between part of the Bar25 area (left) and YAAM’s plot (right).

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E. Mühlenstraße 60-63 (Oststrand).

Der „East-Side-Tower“ wurde in den 1990er Jahren als Abschluss einer Gebäudekette am Ufer gedacht (heutige East-Side-Gallery). Er ist nach deren Abwicklung als einziges übrig geblieben. Niemand will heute noch dieses Ding, weder der Bezirk, noch der Bürgermeister. Nicht einmal der Architekt (Tschoban) ist begeistert von der Idee, den Turm an dieser Stelle tatsächlich zu bauen. Nicht viel spricht dafür, dass die Eigentümer „city-bauten“ die Umsetzung dieses Projekts zeitnah in Erwägung ziehen. Ohne eine gewisse „Nachbarschaft“ und wohnungsnahe Infrastruktur ist das geplante Luxus-WellnessWohnen nicht vorstellbar. Die nicht umgesetzte Baugenehmigung ist ein wunderbarer Platzhalter für die Zwischennutzungen. Das kann noch lange so bleiben. Dennoch sollte das Projekt in die Diskussion über Grundstückstausch aufgenommen werden.

Ein Antrag dazu wurde in der BVV FriedrichshainKreuzberg beschlossen. Der Bereich sollte ein Ort für kulturelle Nutzungen bleiben und nicht steril werden, wie der East-Side-Park.

E. Mühlenstraße 60-63 (Eastern Coast).

The so-called “East-Side-Tower” had been planned during the ‘90s to mark the end of a line of buildings that would unfold along the bank, in the current location of East-Side-Gallery. It is the only building that has remained as a thought in the course of time.

No one desires its erection, neither the District, nor the Mayor. Not even the architect Sergei Tschoban is excited with the idea of a tower, constructed at this point. It is insignificant that the owner “citybauten” wishes for an imminent erection of the building. Without a cohesive neighborhood and the appropriate residential infrastructure, the planned “luxury & wellness” building cannot be perceived as realizable. The fact that the tower is still unlicensed secures exquisitely the preservation of the current intermediary uses. The situation though cannot remain the same forever; the area has to be included in the discourse of the plot exchange. An application has been sent to the District Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg regarding this matter. The area has to remain a place for cultural uses and should not become sterile.

SPREEUFER FÜR ALLE! - THE SPREE’S RIVERBANKS ARE FOR ALL!

F. Anschutz- und Postareal.

Nur mit einem kleinen Gutachterverfahren (2002) an der Öffentlichkeit vorbei und mit übertriebenen Vorgaben für die bauliche Ausnutzung der Grundstücke wurde eine unglaubliche Planung aus dem Boden gestampft. Das ehemalige Bahngelände ging für einen geheim gehaltenen Preis in das Eigentum des texanischen Multimilliardärs Philip Anschutz (AEG) über. Einen kleineren Teil hält die BSR und nutzt diesen als Betriebsgelände. Die Post hat ihr Areal am Ostbahnhof vor dem Bürgerentscheid an ein dänisches Ehepaar verkauft, die Parzellen sind mit dauerhaften Zäunen für einen längeren Stillstand gesichert. Dem Auftritt der AnschutzGesandten (Europa-Chef Detlef Kornett und Projektleiter Michael Kötter) im Sonderausschuss am 4. Dezember 2008 war die Drohung vorausgegangen, eine Umsetzung unseres Vorschlags (siehe nächste Seite) würde das Land 50 Millionen Euro kosten.

Hintergrund ist ein städtebaulicher Vertrag, der dem Eigentümer bis 31.12.2020 volle Garantie auf das Baurecht sichert. Das Projekt ist ein Musterbeispiel für eine fehlgeschlagene Stadtplanung neoliberalen Charakters. Das ehemalige Bahngelände hätte auch anders entwickelt werden können. Heute haben wir hier nichts als Parkplätze, überall Werbeschilder, die die Anwohner belästigen und dem Monstrum „O2-World“ droht mangels Auslastung die Pleite.

Die Anschutzvertreter kündigten an, nur an die exklusivsten Nutzer zu verkaufen. Es ist von einem Kongresszentrum mit Hotelhochhaus die Rede. Unser Prüfantrag im Sonderausschuss zur Beseitigung der Hochhäuser im B-Plan fand in der BVV wenig Unterstützung. Man hatte Angst vor einer Verschlechterung des Verhältnisses zum Eigentümer.

Werbeanlagen in dieser Größe und Lage sind laut Bauordnung nicht genehmigungsfähig, waren aber

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Teil des B-Plans. Unser Antrag zur Demontage der Werbeanlagen führte immerhin dazu, dass die AEG gezwungen wurde, die Leuchtstärke der Schilder auf das gesetzlich vorgeschriebene Maß zu reduzieren. In diesem Fall wird ein großes Problem städtebaulicher Verträge deutlich: Neben dem weitgehenden Ausschluss der Öffentlichkeit ist bis heute nicht bekannt, wie viel AEG für den Erwerb des gigantischen Grundstücks zahlen musste und welche (Nicht-)Auflagen in den Vertrag mit eingeflossen sind. Für Interessierte ist er kostenpflichtig einsehbar, die wesentlichen Stellen, gut ein Drittel, sind jedoch geschwärzt. Bei zukünftigen städtebaulichen Verträgen müssen neben einer größeren öffentlichen Beteiligung auch mehr Weitsicht die Planungen bestimmen.

Das Land Berlin hat das Areal bereits erschlossen (Straßen, Leitungssysteme). Von daher ergab unsere Ideenwerkstatt vom 06.05.08 ein Votum für eine Verbesserung der baulichen Struktur durch sinnvolle Reduzierung: Verzicht auf die Hochhäuser und das „Entertainment-Center“ (rote Flächen). Es entstand eine adäquate Platzabfolge rund um die O2-World und Sportflächen im Nordwesten. Vorgeschlagen wurde eine Mischung aus Wohnen und Gewerbe, die kleinteilig ist und allen Bevölkerungsgruppen offen steht. Ziel ist es, die Bildung eines wirklich lebendigen Quartiers zu ermöglichen. Vor allem auf dem Bereich der BSR sollte sozialer, bzw. bezahlbarer Wohnungsbau entstehen. Um den absehbaren gravierenden Fehlentwicklungen entgegenzuwirken, sehen wir hier dringenden Diskussionsbedarf.

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F. Anschutz and Post Area.

In this case, a truly unbelievable deal was sealed, regarding the construction exploitation. The former area of the railway was sold to the Mexican multimillionaire Philip Anschutz, in a price that was never announced. A small part was reserved for the public company BSR, being used as company grounds. The Post sold its area before the referendum to a Danish couple; this sector is long since fenced and probably will remain so. The representatives of Anschutz (Detlef Kornett -chief executive in Europe and Michael Kötter -project supervisor) threatened the Special Committee on 04.12.2008 that the application of our proposal would cost the Senate 50 million euro. This claim was based on an urban planning contract that fully guarantees the owner’s rights until 31.12.2020. The project presents an exemplary model of failed neoliberal urban plans. The former area of the railways could have been developed differently. Today there is nothing other than parking spots, advertisement boards that burden the residents and the monstrous building of “O2-World”, which is expected to go bankrupt. Anschutz’s representatives announced their intention to lease the buildings and resale the surfaces to the most exclusive users. Our application to the Special Committee asking for reexamination, in order to prevent the erection of towers, found little support, since the aggravation of the relationships with the investor was feared. According to the law, large advertisement boards are not allowed on this location, however they are part of the “Construction Plan”. Our applications to remove the signs lead always to the decrease of their luminosity to the legal level. A serious problem, regarding the contracts, is clear. Apart from the prohibition of community participation during the procedures, the amount of

money that AEG (NT. Philip Anschutz’s company) had to pay to acquire the gigantic plot (523.000 sq.m.) remains until today unknown, as also the restrictions that were (not) included in the agreement. The access to the contract is purchasable, but the crucial parts of it -almost one third of the text- are blackened. In future urban planning contracts is needed to secure, apart from the wide participation of the citizens, the transparency of the design processes. Berlin’s Senate has already installed the necessary infrastructure in the area (roads, utilities network, etc). The Idea Workshop that was realized on 06.05.2008 to revise the existing plan, was based on that fact and suggested not to erect the towers and the mall. In this way an adequate square surface would emerge around the Arena, along with the northwestern sport facilities. In the Workshop a mixture of residencies and shops was proposed, small in scale and open to all social groups. The target is to configure a truly lively community. It is necessary to plan towards social and affordable housing, mainly within the sector of BSR. To act against the false developments, it is immediately needed to initiate this discussion.

SPREEUFER FÜR ALLE! - THE SPREE’S RIVERBANKS ARE FOR ALL!

G. Nördliche Lohmühleninsel.

Der Bezirk sieht keine Möglichkeit, den gewerblichen Nutzern geeignete Ersatzflächen anzubieten. Die gewerblichen Nutzer haben kein Interesse an einer Verlagerung. Rund um das Kraftwerk Klingenberg entstehen jedoch neue Gewerbeflächen, die sich als neuer Standort anbieten würden. Als ersten Schritt zur Entwicklung als Grün- und Kulturfläche will das Bezirksamt eine Änderung des Flächennutzungsplans anregen. Auf der südlichen Lohmühleninsel werden unterdessen die Frei- und Grünflächen im Rahmen des Programms „Stadtumbau West“ erneuert. Am 20.05.2008 gab es hierzu eine Ideenwerkstatt: Grundvoraussetzung für die Entwicklung ist die Verlagerung des Gewerbes an geeignete Stelle, z.B. Kraftwerk Klingenberg, sowie die öffentliche Nutzung als Grün- und Kulturfläche (kein Wohnen wegen Störwirkung).

Der Brückenschlag zum Osthafen (Hafensteg für Fußgänger/Radfahrer) sollte beide Bezirke verbinden. Ein Freibad soll in die Freiflächennutzung eingefügt werden. Kostenpflichtig sollen nur die Beckenbereiche sein, die Liegewiese und der Strand bleiben öffentlich. An der Schleusenstraße werden Funktionsgebäude für Sport, Kultur, Gastronomie und Freibad vorgeschlagen.

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G. Northern Lohmühlinsel Island.

The District couldn’t find a way to transfer the existing industrial uses to more appropriate surfaces.

Furthermore, these uses aren’t interested in moving.

However, around the workspace of Klingenberg lie surfaces ideal for industrial uses, that could be suggested as relocation sites. A first step of the District towards the development of the island as a green, cultural area would be the alteration of the land use plan. In that way, the free and green surfaces on the island’s southern part could be redesigned, in the framework of the “City Redevelopment - West” program. On 20.05.2008 an Idea Workshop was realized in the area. Basic components of our plan are the relocation of the industrial uses in more appropriate spots (e.g. around Klingenberg) and the provision of public uses, such as green surfaces and cultural spaces. The footbridge of the Eastern Harbor could connect the two banks. Along Schleusenstraße, public buildings are suggested to house sport and gastronomy facilities, cultural spaces, and a public pool.

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H. Cuvrystraße/Schlesische Straße.

Die Zuständigkeit liegt bei der Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, nachdem das Bezirksamt die bestehende Baugenehmigung nach jahrelanger Untätigkeit zurücknehmen wollte.

Der Senat sieht heute keine Notwendigkeit zur Planungsänderung. Auf dem Grundstück, von welchem das YAAM einst weichen musste, wird Stillstand zelebriert und alternative Planungen blockiert. Der Eigentümer lässt keine Bauabsichten erkennen.

Nachbarschaftliche Aneignungen finden zwar statt (das Grundstück wird inoffiziell als öffentliche Grünfläche genutzt), mittelfristige Zwischennutzungen werden vom Eigentümer jedoch verweigert. Unsere Ideenwerkstatt am 20.05.2008 ergab folgenden Vorschlag: Die Verbauung entlang der Cuvrystraße und des Spreeufers entfällt, statt dessen experimentelle Brandwandbebauung, Bereitstellung einer Rohbaustruktur (Wohnregal), die individuell und temporär ausgebaut und genutzt wird, Nachbarschaftsgärten ergänzen das alternative Konzept, an der Spree entsteht eine öffentliche Grünfläche mit Open-Air-Kino, Pavillons bieten öffentliche Nutzungen.

H. Cuvrystraße/Schlesische Straße.

The responsibility burdens the “Senate Department for Urban Development and Environment”, as the District wishes to cancel the granted construction license, after years of the plot lying inactive. The Senate however doesn’t recognize any need to change the plans. Inside the plot, where once YAAM was housed, inertia and dereliction dominate, while the alternative plans are being obstructed and our applications for middle-term intermediary uses are being rejected. Despite all this, the plot is being appropriated by the neighborhood, as its surface is being informally used as a public green area. The Idea Workshop on 20.05.2008 made the following suggestion: the construction along Cuvrystraße and the Spree’s bank will be cancelled and instead of the current plan an experimental habitation will take place parallel to the sidewalls and through a metal structure, which will enable its use and expansion individually and temporarily. Neighborhood gardens will complete the project and a public green surface will host an open-air cinema by the river.

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7.11 Anschutz and Post area. In red, the future buildings.

7.11 Planung rund um die O2-World.

7.12 Proposal of the Idea Workshop for the Anschutz and Post area.

7.12 Ideenwerkstatt.

7.13 Proposal for the change of land uses in northern Lohmühleninsel island.

7.13 Vorschlag zur Nutzungsverteilung nördliche Lohmühleninsel.

7.14 Proposal for the change of land uses in Cuvrystraße and Schlesische Straße.

7.14 Vorschlag Nutzungsverteilung Cuvry/Schlesische Straße.

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I. Kreuzberger Spreeufer an der Köpenicker Straße.

Entgegen der Behauptungen, Mediaspree wäre längst abgeschlossen und der Bürgerentscheid käme zu spät, ist das Ufer in Kreuzberg planungsrechtlich quasi jungfräulich. Die Planungen sind veraltet, somit ist hier eine tatsächliche, weitreichende Neuentwicklung im Sinne des Bürgerentscheids möglich. Entsprechend sollten hier Leitlinien einer neuen Planungskultur sowie die Möglichkeiten der Bürgerbeteiligung erarbeitet werden, um eine wirklich partizipative Entwicklung „von unten“ zu ermöglichen. Mit unserem modellhaften Verfahren stießen wir auf nur begrenzte Gegenliebe. Unser Vorschlag wurde über Monate hinweg vor allem als „zu aufwändig“ und „zu teuer“ angesehen. Die Grünen befürworteten sogar den Komplettverkauf des landeseigenen Behala-Grundstücks um eine „Schubladenplanung“ zu vermeiden. Dem konnten wir unsere Vorstellungen von kleinteiliger Entwicklung und Parzellierung entgegensetzen.

Unser alternativer Verfahrensvorschlag wurde durch den neu gefassten Aufstellungsbeschluss (BehalaDämmisol) unterlaufen. Immerhin wurde dabei der Behala mit dem erfolgreichen Bürgerentscheid im Rücken ohne Entschädigungsforderungen (statt 10 Meter) ein 20 Meter breiter öffentlicher Uferstreifen sowie 10 anschließende, ebenfalls unbebaubare (aber private) Meter abgehandelt, was zusammen 30 Meter unbebaute Uferfläche macht. Dazu kommt ein weiterer Platzbereich.

Entsprechend dieses Modells wurden vom Bezirksamt neue „Leitlinien für das Kreuzberger Spreeufer“ verkündet. Das geschah weitgehend am Sonderausschuss vorbei und ohne Bürgerbeteiligung.

Die nachträgliche Bürgerversammlung ohne formales Einwendungsrecht und Möglichkeiten

der Einflussnahme ist keine erfolgreiche Bürgerbeteiligung. Eine schließlich noch eingesetzte Arbeitsgruppe zur „Operationalisierung“ unseres Antrages war in vielen Teilen obsolet geworden und bereits bei ihrem zweiten Treffen mangels Anwesenheit der Parteienvertreter arbeitsunfähig.

Jetzt steht die „Qualifizierung“ der Planungen im Sinne des Bürgerentscheids an. Dies muss über ein modellhaftes Verfahrens geschehen. Dabei stehen neben der Gestaltung soziale Fragen im Vordergrund: wer baut was und für wen? Ein Prozess, an dem wir uns beteiligen werden und Interessierte zur Mitwirkung einladen.*

* Alle Texte gehören zu der Broschüre “Spreeufer für alle!”, die die Initiative “Mediaspree Versenken!“ nach dem Entzug ihrer Bürgerdeputierte aus dem Sonderausschuss herausgab.

SPREEUFER FÜR ALLE! - THE SPREE’S RIVERBANKS ARE FOR ALL!

I. Kreuzberg’s bank on Köpenicker Straße.

Despite the claims that the referendum was belated, since Mediaspree Projekt had already been decided, Kreuzberg’s bank remains to a great extent intact from the project’s interventions. The existing plans are outdated and so a real, wide development in the direction of the referendum is possible. The general outline of an alternative design culture has to be crafted, as also the procedures that will ensure the citizens’ involvement, in order to create a truly participatory development “from below”. The model processes that we suggested found little response.

Our proposal was for months characterized as “too difficult” and “too expensive”. The Greens supported the sale of Behala’s public-owned plot to a private investor, in order to avoid its fragmentary design.

Thus, we counterposed our perception that favors interventions of small scale. Thanks to the successful referendum, Behala will maintain a distance of 20m (instead of 10m) from the banks, without compensation demands, creating in that way a wide public promenade next to the river. Another 10m will be added to the width of the promenade -also unoccupied, but of private property- developing a completely free lane of 30m next to the Spree’s banks.

At this spot, another square could be suggested.

According to this model, new “Guidelines for the Kreuzbergian bank of the Spree” will be composed by the District Council. Part of these guidelines has been shaped in a great extent by the Special Committee, without the citizens’ participation. The subsequent assembly of the community that cannon object or influence the procedures, doesn’t identify with the successful citizen participation that we envision. Our idea to define a group that would edit our proposal was rejected in action, since already from the second

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meeting the committee was unable to work, due to the absence of the parties’ representatives. Now, the “virtues” of the new plans are expected to be judged, according to the referendum regulations. This critique has to take place within prototype procedures.

Apart from the configuration of the spaces, social questions emerge; who builds and for whom? To answer these questions we initiate a process and we invite everybody interested to contribute.* (Initiativkreis Spreeufer, 2010)

Mediaspree

Versenken!

AG

* The above extracts come from the brochure “Spree’s riverbanks

for all!” (Spreeufer für alle!) that the initiative “Sink Mediaspree!”

(Mediaspree Versenken!) published after the withdrawal of its representatives from the Special Committee.

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APPENDIX

7.2 Modell Dragoner Areal - Model Dragoner Areal Wir laden euch ein.

Arbeitet zusammen mit uns an einem: Modellprojekt für eine Stadt von unten auf 4,7 Hektar im Besitz des Bundes (BImA) hinter dem Finanzamt Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg initiiert durch Stadt von Unten Wir wollen: 100% Mietwohnungen 100% wirklich soziale Mieten 100% dauerhaft abgesichert Wir brauchen eine andere Stadtentwicklung!

Das ehemalige Kasernengelände hinter dem Finanzamt Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg muss als große innerstädtische Freifläche im öffentlichen Besitz entlang der Interessen lokaler NutzerInnen entwickelt werden. Es darf nicht kurzfristigen Verwertungsinteressen überlassen werden, die die Spirale von Mietsteigerung und Verdrängung weiterdrehen und eine gesichtslose Stadt produzieren.

In der Mieterstadt Berlin haben 60% der BewohnerInnen Anrecht auf einen Wohnberechtigungsschein (WBS) zum Bezug einer Sozialwohnung wohnen viele Menschen, die an alternativen Lebensmodellen interessiert sind kommen täglich neue Menschen hinzu haben Freiräume eine heterogene und offene Stadtkultur hervorgebracht.

Wir fordern ein Modellprojekt für eine Stadt von unten!

Ausverkauf?

Die Bundesanstalt für Immobilienaufgaben (BImA) hatte 2012 das im Bebauungsplan als Gewerbegebiet

ausgewiesene 4,7 ha große ehemalige Kasernenareal hinter dem Finanzamt Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg meistbietend für ca. 21 Mio. an den Investor ABR German Real Estate verkauft. Dieser plante für das Gelände hochpreisige Eigentumswohnungen, Genossenschaftsbauten und Neubau durch Baugruppen.

Damit das Gelände von profitorientierten Investoren entwickelt werden kann, hätte durch einen Aufstellungsbeschluss, eine Bebauungsplanänderung eingeleitet werden müssen. Weil der Bezirk Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg diesen nicht aufstellen wollte, trat im Januar die German Real Estate vom Kauf zurück.

Im Rahmen von Beteiligungsverfahren wurden von den anwesenden AnwohnerInnen und der Bezirkspolitik massive Zweifel am Versprechen „bezahlbarer” Wohnungen durch einen Privatinvestor geäußert. Trotz dieser Einwände hat die BImA das Gelände nun erneut im Höchstbieterverfahren ausgeschrieben.

Stichtag für die Abgabe von Angeboten war der 31.07.2014!

Das bundeseigene Grundstück darf nicht an einen Privatinvestor verkauft werden!

Deshalb fordern wir ein sofortiges Moratorium im Verkauf und der Vergabe der Liegenschaft der ehemaligen Dragonerkaserne!

Was Dann? bis zu 700 Wohnungen Kleingewerbe und Ateliers kulturelle Orte + soziale Infrastruktur gemeinschaftlich organisierte öffentliche Räume in Modellen eines neuen kommunalen Wohnungsbaus mit Mietermitbestimmung

MODELL DRAGONER AREAL - MODEL DRAGONER AREAL

in selbstverwalteten Wohn- und Arbeitsprojekten …wirtschaftlich günstig, sozialmietenkompatibel, generationenübergreifend, experimentell, glitzernd, gut angebunden, nahversorgt, hyper- und interaktiv, mit guter Aussicht und quersolidarisch.

Auf der Basis von: 100% Mieten -keine Eigentumswohnungen und -projekte 100% Teilhabe -ohne Eigenkapital, Einlage oder Anteilszeichnung 100% wirklich soziale Mieten -Mieten, die auch für Menschen, die Sozialleistungen beziehen, tragbar sind 100% dauerhaft abgesichert -Privatisierungen werden durch das Eigentumsmodell ausgeschlossen WIE? Bildung einer gemeinnützigen und sozialen Kooperation für Erwerb, Entwicklung und Betrieb des Geländes (z.B. mittels eines revolvierenden Fonds und einer Entwicklung durch neuen Träger wie kommunales Sondervermögen/ Mietshäusersyndikat/o.ä.).

Verkauf nicht im Höchstbieterverfahren sondern zum oder unter dem Verkehrswert.

Vergabe der Flächen im Erbbaurechtsmodell, Grundstück verbleibt im kommunalen Besitz.

Dauerhafte vertragliche Sicherung des kommunalen/ selbstverwalteten Wohnungsbaus.

Etwaige Gewinne aus dem Betrieb des Areals gehen in dessen Weiterentwicklung oder in die Entwicklung ähnlicher Projekte.*

*

Der Text befindet sich in der Webseite der Initiative “Stadt von unten”, in der Lage “Modell” und darstellt die Aussage der Kollektive.

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We invite you.

To work with us on a model project for a city from below in a surface of 4,7 hectares under the Federation’s possession (BImA) behind the Financial Service of FriedrichshainKreuzberg with the initiative City from Below We want: 100% rental apartments 100% truly social rents 100% permanent security We demand another urban development!

The former barracks’ area behind the Financial Service of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg has to be developed as a large free surface inside the city, under public ownership, according to the interests of the local users. It must not be conceded to the short-term interests of financial exploitation, which spin further the spiral of rising rents and dislocated inhabitants, producing an impersonal city.

In the tenants’ city that is called Berlin 60% of the residents have the right for a social residential unit live many people that are interested in alternative life models arrive constantly new residents free spaces have created a heterogeneous and open urban culture.

We demand a prototype project for a city from below!

Sale?

The “Federal Department for Immovable Property Matters” (BImA) had sold in 2012 to “ABR German Real Estate” through bidding procedures, for about 21 million euro, the 4,7 hectares plot of the old

barracks, located behind the Financial Service of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, which was characterized as industrial area in the “Construction Plan”. The private owner was planning to erect expensive private apartments. Thus, after the change of the land use characterization, the area could be restructured by investors oriented towards profit. Since the District Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg didn’t agree on such a development, “ABR German Real Estate” withdrew from the purchase of the plot in January 2014.

During the following participation procedures, doubts were expressed by the inhabitants and the District’s representatives regarding the promises for affordable housing, in the scenario of the area’s purchase by a private investor. Despite the objections, BImA initiated a new bidding process for Dragoner Areal. The offers were deposited on 31st July 2014.

The federal-owned plot is not allowed to be sold to a private investor!

This is why we demand the immediate pause of the sale actions and the assignment of the old barracks to public possession.

Then what? up to 700 apartments small shops and ateliers cultural and social support spaces collectively organized public spaces for a new communal housing policy that the tenants will co-shape for self-managed housing and working projects … affordable, compatible with social rents, crossgenerational, experimental, glowing, well connected to the city, with local provisions, hyperactive and interactive, with bright external look and solidary.

In the base of: 100% rents -no private owned apartments or projects 100% common possession -without private capital,

MODELL DRAGONER AREAL - MODEL DRAGONER AREAL

deposits or percentage 100% truly social rents -rents that even people receiving public benefits will be able to afford 100% permanently secured -no future privatization scenarios HOW? Constitution of a communal and social organization for the purchase, the development and the management of the plot (e.g. through an open institution and through new entities such as the tenants’ union, common/communal property status, etc) Purchase not through bidding procedures, but only in a price equal to or lower than the plot’s market value.

Allocation of the surfaces through the “Leasehold Model”, with the plot remaining in common/ communal possession.

Long-term legal security of the complex’s communal/ self-managed character.

Any profits derived from the management of the complex will be utilized to further develop this or similar projects.* (Stadt von unten, 2014)

* The above text is on the initiative’s “City from below” (Stadt von

unten) website, in the place “Model” (Modell) and constitutes the basic declaration of the collective.

151

152

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Filmography Hoppe, J. A., Lange, H., & Maeck, K. (Directors). (2015). B-Movie: Lust and Sound in West Berlin 1979-1989 [Motion Picture].

Schulte-Westenberg, G., & Coers, M. (Directors). (2014). Mietrebellen [Motion Picture].

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Image credits 1.1 Screenshot from Google maps.

1.2 ibid.

2.1 Werner, F. B. (1730). Berlin. [Colored engraving]. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons: https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Berlin_Map_1730_Werner.jpg.

2.2 Bundesministerium für gesamtdeutsche Fragen. (1958). [Map]. In Bundesministerium für gesamtdeutsche Fragen (1958), Mitten in Deutschland - Mitten im 20. Jahrhundert. Kölln: Bundesministerium für gesamtdeutsche Fragen.

2.3 Unknown. (1978). West-Berlin. [Map]. Retrieved from Wikiwand: http://www.wikiwand.com/de/WestBerlin.

2.4 Moldvay, M. (1980). Türkische Gastarbeiter - Straßenszene in Berlin-Kreuzberg. [Photograph]. Retrieved from VlikeVintage: http://www.v-like-vintage.com/photo/124826/tuerkische-gastarbeiter--strassenszene-inberlin-kreuzberg.

2.5 Krolow, W. (1979). [Photograph]. Retrieved from artnet: http://www.artnet.com/artists/wolfgang-krolow/ wir-sind-die-terroristen-und-gr%C3%BCssen-touristen-j6Qouki77f_0hU4KpkZ6dg2.

2.6 Unknown. (1990). Besetzte Häuser in der Mainzer Straße in Berlin - Friedrichshain. [Photograph]. Retrieved from LocaBerlin: http://blog.locaberlin.de/554/.

2.7 Schorat, S. (1980). [Photograph]. Retrieved from Berliner Punkszene 1980: http://shizzo-berlin1980.de/ 2.8 Hughes, M. (1987). Oranienstraße. [Photograph] Retrieved from Kreuzberged Berlin: https://kreuzberged. com/2013/08/16/book-of-the-month-michael-hughes-inside-kreuzberg/.

2.9 Norton, C. (1976). No man’s land. [Photograph]. Retrieved from NPA: http://www.npa-stockimages.info/ documentary-images.html.

2.10 Unknown. (1999). Love Parade. [Photograph]. Retrieved from Welt: https://www.welt.de/kultur/pop/ article144285640/Berlins-neue-Loveparade-darf-nicht-Loveparade-heissen.html.

2.11 Hoppe, J. A., Lange, H., & Maeck, K. (1984) [Snapshot from motion picture] In Hoppe, J. A., Lange, H., & Maeck, K. (2015), B-Movie: Lust and Sound in West Berlin 1979-1989. [Motion picture].

2.12 Pohlisch, O. (2015). Idyllisches Plätzchen im Norden des Geländes. [Photograph]. Retrieved from germanarchitects: http://www.german-architects.com/architektur-news/hauptbeitraege/Kein_Hoechstpreis_fuers_ Kreuzberger_Filetstueck_4787.

160

IMAGE CREDITS

3.1 Superstudio. (1974) Supersurface. [Collage]. Retrieved from RNDRD: http://www.rndrd.com/n/1690.

3.2 Tanagram Partners. (2010). Augmented Reality. [Drawing]. Retrieved from Trope Collaborative: http://www. tropecollaborative.com/casestories/iARM.html.

3.3 Kollhoff, H. (1993). Modell Alexanderplatz. [Model photograph]. Retrieved from Exklusiv Immobilien in Berlin: http://www.exklusiv-immobilien-berlin.de/nachrichten/berlin-alexanderplatz/7978.

3.4 Senate Department for Urban Development and Housing. (2014). Modell Potsdamer Platz [Model photograph]. Retrieved from Senate Department for Urban Development and Housing: http://www. stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/planen/stadtmodelle/en/stadtmodell_500.shtml.

3.5 Julia. (2015). Mauerpark-Flohmarkt-Special. [Photograph]. Retrieved from Kreativlabor Berlin: http://www. kreativlaborberlin.de/foto-freitag-9-flohmarkt-am-mauerpark-teil-3/.

3.6 Voigt, B. (2016). [Photograph] Retrieved from MadArtLab: https://madartlab.com/berlins-boycottairbnbtargets-tourists-and-rising-rents/.

3.7 Regionalmanagement Mediaspree. (2008). [Three-dimensional representation]. Retrieved from Berliner Morgenpost: http://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article102178847/Mediaspree-Projekt-in-Gefahr.html.

3.8 Piepgras, A. (2014). [Drawing]. Retrieved from Immobilien Zeitung: http://www.immobilien-zeitung. de/129357/dragonerareal-kunst-kommerz-und-kinderlachen.

4.1 Personal production.

4.2 Personal archive (2016).

4.3 ibid.

4.4 Kodal, T. (2014). [Photograph]. Retrieved from berlinlovesyou: http://berlinlovesyou.com/2016/04/27/ may-1st-kreuzberg-quick-party-guide/.

4.5 Geismar, R. (2016). Twin Towers Sunset. [Photograph]. Retrieved from 500px: https://500px.com/ photo/137400115/twin-towers-berlin-sunset-by-robert-geismar.

4.6 Allianz. (2012). [Photograph]. Retrieved from Property EU: https://propertyeu.info/Nieuws/ffc0aa68-e47141c7-9c9f-f073281e5778/Blackstone-Quantum-buy-Allianz-HQ-in-Berlin-for-%E2%82%AC230m.

4.7 Aukett + Heese. (2008). [Photograph]. Retrieved from Aukett + Heese: http://www.aukett-heese.com/ projects/interior-design/universal-music.

4.8 Screenshot from Google maps and personal editing.

4.9 Hughes, M. (1987). [Photograph]. Retrieved from umbruch-bildarchiv: https://www.umbruch-bildarchiv. de/bildarchiv/ereignis/010587-92berlin.html.

161

4.10 von Steffelin, C. (1993). GĂśrlitzer Park. [Photograph]. Retrieved from iheartberlin: http://www.iheartberlin. de/2013/10/30/night-life-berlin-1974-until-toda/.

4.11 Mediaspree Versenken! (2008). Investorenbejubeln. [Photograph]. Retrieved from podopolog: http:// xlterrestrials.org/plog/?p=752.

4.12 Mediaspree Versenken! ibid.

4.13 Mediaspree Versenken! (2008). Ostprinzessin am Osthafen. [Photograph]. Retrieved from Abriss Berlin: http://www.abriss-berlin.de/blog/2008/09/28/ideenwerk-am-osthafen/.

4.14 Mediaspree Versenken! (2008) BĂźrgerentscheid. [Digital scanning]. Retrieved from Analyse, Kritik und Aktion: http://aka.blogsport.de/category/freiraeume/page/9/.

4.15 Screenshot from Google maps and personal editing.

4.16 Beurich, T. (2009). [Photograph]. Retrieved from Berliner Zeitung: http://www.bz-berlin.de/media/ polizeischutz-fuer-die-cuvry-brache-1.

4.17 H., M. (2014). [Photograph]. Retrieved from nerdcore: http://www.nerdcore.de/2014/12/12/blu-ispainted-black-in-berlin/.

4.18 Unknown. (2010). [Photograph]. Retrieved from cafebabel: http://www.cafebabel.co.uk/lifestyle/article/ berlins-legendary-bar-25-requiem-for-a-bar.html.

4.19 Personal archive (2016).

4.20 ibid.

4.21 Unknown. (2014). [Photograph]. Retrieved from World Travel Images: http://www.worldtravelimages.net/ Berlin_Kreuzberg.html.

4.22 Schmid, L. (1969). Oranienplatz in Kreuzberg mit dem geplanten Autobahnkreuz. [Collage]. Retrieved from Spike Art Magazine: http://www.spikeartmagazine.com/de/artikel/radikal-modern-der-berlinischen-galerie.

4.23 Screenshot from Google maps and personal editing.

4.24 ibid.

4.25 Mediaspree Versenken! (2008). [Three-dimensional representation]. Retrieved from pogledaj: http:// pogledaj.to/drugestvari/berliners-against-goliath-investors/.

4.26 Personal archive (2016).

4.27 Badeschiff. (2015). Badeschiff Stand Up Paddling [Photograph]. Retrieved from Arena Berlin: http://www. arena.berlin/veranstaltungsort/badeschiff/.

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IMAGE CREDITS

4.28 Internationale Bauausstellung Berlin. (1987). Block 103: Modellprojekt der ökolgischen Stadterneuerung.

[Drawing]. In Bodenschatz, H., Polinna, C., Huber, M., Carbone, A., Kurtz, T., Vonderau, E., et al. (2010), Learning from IBA - die IBA 1987 in Berlin. Berlin: Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung.

4.29 BeBerlin. (2013). Technology and innovation. [Photograph]. Retrieved from BeBerlin: http://www. be.berlin.de/campaign/city-of-opportunities/information/technology-and-innovation.

5.1 Personal production.

5.2 Schaub, F. W. (1780). Upstall unterhalb der Tempelhofer Berge. [Painting]. Retrieved from Upstall: http:// upstall.de/index.php?id=61.

5.3 Unknown. (1863). Historische Berliner Stadtkarte. [Map]. Retrieved from Upstall: http://upstall.de/index. php?id=61.

5.4 Unknown. (1918). Straßenkämpfe in Berlin (Spartakidengruppe). [Photograph]. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cpartakovtsy-2.png.

5.5 Röblitz, M. T. (1938). Waschhalle von Osten. [Photograph]. Retrieved from Upstall: http://upstall.de/index. php?id=61.

5.6 Screenshot from Google maps and personal editing.

5.7 Personal archive (2016).

5.8 ibid.

5.9 Personal archive (2016).

5.10 Pasolini, P. P. (1961). [Snapshot from motion picture] InPasolini, P. P. (1961), Accattone. [Motion picture].

5.11 Prokura. (2014). [Photograph]. Retrieved from Reclaim your city: https://reclaimyourcity.net/content/ stadtkunstaneignung-dauerausstellung-dragoner-areal-kreuzberg.

5.12 Prokura. ibid.

5.13 Personal archive (2016).

5.14 Prokura. (2014). [Photograph]. Retrieved from Reclaim your city: https://reclaimyourcity.net/content/ stadtkunstaneignung-dauerausstellung-dragoner-areal-kreuzberg.

5.15 Upstall. (2011). Workshop- Skizzen. [Drawing]. Retrieved from Upstall: http://upstall.de/fileadmin/pdfs/ Upstall_Expose_2012_03_02.pdf.

5.16 Stadt von unten. (2014). [Photograph]. Retrieved from Stadt von unten: https://stadtvonunten.de/ grundstein-am-mehringdamm-gelegt-zur-gestrigen-aktion-bima-rettetberlin/.

163

5.17 Stadt von unten. (2014). [Photograph]. Retrieved from Stadt von unten: https://stadtvonunten.de/wirbieten-100-bima-nimmt-angebot-der-stadtgesellschaft-entgegen/.

5.18 Chair for urban design and urbanization. (2015). [Model photograph]. Retrieved from CUD: http://www. cud.tu-berlin.de/topics/wohnen-in-berlin-4-dragoner-areal/.

5.19 Personal archive (2016).

5.20 Stadt von unten. (2016). [Photograph]. Retrieved from Stadt von unten: https://stadtvonunten.de/briefan-die-bima-fuer-genehmigung-des-stadteilwohnzimmer-auf-dragonerareal/.

5.21 Groth Gruppe. (2015). [Drawing]. Retrieved from Groth Gruppe: http://www.grothgruppe.de/_Web/UI/ projekte/ProjektDetails.aspx?id=122.

5.22 Unknown. (1932). Neues Frankfurt. [Photograph]. Retrieved from Kunstgeschichtliches Institut: kunst. uni-frankfurt.de 5.23 Personal archive (2016).

6.1 Urban Catalyst. (2011). Holzmarkt - Phase 3 [Drawing]. Retrieved from Urban Catalyst Studio: http://www. urbancatalyst-studio.de/en/projects/holzmarkt-berlin-en.html.

6.2 Holzmarkt. (2013). [Photograph]. Retrieved from iheartberlin: http://www.iheartberlin.de/2014/06/02/ carrots-unicorns-and-vegan-burgers-a-visit-to-the-holzmarkt/.

6.3 YAAM. (2016). [Photograph]. Retrieved from YAAM: http://www.yaam.de/history/.

6.4 FREO. (2016). East Side Mall. [Three-dimensional representation]. Retrieved from FREO Group: http://www. freogroup.com/projects/east-side-mall/.

6.5 Bizim Kiez. (2016). [Photograph]. Retrieved from Bizim Kiez: http://www.bizim-kiez.de/blog/kategorie/ausmedien/.

6.6 Young, A. (2013). [Photograph]. Retrieved from VICE: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/berlins-waragainst-gentrification 7.1 Initiativkreis Mediaspree Versenken! AG Spreeufer. (2010). [Drawing]. In Initiativkreis Mediaspree Versenken! AG Spreeufer (2010), Spreeufer fĂźr alle! Berlin: Bewegungsstiftung.

7.2 Initiativkreis Mediaspree Versenken! AG Spreeufer. ibid.

7.3 Initiativkreis Mediaspree Versenken! AG Spreeufer. ibid.

7.4 Initiativkreis Mediaspree Versenken! AG Spreeufer. ibid.

7.5 Initiativkreis Mediaspree Versenken! AG Spreeufer. ibid.

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IMAGE CREDITS

7.6 Initiativkreis Mediaspree Versenken! AG Spreeufer. ibid.

7.7 Initiativkreis Mediaspree Versenken! AG Spreeufer. ibid.

7.8 Initiativkreis Mediaspree Versenken! AG Spreeufer. ibid.

7.9 Initiativkreis Mediaspree Versenken! AG Spreeufer. ibid.

7.10 Initiativkreis Mediaspree Versenken! AG Spreeufer. ibid.

7.11 Initiativkreis Mediaspree Versenken! AG Spreeufer. ibid.

7.12 Initiativkreis Mediaspree Versenken! AG Spreeufer. ibid.

7.13 Initiativkreis Mediaspree Versenken! AG Spreeufer. ibid.

7.14 Initiativkreis Mediaspree Versenken! AG Spreeufer. ibid.

Reaching the end, words come out with difficulty and the faces that accompanied this effort overwhelm the mind. I would like to thank Katharina Hagg, Anna Heilgemeir and Dagmar Pelger for the inspiration and the contact with the unknown, Stavros Stavrides for the discreet guidance, Kostas and Vaso for the help and the stoic patience, Dimitra for the discussions, the advice and the time spent reading this book.