The Cultural Production of Locality: Reclaiming the ‘European City’ in Post-Wall Berlin

Home , Dorotheenstadt, Fischerinsel, Mitte (locality)

Volume 34.2 June 2010 281–309 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.00894.x The Cultural Production of Locality: Reclaiming the ‘European City’ in Post-Wall Berlin

VIRAG MOLNAR

Abstractijur_894 281..309 Berlin’s post-1989 rebuilding is used to explore the role of cultural professionals, exemplified by architects and urban planners, in the production of locality. Drawing on an analysis of architectural debates, competitions and building projects, the article traces how the model of the ‘European city’ became the dominant paradigm of urban reconstruction in the 1990s and what precisely was understood by the term ‘European city’. In so doing, the analysis demonstrates how the contentious notion of ‘tradition’was mobilized as the main localizing strategy in response to intense internationalization. It shows how locality came to be constructed in contrast to other spatial-cultural units (e.g. the ‘American city’) and to particular historical layers of the city (e.g. that of the socialist era). The intense controversies over Berlin’s rebuilding lucidly illustrate how the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ are symbolically constructed by actors as relational categories, where the very categories are not fixed but multilayered, value-laden, historicized, contested, repeatedly redefined and restructured.

Introduction In 1991 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a prestigious German newspaper, and the German Architectural Museum organized a sensational exhibition, Berlin Tomorrow — Ideas for the Heart of a City, that opened the ﬂow of architectural blueprints for the rebuilding of Berlin (Lampugnani and Mönninger, 1991). Although the media spectacle, which lined up the haute couture of contemporary international architecture, stunned many local architects — some labeled the exhibition a ‘mail-order catalogue for politicians and real estate developers in the hope of whetting their appetite to build’ (Flierl, 1998: 24) — it quite accurately conveyed the spirit of the times. Berlin was envisioned as beginning its second Gründerzeit:1 it was to witness a surge in population — some even predicted that an additional 1.4 million inhabitants would be drawn to the city (Häußermann and Siebel, 1991: 49; Lampugnani and Mönninger, 1991: 13) — and unparalleled economic growth in tandem with a building boom. It was also to be restored as the nation’s capital, which would bring with it an urgent demand for new buildings to host the federal administration. Popular catchwords of the early 1990s

This research was supported by the DAAD and an NSF SES-0221208 grant. I thank Tibor Beke, Judit Bodnár, John Czaplicka, Diane Davis, Manali Desai, Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas, Michèle Lamont, Anson Rabinbach, Libby Schweber, Leslie Sklair, Maiken Umbach, Lawrence Vale, Rosemary Wakeman, Katja Zelljadt and the anonymous IJURR reviewers for comments and suggestions. 1 The term denotes the second half of the nineteenth century when Berlin underwent a time of unprecedented growth and its foundations as a modern metropolis were laid.

© 2010 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA 282 Virag Molnar described Berlin as the ‘center of Central Europe’, the ‘gateway to the East’, the ‘hub between East and West’ and the ‘European metropolis’. Moreover, Berlin was not only predicted to catch up with global cities of Europe such as London or Paris within a matter of a few years, it was to embody the model of the future metropolis. The reconstruction of Berlin as the German capital has spawned a sizeable literature since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But research has concentrated chiefly on the political economy of urban transformation (Strom, 1996; 2001; Strom and Mayer, 1998; Häußermann, 1999; Krätke and Borst, 2000; Lenhart, 2001) and on the changing ways in which collective memory is encapsulated in the new urban landscape through contested sites, buildings and monuments that reflect attempts to come to terms with Berlin’s troubled history (Czaplicka, 1995; Huyssen, 1997; Ladd, 1997; 2000; Marcuse, 1998; Wise, 1998; Campbell, 1999; Young, 1999; Jordan, 2006).2 This analysis takes a different perspective by shifting the attention to the architectural and urban planning professions. In contrast to existing approaches that, by and large, treat architects and planners as passive actors, as the instruments of either politics (i.e. state power) or capital (i.e. real estate developers), it demonstrates that they provide important insights into the cultural production of place in the context of large-scale social change and globalization. Throughout the 1990s Berlin witnessed fierce architectural debates, hosted the world’s largest international architectural competitions to date, and generated the greatest volume of building activity in Europe (with its 440 inner-city construction sites, the city called itself ‘Europe’s largest building site’). The relentless discussions and controversies surrounding these events indicate that the symbolic aspects of urban planning carry enormous weight (Sewing, 1994; Haila, 1997; Huyssen, 1997). In the general process in which cities aspire to the status of global cities and adopt similar types of urban politics to this end (Cox, 1993; Mayer, 1997), architects are assigned an important role. In an attempt to attract investors, the creation of the image of the city has become a central concern, and architects increasingly act as providers of such images. But how they perform this role is less well understood. As the political scientist Elizabeth Strom notes ‘the most vibrant debates in Berlin have been over the symbolic, cultural terrain that urban political economy has never been able to explicate’ (2001: 7). Berlin’s rebuilding took place against the backdrop of massive privatization (and reprivatization), presenting a unique opportunity for private developers to steer urban reconstruction and mount a serious challenge to hitherto dominant public planning institutions. In this situation, architects and planners claimed that adherence to cultural models — encapsulated in strong and well-articulated architectural guidelines — could serve as a viable strategy to counterbalance the profit motive of private developers. This article argues that, through a series of architectural debates, competitions and building projects that tackled the cultural legitimacy of various historical layers of the city’s architecture, architects and urban planners constructed a model of the ‘traditional European city’, which evolved into the dominant paradigm of urban reconstruction in post-1989 Berlin. In this process, they struggled to align the past, present and future in some meaningful relationship (Koshar, 1998). The ‘European city’ became defined and simultaneously mobilized as ‘cultural warfare’ in pursuit of three objectives: 1 To curb the influence of international real estate developers who were perceived to be promoting a neoliberal, ‘American’ city model, putting urban reconstruction at the mercy of private interests and amplifying the homogenizing tendencies of globalization. 2 To strengthen the position of a small group of Berlin architects in relation to international and other German architects in the competition for commissions by endorsing architecture that was supposed to be ‘typical’ of Berlin.

2 Research on the social consequences of the city’s reuniﬁcation (e.g. Häußermann and Kapphan, 2000) is not addressed here.

3 To advance the ‘civilizing process’ of East Germany in the realm of the built environment. The reurbanization of East Berlin through adherence to the model of the ‘European city’ was to correct the ‘mistakes’ of East German modernist architecture and urban planning, thereby contributing to the general re-civilization of the East. By probing a series of professional debates, architectural competitions and projects, the analysis explores how the model of the ‘European city’ emerged, what it actually signiﬁed, and why it triumphed as the cultural doctrine of urban reconstruction. In doing so, it reveals how cultural professionals contribute to the production of locality and the symbolic construction of categories such as the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ in times of social change.3

‘Global city’, ‘American city’, ‘European city’ and the construction of locality Sociological inquiry into global cities has prioritized the political-economic dimensions of contemporary urban transformations (Friedmann, 1986; Sassen, 1991; Knox and Taylor, 1995) and their social ramiﬁcations (Sassen, 1991; 1998; Abu-Lughod, 1999; Marcuse and van Kempen, 2000). However, scholars in this ﬁeld have paid little attention to the career of the global city as a normative model that has had profound effects on the framework of urban governance (Haila, 1997). Growing consensus among urban policymakers over a new ecology of cities brought about by globalization prompted a bundle of policy instruments often in emulation of ‘real’ global cities rather than in response to actual material processes (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Meyer et al., 1997; Boyle and Rogerson, 2001). Cities have rushed to adopt these measures in the hope of improving their competitive advantage in a perceived global urban hierarchy (Cox, 1995). It is in this context that cultural strategies — the use of urban and architectural design, place marketing or city branding — have come to function as crucial planning tools of contemporary urban management.4 Broadly publicized success stories such as Barcelona or Bilbao, where urban design and architecture were very consciously put in the service of urban revitalization, led to an even more widespread diffusion and emulation of cultural development practices, suggesting that the architectural image of the city can itself increase its economic attractiveness (Bruggen and Gehry, 1998; Plaza, 2000; Subirós, 2003; Beriatos and Gospodini, 2004; Kahn, 2004; Sklair, 2006). These cases also imply that cities lacking the economic prowess and geographic centrality of global cities or grappling with massive economic and social restructuring will accord greater weight to cultural strategies to lure volatile international capital their way, which in turn is expected to propel their development forward. Research into the symbolic economies of cities and the place of the culture industry in urban development took off in the 1990s and has remained largely disconnected from the global city literature (Sorkin, 1992; Zukin, 1995; Gottdiener, 1997; Judd and Fainstein, 1999; Eisinger, 2000; Clark, 2003; Hannigan, 2003). It has emphasized that cities are not only sites of changing forms of production and economic control but of consumption as well. Moreover, with the restructuring of the economy towards services and consumption the culture industry has assumed a vital role for urban economies.

3 Newspapers, magazines, professional journals, municipal government publications, documentation of architectural competitions and interviews with architects and urban planners are used as primary data sources for the in-depth analysis of professional discourses in the 1990–2003 period. 4 Recent research on urban planning and policy has documented this ‘cultural turn’ in urban governance (Grifﬁths, 1995; Gospodini, 2002; Hannigan, 2003). These studies, however, remain descriptive and unreﬂective about the use of categories such as ‘tradition’ or ‘heritage’, underscoring the need for sociologically informed inquiry into these issues.

Contemporary urban ‘renewal’ closely links the production of space with the production of symbols, which masks the growing commercialization of culture and the privatization of public space (Zukin, 1995). Some argue that the city itself has been rapidly reduced to a mere cultural commodity (Goodwin, 1993; Judd and Fainstein, 1999). But this literature has focused overwhelmingly on US cities and has generally lacked the international and comparative perspective that underlies the global city literature. Even though architectural and urban design have been instrumental in creating new spaces of consumption, culture, leisure and themed environments, thereby transforming the character of urbanity, the role of design professionals in this process has received scant attention. It is generally assumed that these cultural producers are simply cogs in the unstoppable machine of commodification steered by international capital flows and real estate developers (Zukin, 1996: 148). By contrast, this article aims to demonstrate that architects and urban planners offer an important analytical lens into cultural aspects of globalization, including: the symbolic struggles over definitions of a ‘globalized’ urbanity, cultural traditions and locality; the politics of design and the built environment; and the very process of urban commodification. The case study of Berlin’s rebuilding shows the active involvement of architects and urban planners in the symbolic production of locality. It explains how they utilized ‘tradition’ as the principal strategy of localization, and how they came to define locality relationally, both spatially and historically. The meaning of locality was derived and disaggregated from a supranational construct: the notion of the ‘traditional European city’. The ‘local’ nevertheless came to encompass many different, culturally meaningful scales: the supranational region of ‘Europe’, the subnational region of ‘Prussia’, the nation (though only implicitly), the city of Berlin, and the ‘historical’ center of the city. The conceptualization of locality in relation to historical time, i.e. to the past, unfolded as the most intensely contentious process. Various local and foreign architects clashed over competing definitions of locality that privileged different historical layers of the city, albeit that one interpretation, that of the ‘European city’, quickly achieved dominance and remained without serious contenders. The ‘local’ was naturally pitched against the ‘global’, but the latter was not portrayed as faceless uniformity either. The ‘global’ was particularized and concretized — if also overly abstracted and occasionally distorted — in the image of the ‘American city’, against which the ‘European city’ came to be fleshed out. Hence, this inquiry illustrates how the local and the global are symbolically constructed by actors as relational categories, where the very categories are not fixed but multi-layered, value-laden, historicized, contested, redefined and restructured. In this process, the global often gets particularized while ‘localism’ may exemplify a global fad (see other examples in Robertson, 1995, Umbach, 2002). Architects’ and planners’ search for the ‘European city’ in 1990s Berlin not only illuminates the spatial and cultural transformation of a major European capital, but points to the recent revival of scholarly and policy interest in the idea of the ‘European city’ (Bagnasco and Le Galès, 2000; Grainiger and Cutler, 2000; Kazepov, 2005).5 Meanwhile, the ‘European city’ has also become an export product that left its mark on the New Urbanism movement in the United States (Bodenschatz, 1998) and traveled as far as China where European architects currently promote it as an urban planning and architectural model (Marg and Meyhöfer, 2004). It seems that whereas Europeans have been repeatedly bogged down in their efforts to define ‘Europe’ as shared culture in the face of prevailing intracontinental cultural and political variation, they have been more successful in constructing ‘Europe’ relationally, as an oppositional concept (Barth, 1998 [1969]; Lamont and Molnár, 2002; Markovits,

5 These ideas are also becoming institutionalized through networks such as the ‘Eurocities’ network (http://www.eurocities.org), the ‘European Capitals of Culture’ program of the European Union (http://europa.eu.int/comm/culture/eac/other_actions/cap_europ/cap_eu_en.html) or the work of the Council for European Urbanism (2005).

2007). In this vein, a recent book by leading European urbanists argues that although it is difﬁcult to ‘outline the European city without stumbling against the distinctiveness of nation-states and the societies they fashion’, ‘certain common features can be detected if one uses the glaring contrasts afforded by the United States’ (Bagnasco and Le Galès, 2000: 12). The statement implies that such a comparison reveals most clearly the lowest common denominator of European urbanity. Such relational, oppositional conceptualizations often constitute an important background assumption and may evolve into a point of departure for future policy frameworks, as the case of urban and architectural development in Berlin will show.

The ‘European city’ in Berlin The most powerful and overarching paradigm that evolved in Berlin during the 1990s was that of the ‘European city’. Discourses about urban reconstruction in Berlin were all embedded in this larger discourse, and other professional models arose closely coupled with discussions about the nature and peculiarities of the ‘European city’. The term rarely appeared in German professional literature before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it soon became a highly valued currency after 1990. The combative architectural debates that occupied a prominent place in public intellectual discourse during the 1990s prompted urban sociologists and architectural historians to reflect on the idea of the ‘European city’ as a basic type in a larger typology of cities (American, Asian, etc.). Although scholars reacted to professional and policy debates somewhat sluggishly, they provided the theoretical underpinnings of the discourse (Hassenpflug, 2000; Siebel, 2000; Häußermann, 2001; Kaelble, 2001; Schubert, 2001; Tank, 2001). They have agreed that the prototype of the ‘European city’ as such does not exist empirically, but it can be conceived as an ideal type (in the Weberian sense) and an idea that carries in itself a political, social and emancipatory project (Hassenpflug, 2000: 14). Walter Siebel (2000), a renowned German urban sociologist, has offered the most succinct summary of the particularities of this city type to date. According to him the ‘European city’ can be described by a characteristic morphology and cityscape: a spatial centrality; the clear distinction between town and country; and the juxtaposition and intermingling of work and home, natives and strangers, poor and rich. It is also defined by a characteristic way of life: the structural separation and polarization of everyday life into a private and public sphere. Last but not least, the ‘European city’ is strongly associated with the hope of emancipation, with the belief that as a city dweller one will have a better life. Yet, even scholarly reflections shared to some extent what was pervasive in architects’ and planners’ efforts to define the ‘European city’: the constant mixing of empirical reality, conceptual constructions and normative representations (Zubrzycki, 2001). Though a handful of German urban theorists remained cautious and skeptical about the contemporary relevance of the European city as an architectural and urban planning model to pave the way for the future (Sieverts, 1997; Siebel, 2000; Schubert, 2001), most Berlin architects eagerly embraced the idea (Gruppe 9. Dezember, 1991). The majority greeted and actively promoted this model as the underlying source of urban redevelopment because they saw it as capable of simultaneously producing a local label, meeting global city claims, and enjoying broad cultural appeal among Berliners. Some architects even saw the European city as a major civilizational achievement that has proved its worth by the longevity of its existence, attesting to its versatility and adaptive capacity.6

6 An urban planner, a well-known representative of the ‘careful city-renewal’ school, told me in an interview: ‘I consider the invention of the city, and what it came to be in Europe, the greatest civilizational and cultural achievement that Europe has brought about’.

The initial boom enthusiasm of the early 1990s found expression in futuristic plans and skyscraper projects. But a great many Berlin architects felt sometimes quite frightened by the proliferation of architectural blueprints that treated the reunited city as a clean slate for radical architectural fantasies. Instead, many local architects seemed to favor the past, as opposed to some uncertain future, as the ultimate point of reference for the production of architectural visions. They proclaimed that ‘Berlin does not have to be reinvented again!’ (Stimmann, 1999: 547). They asserted that despite the immense destruction caused by the second world war, the division of the city and postwar urban redevelopment plans — whose damage is routinely compared in magnitude to the damage inflicted on the city by the war — Berlin preserved the basic structure of a ‘traditional European city’, on which the new Berlin should be built. The model of the ‘European city’ was to restore a sense of place in Berlin while propelling the city into the league of global players. But, at first, it remained rather elusive which architectural historical layers of the city would fit the desired image and what kind of new architecture would be worthy of a ‘traditional European city’ (Schneider, 1993). The foremost advocate of the model of the ‘European city’ was the powerful and controversial city building director (Senatsbaudirektor), Hans Stimmann. He played a central role in articulating, promoting, instituting and defending the paradigm of the ‘European city’ in Berlin. His official position required him to mediate between architects, politicians and investors, but also enabled him to enforce the ‘European city’ as the binding model of urban development. He argued that strong and unambiguous models (Leitbilder)7 such as the ‘European city’ were necessary in a time when no masterplan and no clear legal regulations were at the disposal of city builders. Throngs of investors and real estate developers took Berlin by surprise at the beginning of the 1990s, threatening to bring with them the ‘American city’ with its dull office towers and vast shopping malls. The legal regulatory framework was taking shape at a dauntingly slow pace whereas international developers’ pressure required immediate response (Stimmann, 1993: 158).8 Thus the most important feature of the ‘European city’ model was that it was constructed, although often implicitly, in opposition to another ideal type, the ‘American city’9 (Bagnasco and Le Galès, 2000: 8; Jessen, 2000; Häußermann, 2001). Global uniformity was epitomized by the ‘American city’ and the contrast was used instrumentally to work out the inventory of local idiosyncrasies. This comparison gained special significance as the model of the ‘European city’ was used to generate developing strategies and planning guidelines for everyday architectural and planning practice. The list of properties, summarized in Table 1, is by no means exhaustive; it includes those that were most commonly evoked in interviews and professional publications about the ‘European city’ in Berlin in the 1990s. In Stimmann’s view contemporary social change in Germany did not require a fundamentally new urban planning concept. What was needed instead was a recollection of traditional urban structures that had proved successful in the past, coupled with careful experiments involving elements of the ‘European city’ — i.e. streets, squares, parks and, most of all, the architecture of individual buildings (Stimmann, 1999: 547–8). This planning model stood in sharp contrast to postwar urban planning in Berlin, where the destruction of the war also offered a one-off opportunity to architects to break

7 It is hard to ﬁnd an English equivalent that carries all the connotations of the German concept of Leitbild. The term is used particularly often in urban planning and architectural discourse. It denotes a set of fairly coherent guiding principles and images (literally using the metaphor of a ‘guiding image’) that constitute a strong general vision for development. 8 The general land-use plan (Flächennutzungsplan), for instance, the basic regulatory starting point of all planning and construction activity, was only ratiﬁed at the end of 1994, when a large number of construction projects were already underway. 9 Although the term ‘American city’ is used in the debates, the imprecise designation is meant to refer to the US city.

Table 1 ‘European’ vs. ‘American’ city

European City American City Compact/coherent Dispersed/fragmentary The clear separation of public and private spaces Blurring of private and public spaces structures the city Urban life unfolds in public spaces (streets, Urban life is locked into controlled, semi-public squares, public parks) spaces (shopping malls, theme parks) Historically older; historical layers are additive Historically much more recent, less bound by and give the impression of organic city growth the preservation of older city structures The boundaries of city and countryside (town The boundaries of city and countryside are and country) are sharply drawn generally dissolved Strongly oriented toward public transportation Planned overwhelmingly for private car and pedestrian traffic transportation Mixed-use urban areas Predominantly mono-functional city areas Public actors, experts (e.g. architects) and public Private developers are the key actors of urban funds play a key role in urban development development Social integration and social mixing (i.e. Social segregation is seen as a spontaneous combating social segregation) are important process and as an organizing and stabilizing goals of urban planning force Source: The table is based on the analysis of the media coverage of architectural debates and shows architects’ and urban planners’ perceptions about the differences between the ‘European’ and the ‘American’ city. with the ‘traditional’ city and erase urban structures that they considered the burden of history. Stimmann denounced the postwar reconstruction of West Berlin, which closely followed the ‘American’ model of the city, as a failure born out of hatred for the past and the systems race of the cold war (Stimmann, 1999: 543–4). He was similarly unsympathetic to the architectural aspirations of interwar Berlin that also ‘defined its modernity as quintessentially “American” — Berlin as a “Chicago on the Spree” — as such, different both from older European capitals and from the Berlin of the Wilhelmian Empire’ (Huyssen, 1997: 5). It was becoming increasingly clear that the desirable picture of the (historical) ‘European city’ that the city building director had in mind was the city of the late nineteenth century (of the Gründerzeit) (Paul, 1996; Stimmann, 1997; Siebel, 2000). It was the competition for the redesign of the Potsdamer Platz area (over half a million square meters of floor space) in 1991, the first in a series of grandiose architectural and planning competitions, that launched the ‘European city’ as the dominant model of urban reconstruction (Bodenschatz et al., 1995; interview with Harald Bodenschatz, 2 April 2002). The winning design by the Munich architectural team of Hilmer and Sattler that featured traditional street blocks and low-rise structures encapsulated the leading idea of their plan in the following statement: ‘Not the model of the American city with its agglomeration of skyscrapers used worldwide, but the compact, spatially complex European city constitutes the basis of our design. Urban life should not be locked into the indoors of large building complexes, but unfold on streets and squares’ (Lampugnani and Schneider, 1994: 70). The success of the plan clearly signaled that the jury, led by the newly appointed city building director, Hans Stimmann, favored designs that presented themselves as homages to the traditional ‘European city’. The jury upheld this decision in the face of the investors (Sony with the US real estate developer, Tishman Speyer, and Daimler- Benz) who were hoping to see a signature headquarters for themselves, possibly arising in a most lavish high-rise form. It also alienated some of its own members: Rem Koolhaas, the influential Dutch architect, celebrated internationally for his

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.2 © 2010 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 288 Virag Molnar unconventional ideas, demonstratively left the jury (and Berlin) in protest. He reasoned that Berlin had fallen victim to the dogma of the traditional ‘European city’, that is ‘an idea of the city that is bürgerlich [bourgeois], dated, reactionary, unrealistic, banal, provincial and, most of all, amateurish’ (Koolhaas, 1991: 33). In his view, the principal mistake was that Berlin refused to take the existing Berlin with its fragments and voids as the starting point for future plans and instead went chasing after an idealized image of a European city that may have never existed (ibid.; Haberlik and Zohlen, 2001). But, ironically, the controversies that haunted the planning of the Potsdamer Platz prompted architects to line up behind the model of the ‘European city’, as it helped them appear as a united front against investors in defending the role of architects, i.e. of expertise, in planning and the legitimacy of the competition process (Strom, 2001: 194). The planning controversies surrounding the Potsdamer Platz, which are well documented elsewhere (Strom, 2001), mainly involved the investors undermining the authority of the competition process. The incident in which key multinational investors commissioned the British star architect, Richard Rogers, to draw up a plan for the area outside the official competition created uproar in professional and local political circles, pushing even those who were not enthusiastic about the outcome of the competition to defend the plan put forward by the official winners. Rediscovering the ‘traditional’ city as a source of architectural inspiration was, nevertheless, part of a larger European trend launched by the Italian architect Aldo Rossi’s manifesto about the architecture of the city (Rossi, [1966] 1982). The city as a repository of collective memory and of architecture’s embeddedness in a historically and morphologically complex urbanity stood at the center of this postmodern challenge in European architecture. The restored significance of architecture’s relationship to the historical city and its urban fabric granted a characteristic flavor to European postmodernism in comparison, for instance, to the postmodern agenda in American architecture and urban design.10 In the Berlin of the 1990s the notion of the city explicitly acquired the distinguishing label ‘European’, stressing the distinctiveness of this type and its importance as a source of cultural identity.11 Many architects involved in the reconstruction were convinced that their discussions had relevance beyond Berlin. With its desolate ‘inner periphery’, Berlin offered a laboratory for testing possible scenarios for the future of the European city at large in the age of globalization (Kollhoff, 1995).

Critical reconstruction: reclaiming the nineteenth-century city It was the paradigm of ‘critical reconstruction’ that tried to operationalize the ‘European city’ and condense it into a set of rudimentary principles that defined a basic urban syntax. These principles aimed at defining the two-dimensional layout of the city and the cubic volume of new constructions (interview with Josef Paul Kleihues in Siegert, 1996–2001). They promised tools to create urban diversity and ‘a lively and liveable city’ (Ladd, 1997) while containing the rush of investors and harnessing speculative real estate development. The concept and repertoire of critical reconstruction was refined and elaborated during the early 1990s through discussions of concrete projects at public and professional forums such as the City Forum (Stadtforum) and the Architecture Workshop

10 For more on the relationship between the Berlin architectural debates and other postmodern urban design trends, especially New Urbanism, see Murray (2008). 11 Intellectual theorizing about the ‘European city’ dates back to the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, to the work of Max Weber (Weber, [1921] 2000). A diverse group of European intellectuals carried on a debate about the ‘European city’ until the second world war, but then the discourse tapered off (Bendikat, 1998; Kaelble, 2001). It was reanimated in the works of postmodernist architects such as Aldo Rossi and Leon Krier from the late 1960s onwards (Rowe and Koetter, 1978; Krier, 1981; Rossi, [1966] 1982).

Figure 1 Leipziger Platz: restoring the original urban layout

(Architekturwerkstatt), and a series of expert opinions about urban redevelopment for key areas of the city (Bodenschatz et al., 1995). Modeled closely on the central tenets of critical reconstruction, the emerging regulatory framework was built around the following five key elements. It prescribed adherence to and restoration of the historic street network (both street and block structures) and the corresponding frontage lines of streets and squares (see Figures 1 and 2). Although it was not always specified precisely which historical period’s ground plan was being evoked, ‘historic’ overwhelmingly referred to the nineteenth- century city plan.12 In several parts of the city center this guideline implied the re-narrowing of existing streets (e.g. Leipziger Strasse, Glinkastrasse, Friedrichstrasse), calling for the revision of postwar rebuilding that routinely widened streets to accommodate rising traffic demand. Another rule determined the permissible height of new buildings, which were not to exceed 22 meters to the eaves and 30 meters to the ridges. These measures aimed at preserving the predominantly horizontal skyline of European cities. The eaves height of 22 meters was derived from the Berlin building code of 1897. The ridge height of 30 meters (with set-back storeys under a 60% angle) granted a small concession to developers who were concerned about the height restriction of new developments to low-rise buildings in the Berlin center. The urban ‘house’ (residential or commercial building, hotel, department store, theater, etc.) on an individual lot (Parzelle) was defined as the basic element of new developments. The maximum lot size was the size of the block, but smaller lot sizes oriented on historical lot sizes were strongly preferred. This principle hoped to ensure the diversity of street façades and curb the increasingly popular contemporary practice of constructing ‘groundscrapers’: immense, often monotonous, buildings that fill the entire block and dull street experience. When division into smaller lot sizes was prevented by a new ownership structure, critical reconstructionists tried to advise ways to simulate variety and individuality either by dividing up the task of designing for a block-size lot among several architects (e.g. Carrée am Gendarmenmarkt, see Figure 3) or by having a single architect design a collage of independent-looking buildings (e.g. Aldo Rossi’s

12 The only exception to this was the Dorotheenstadt, an area in the city center, where the eighteenth-century baroque layout was supposed to be preserved.

Figure 2 Potsdamer Platz: street and block structures project in the Schützenstrasse, see Figure 4).13 Developers and architects were also prompted to study the properties of buildings typical of Berlin and attribute a strong use-identity to buildings. At the same time a mix of uses was prescribed by the new regulations: at least 20% of the gross floor area in new buildings had to be allocated to residential purposes. This rule was also oriented toward the type of mixed-use buildings that were customary in the late nineteenth century and usually combined work and home (and sometimes commercial) functions. Based on this model, the new buildings were ideally to combine shops, offices and flats (Stimmann, 1994b: 116). In this way policymakers intended to combat monofunctionality, a trend that has spread particularly vigorously in the postwar era in conjunction with modernist urban planning principles. They wanted to prevent the construction of commercial and office districts that are deserted after working hours. Finally, the new regulatory framework contained prescriptions about the façade and the materials of new constructions. They were to display an easily readable entrance, serial window formats and façade materials traditionally used in Berlin such as yellow- gray sandstone, shell limestone, ceramic facing, or clinker brick (Stimmann, 1995a: 17). The materials were chosen also because they were supposed to be durable, reparable and

13 There is enormous concentration in real estate development today so developers generally acquire much larger lots than in the nineteenth-century in order to make a proﬁtable investment.

Figure 3 Carrée am Gendarmenmarkt by Hilmer & Sattler, Max Dudler and Josef Paul Kleihues

Figure 4 Block in the Schützenstrasse by Aldo Rossi adaptable, and to age well. This requirement was rooted in the ‘conviction that atmosphere derives from the emphasized materiality of the city. High-tech buildings consisting solely of glass or displaying all their structural elements cannot allow the creation of the city in the traditional sense. A European city needs walls and openings that mark the transition between building and city (ibid.: 19)’. The demand for ‘typical’ Berlin façades provoked contentious debates about deﬁnitions of what constitutes the ‘typical’ Berlin architectural style, which will be discussed in the next section. It is important to note that ‘critical reconstruction’ was not purely the intellectual product of the 1990s. Its origins can be traced back to pre-uniﬁcation West Berlin, to the work of the so-called ‘rationalist’ school and the peculiar institution of the Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA). The IBA, the International Planning Exhibition, encompassed a series of architectural and planning projects, exhibitions and architectural competitions

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.2 © 2010 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 292 Virag Molnar organized between 1979 and 1987. It became a major intellectual forum for postmodern urban and architectural design where star architects from various countries tackled the theme of the city under the direction of the Berlin architect Josef Paul Kleihues, who was soon to become an important supplier of ideas for urban redevelopment in post- uniﬁcation Berlin (Kleihues and Klotz, 1986). After the Wall unexpectedly fell and the deserted area around it resumed its place as the center of Berlin, critical reconstruction was more or less the only professional paradigm at hand that offered cues as to how to confront systematically the challenge of new architecture in a historically loaded urban context. The representatives of critical reconstruction, mostly former West Berlin architects, also successfully forged a coalition with the city’s building director in the 1990s, Hans Stimmann, who supported their conceptualization and operationalization of the ‘European city’.

Rehabilitating ‘stone Berlin’, dismissing postwar Berlin The institutionalization of critical reconstruction, which intended to control the evolution of the new cityscape and the structure of land use, pinpointed the late nineteenth-century city as the urban ideal behind these guidelines. The strong orientation on the 1897 building code with respect to permissible building heights and the requirement that the construction of buildings follow public street lines to yield closed block structures, the resurrection of a nineteenth-century type of mixed-use commercial buildings on individual lots, and the plea for the diversity of façades all stemmed from the nineteenth- century image of the city. Critical reconstructionists’ call for a ‘stone’ architecture in fact tried to rehabilitate a pejoratively encumbered phrase that evoked uneasy associations in Berlin. The terms ‘stone architecture’ and ‘stone Berlin’ were coined by Werner Hegemann in the 1930s in his seminal work, Stone Berlin: History of the Biggest Tenement Block City in the World, which packed a vehement critique of the impact of speculative city development during the Gründerzeit: unbearably high urban densities, vast, dark, monotonous, poorly constructed and overcrowded residential blocks, which were in his view the true trademark of the nineteenth-century city (Hegemann, [1930] 1988). Whereas in the interwar and postwar era architects and planners categorically rejected the nineteenth-century city and strove to eradicate its traces, in the Berlin of the 1990s the nineteenth-century city made a huge comeback. The restoration (‘critical reconstruction’) of the nineteenth-century city, and particularly the ‘beauty’ of its cityscape, was supposed to have a healing effect on Berlin’s postwar wounds. As Stimmann argued, ‘in a city such as Berlin, with its history of psychological trauma, architecture must surely revert to norms, to composition and — in the tradition of the one-time solid, ‘stone’ city of Berlin — to the physical, the material and the tectonic. Only in this way can architecture fulfill its dual role as a factor in the urban image of the city and as a social and working environment’ (Stimmann, 1995a: 21). Parallel to the re-evaluation of nineteenth-century city structures, other historical layers of the city became harshly devalued. Not surprisingly, postwar modernist architecture came under heavy fire, but hardest hit of all was East German modernism. East German modernist architecture had a double handicap, as it was declared both politically and aesthetically dubious. Consequently, the 1990s brought a wave of demolitions of important East German modernist buildings, including some that were even protected by historic building preservation (Kil, 1996; 2000; Hain, 1999). The destruction of these buildings was most often justified by the necessity of restoring the historical ground plan and closed block structures that postwar modernism tried to redraw. In this way it was not only buildings that fell victim to reconstructionist efforts but public spaces — such as public squares created after the war with the intention of opening up the too densely built nineteenth-century city — as well. The process of ‘reclaiming the European city’ (Stimmann, 1999) did not explicitly call for the demolition of East German architecture; it only aspired to correct the ‘inadequacies’ of

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.2 © 2010 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. The cultural production of locality in Berlin 293 the postwar urban layout. This, however, also entailed that not the slightest attempt was made to differentiate between East German buildings on the basis of architectural quality. With respect to some central areas the critique became quite explicit. In a Spiegel interview Stimmann declared that ‘in the case of Alexanderplatz or the Palace area as a matter of fact we have to talk to East Berliners coarsely because there the buildings of the postwar period are simply wrong’ (Klotz and Stimmann, 1994: 57). This statement already anticipated that the one-time center of the capital of the GDR was expected to undergo a major revision.

The ambitious reurbanization of the East The biggest attack on the eastern center came in 1996 in the form of the Planwerk Innenstadt, a masterplan for the two city centers, the ‘City West’ and the ‘historical center’. It embodied the most ambitious exercise in the ‘European city’ model using the method of ‘critical reconstruction’. Stimmann, now a top official at the Department of Urban Development, commissioned two groups of experts, a team of urban planners and theorists to hatch the masterplan. The point of departure of the Planwerk was the rejection of the modernist city and the rectification of postwar planning ‘mistakes’. It also intended to ‘promote an urban identity that was typical of Berlin and of a European city, instead of international uniformity’ (Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, Umwelt und Technologie, 1997: 13). This involved again a strong orientation on the ‘historical’, nineteenth-century city plan and substantial increase in urban densities. Whereas the proposed plan concerned only a few sites of the western center and was generally more tolerant with the modernist urban fabric (Bodenschatz, 1996; 1997; Urban, 2003), it had massive implications for the east. It aimed at the full-scale ‘reurbanization’ of the area: it called for the re-narrowing of several traffic streets to approximate their nineteenth-century width (Leipziger Strasse) and the ‘refilling’ of the oversized open spaces between Spreeinsel and Alexanderplatz. On the regained land it proposed the construction of mainly residential buildings that would attract new residents from the well-to-do classes (‘real’ Stadtbürger as opposed to the current residents) while containing no guarantees that lower-income groups would be able to stay in the neighborhood. The area also encompassed the former site of the Baroque Imperial Palace that was blown up in 1950 by the East German government and replaced in 1976 with the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic), which functioned until 1989 as a parliament-cum- popular-entertainment-center. The fate of the building was the subject of intense struggle between professional and civil groups who campaigned for the rebuilding of the Imperial Palace versus those who wanted to preserve the Palast (Jakubeit and Hoidn, 1998; Misselwitz et al., 2005). The Planwerk clearly tilted the scale towards advocates of reconstruction. It also asserted that the ‘monumental structures’ of East German modernism (e.g. the high-rise residential buildings in the center, on Fischerinsel or in Leipziger Strasse) proved extremely rigid; they could not be remodeled to meet new demands, and therefore they could not be part of a gradual redevelopment that tried to integrate and combine old and new structures. The plan was predicated on the assumption that there was no alternative to the European city concept (Machleidt, 2001). The uproar that followed the unveiling of the masterplan bewildered its authors. Unsurprisingly, the biggest opposition came from the East. The East Berlin professional, political and lay public interpreted the Planwerk as an infringement, a ‘provocation’ and even as a ‘declaration of war’. They disapproved of the authoritarian manner in which no East German planner was consulted in the course of drawing up the plan and in which the ready-made plan was to be imposed on the residents of the affected districts. While nobody claimed that the modernist restructuring of Berlin’s eastern center was without fault, critics argued that these parts of the city did already have a distinctive identity. And this heterogeneous, collage-like, pluralistic identity could just as well be the basis of redevelopment plans as the critical reconstruction of the ‘European city’(Steglich, 1997).

Figure 5 Demolition in progress: Palast der Republik, June 2008

Despite the flurry of professional criticism, fortified by public protest, the final version of the Planwerk was adopted by the city government and went into law in May 1999 (Senatsverwaltung für Inneres, 1999). As a fitting conclusion to the process, in 2003 the German parliament passed a resolution that decided in favor of the partial reconstruction of the one-time Imperial Palace and the demolition of the Palast der Republik (see http://www.schlossberlin.de). After numerous delays, the demolition process began in 2006 and dragged on until early 2009 (see Figure 5). The demolition itself became a spectacle broadcast via a webcam, courtesy of the Department of Urban Development. In November 2008 the design of little-known Italian architect, Francesco Stella, was declared the winner of the building competition that prescribed the reconstruction of three of the four original facades and much of the interior courtyard of the original Palace (Richter, 2008). The troubled reception of the masterplan roundly reinforced Stimmann’s claim (1999: 556) that the ‘confrontation about defining the links between the future and the past is far from being over’.

Berlin architecture: ‘Prussian style’ and ‘new simplicity’ The regulatory framework of critical reconstruction did not explicitly prescribe, though it implied, the need to deﬁne a speciﬁc style for new architecture drawing on a regional architectural tradition typical of Berlin. It also seemed likely that an architectural style that successfully claimed to be compatible with the spirit of critical reconstruction would have a better chance at securing commissions for architects. The recovery — the ‘invention’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) — of a Berlin architectural tradition proved, however, an immensely controversial endeavor. Like all acts of ‘inventing’ traditions this one also proceeded through a highly selective appropriation and strategic reinterpretation of Berlin’s architectural history.

Prussian regionalism as a source of Berlin architecture By the mid-1990s two currents came to signify the so-called ‘Berlin tradition’. The ﬁrst identiﬁed Berlin’s turn of the century metropolitan commercial architecture as an

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.2 © 2010 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. The cultural production of locality in Berlin 295 important source of tradition and inspiration (Klotz and Stimmann, 1994; Sawade, 1994; Sewing, 1994; Stimmann, 1995b; Mönninger, 1996). It referred to the typological and stylistic properties of office and commercial buildings and department stores designed by architects who represented a ‘conservative trend of a traditional modernism’ before the first world war and in the 1920s (e.g. Peter Behrens, Erich Mendelsohn, Max Taut) (Sewing, 1994: 63). The materiality, functionality and simple elegance of these buildings were viewed to have played a major role in lending Berlin a modern metropolitan character (Stimmann, 1995a: 17). The second current could be depicted by the more amorphous categories of ‘Prussian rationalism’, ‘Prussian classicism’, ‘the tradition of Prussian enlightenment’ and ‘Prussian style’. On the one hand, architects sketched out a straight historical lineage from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, from Karl Friedrich Schinkel all the way to the ‘poetic rationalism’ of the contemporary Josef Paul Kleihues (Neumeyer, 1994: 19; Kähler, 2000: 385). The architectural historian, Fritz Neumeyer, also asserted that a ‘Prussian line’ in modern architecture was not a novelty. In an essay, ‘From Prussian Style to New Architecture’, which appeared in 1933, the architect Wassili Luckhardt already suggested the existence of such a lineage (Luckhardt, 1933; Neumeyer, 1994: 19). On the other hand, architects also enumerated a set of qualities and dispositions that aptly characterized this ‘Prussian’ tradition. These were manifested in ‘typological clarity, sparse employment of ornaments, the cultivation of simple but perfect technical and craft details, the use of durable and tested materials, and the resistance to cheap attraction’ (Stimmann, 1994a: 12). Consequently, a ‘Berlin architecture’ preferably had to be ‘disciplined, Prussian, modest with colors, stony, and rather straight than curved’ (interview with Hans Stimmann, 1993). It was, nevertheless, also suggested that the successful mastering of the Prussian tradition required a particular mentality, a ‘utilitarian sobriety’ that was conducive to the display of ‘puritan elegance, meagerness and powerful forms’ (Neumeyer, 1994: 18). Jürgen Sawade, a former assistant of Josef Paul Kleihues, the founding father of ‘critical reconstruction’, stressed the importance of personal character in finding an adequate architectural language for Berlin: ‘I am from Berlin and thus from a metropolis. My architecture is a metropolitan architecture. But I am also Prussian and as such I am a purist, a rationalist and increasingly a minimalist in my aesthetic disposition. My architecture is puristic, i.e. simple, clear, exact and honest...Iamnotalone with this disposition, but anchored in the tradition that runs through Berlins’ architectural history’ (Sawade, 1994: 149). The use of categories referring to a Prussian regionalism became increasingly accepted and began to appear in competition announcements. The guidelines for the Potsdamer Platz investor ABB in 1993 explicitly demanded architecture in the spirit of ‘Prussian Enlightenment’ and of ‘Prussian classicism’ (Mönninger, 1996: 549). It also surfaced as an expression of praise, for instance, in the mayor’s assessment that described the winning design for the new governmental district as presenting ‘a harmonic solution with elements of Prussian rationality’ (Diepgen, 1993: 8). The emerging scope of ‘Berlin architecture’ seemed distressingly narrow and actively excluded a great many local and international architectural trends (Oswalt, 1994; Sewing, 1994). Stimmann appealed against international influences by arguing that since the second world war Berlin has always tried to emulate others, and this practice has yielded only dubious results. It was finally time for Berlin to recover ‘its own tradition’ (Klotz and Stimman, 1994: 55). There were also the dangers of contemporary globalization in the form of multinational developers dumping the serial products of international design on Berlin (Stimmann, 1994a: 13). Fritz Neumeyer, for instance, (1994: 20) warned against ‘declaring Berlin a kind of gigantic exhibition showcase of international architectural fads, which are conceived in other metropolises of the world’. But the new ‘Berlin tradition’ also ruled out numerous local architectural layers (Bodenschatz et al., 1994; Klotz and Stimmann, 1994; Oswalt, 1994; Sewing, 1994;

Mönninger, 1996).14 Most ironically, it did not include several facets of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century architecture (eclecticism, Jugendstil, expressionism), while it craved so relentlessly to restore the urban layout of this epoch.

‘New simplicity’: controversy over the Nazi architectural legacy The issue of ‘Berlin tradition’ erupted most violently in the ‘Berlin architecture debate’, which was sparked off by the director of the German Architectural Museum, Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, and was waged in the feuilletons of the most prestigious German dailies and magazines. In 1993 Lampugnani (1995) published a controversial essay in which he pleaded for a return to ‘convention’ and ‘solidity’ in architecture. In a swift and prompt response, the most ardent critics of Lampugnani, the American architect Daniel Libeskind and the urban theorist and planner Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm argued that the seeming neutrality of a call for a new normality masked a political project already under way in Berlin (Hoffmann-Axthelm, 1995). The agenda of a rationalist, sparse, tectonic, solid and symmetrical architecture was promoted by a handful of Berlin architects (the ‘triumvirate’ of Josef Paul Kleihues, Jürgen Sawade and Hans Kollhoff backed by the city building director Hans Stimmann) under the trademark of ‘Berlin architecture’. Some claimed that the idea of ‘Berlin architecture’ served to monopolize the market of architectural ideas as well as of building contracts (ibid.). As critics reached for the trope of Nazism to discredit the advocates of ‘new convention’ and ‘Berlin architecture’, the controversy turned into the latest act of the ‘Architect’s debate’, an architectural incarnation of the ‘Historian’s debate’ that has been pursued in Germany since the late 1970s in periodic and loud outbursts over the status of the Nazi past (Mönninger, 1996; Rosenfeld, 1997). In the German context architects’ effort to revive and reinterpret architectural traditions was poised to lead to a conﬂict over the architecture of the Third Reich. Proponents of a Berlin tradition were reproached for upholding an apologetic and unethical view of the Nazi past (Hoffmann-Axthelm, 1995; Libeskind, 1995). Daniel Libeskind attacked Lampugnani for his aspiration to rehabilitate architecture under the Nazis by proclaiming it, for instance, of good quality from a technical point of view. Libeskind passionately argued that ‘it is impossible to separate Nazi ideology from what it has produced...German fascist ideology built solidity into its political policy in opposition to the openness and transparency of the short-lived Weimar democracy’ (Libeskind, 1995: 40). Similarly, the former director of the German Architectural Museum, Heinrich Klotz, asserted that new buildings in Berlin were so closely reminiscent of the architecture of the 1930s and conveyed so unambiguously an authoritarian aura that Berlin was hopelessly on its way to becoming ‘New Teutonia’ (Klotz and Stimmann, 1994). In Germany the accusation of Nazism, or of relativizing Nazism, is a potent, though hackneyed, political tactic to strike at opponents in a debate. But these accusations can hardly be made in a vacuum. There were, in fact, several things that paved the way for these charges and facilitated this associative leap by the critics of ‘Berlin architects’. First, Lampugnani’s entry into the ring encouraged the attack, as he had a personal record of trying to normalize the architecture of the Nazi era. At an exhibition he organized at the German Architectural Museum in Frankfurt in 1992 entitled ‘Modern Architecture in Germany, 1900–1950’ he suggested that architects such as Paul Schmitthenner, Paul Schultze-Naumburg and Wilhelm Kreis, who are widely viewed as devoted supporters of the Nazis, had to be assessed without ‘moralization’ (Lampugnani and Schneider, 1992; Rosenfeld, 1997; James-Chakraborty, 1999). Second, advocates and theoreticians of ‘Berlin architecture’ operated with historically overcharged and tainted concepts such as ‘Prussian style’. Moeller van den Bruck who

14 At the same time, it embraced each of those that claimed some link to the tradition of Prussian classicism. This rendered, ironically, the socialist realist architecture of the Stalinist 1950s the only tolerable form of East German architecture.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.2 © 2010 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. The cultural production of locality in Berlin 297 coined the term was not himself a Nazi, but he was a ‘radical cultural pessimist’ and precursor of Nazi ideology. In an essay published in 1916 he tried to distill the essence of ‘Prussian style’ into formal categories, but for him ‘Prussian style’ was not only an aesthetic but also a political and an ethnic (völkisch) label (Moeller van den Bruck, 1916; Oswalt, 1994; Mönninger, 1996). The instrumentality of the Nazi accusations made by opponents of the model of ‘Berlin architecture’ can hardly be denied. Yet the debate highlighted the lack of a historically unburdened vocabulary to discuss the legitimacy of historicist architecture in Berlin. Thus the Berlin edition of the ‘Architect’s debate’ only pushed the discourse about architecture further down the cul-de-sac of historicization, into a debate about conflicting interpretations of various histories (Nazi, socialist, postwar). In light of the nature and harshness of the accusations, it was all the more surprising that the ‘Berlin architects’ came out of the conflict virtually unscathed. But by placing the episode in the larger context of the ‘European city’ debate, the puzzle is actually not so difficult to explain. The paradigm of ‘Berlin architecture’ showed an elective affinity with the broader conceptual framework of urban development as defined by the model of the ‘European city’ and ‘critical reconstruction’. In fact, when the debate broke out in 1993, the notion of ‘Berlin architecture’ fit perfectly into this conceptual scheme, which also became highly institutionalized at this time, thanks to the activism of the city building director, Hans Stimmann. Therefore, in order to triumph over ‘Berlin architects’, one not only had to appeal against the idea of a ‘Berlin architecture’ but to show either the greater compatibility of one’s own architecture with the ‘European city’ model or undermine the basic premises of the entire web of interconnected concepts that came to define it.

Institutional entry points into the political process The German institutional context of urban planning grants great importance to an expert perspective — a feature that was, once again, often identified in the debates as a kind of European exceptionalism (Kaelble, 2001; Strom, 2001). It is argued that, in contrast to the United States, European city planning has self-professedly been suspicious of private interests having the upper hand in urban development. Public planning agencies and expert institutions have been designed to balance, counteract and monitor the role of private investors in urban development (Strom, 2001). In Berlin in particular, state agencies rely heavily on architects and planners through consulting contracts, architectural and planning competitions, and advisory commissions in preparing and carrying out urban development projects. Moreover, many public officials in the planning administration, including the city building director Hans Stimmann, are themselves ‘experts’, qualified architects and urban planners, not simply political actors or career bureaucrats. Media discourse and public discussion forums (most importantly, the Stadtforum), in which public debate about urban reconstruction and the built environment took place, were also largely monopolized by design professionals and architectural critics, where the latter were often architects or art historians by training. Architectural competitions proved to be a particularly important medium that allowed architects to significantly imprint the planning process and diffuse their vision of the ‘European city’. Berlin in the 1990s was a city of prolific architectural competitions, at times lining up nearly a thousand competitors from dozens of different countries (e.g. the Spreebogen competition with 835 entries or the Spreeinsel with 1,015). Between 1992 and 1995 alone there were 158 competitions, 79 organized by the Department of Construction and the rest by the Department of Urban Development, the federal government and the local districts (Schweitzer, 1998: 95; Strom, 2001: 148). Architectural competitions in Germany are strictly regulated and are conducted under the auspices of the Architects’ Chamber, which is responsible for setting the competition

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.2 © 2010 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 298 Virag Molnar guidelines and issuing approvals.15 Architects constitute the majority of the jury, which otherwise includes representatives of the investor, the city, local district and civil organizations, bolstering the claim that competitions foster the dominance of expertise. State funded competitions were held for almost every major area of the urban center and private developers also sponsored competitions for key locations such as the Potsdamer Platz and Alexanderplatz. State and other public institutions, feeling that their traditional planning capacities were seriously undermined in the wake of large-scale privatization — the reprivatization of East German public property generating myriad competing ownership claims but also the sale of large chunks of publicly owned land to private investors16 — attached increasing importance to architectural competitions as a means to steer urban reconstruction. Architectural and planning competitions illustrate best how expertise translates into political power despite architects’ lack of control over tangible political and economic resources. Architects are expected to bestow legitimacy on urban development decisions for ‘their views have such symbolic resonance’ that ‘their imprimatur becomes necessary for public authorities and investors engaging in signiﬁcant building projects’ (Sewing, 1994; Strom, 1996: 474–5). They were also hoped to devise spatial and architectural forms that engendered forceful cultural meanings. And in fact architectural competitions were utilized primarily to generate ideas and suggest a symbolic identity to places, while also diffusing the impression of pluralism, diversity and of enforcing a neutral expert perspective by identifying the ‘best possible’ design.

Architectural positions: ‘Berlin architects’, foreigners and East Germans This section offers a brief sketch of the positioning of various groups in the architectural field during the rebuilding of Berlin. It is by no means an exhaustive catalogue but an attempt to highlight the major cleavages and spot the key actors. The field can be crudely divided into three large, internally further segmented, groupings: Berlin-based architects who mostly came from pre-unification West Berlin, foreign architects who were drawn to the city after the fall of the Wall, and East German architects who were mostly conspicuous in the post-reunification reconstruction process by their absence. The Berlin architectural scene was dominated by a fairly small group of architects who came to stamp the course of Berlin’s architectural development in the early 1980s. This group roughly encompasses two generations and in several cases also embodies a teacher–student relationship. The older generation, including Josef Paul Kleihues, Oswald Mathias Ungers and Jürgen Sawade, made up the so-called Berlin ‘rationalist school’. They were strongly influenced by the general themes of the 1960s: the politicization of architecture, the revision of postwar modernist urban planning and the critique of the destruction of historical urban structures. The younger generation was split between the followers of the older generation and the ‘chaotics’ who argued that the dissolution of the historical city should not be mourned with nostalgia. The 1990s

15 This professional association is not only entrusted with interest representation and licensing but is designated to be the guardian of the built environment and promote building culture (Strom, 2001: 29–30). 16 The most publicized case was arguably the sale of the small-city-sized area of Potsdamer Platz to three private corporations (Daimler-Benz, Sony and ABB). The transfer of public land to private investors was a controversial and contested process that mostly excluded the public view. For insights into these transactions, see Lenhart (2001). Similarly, both West Berlin and East Berlin were recipients of massive federal subsidies before 1989, making public planning agencies unusually powerful even in comparison to other German cities. Special subsidies dried up after the fall of the Wall, putting further strain on state-sponsored urban development.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.2 © 2010 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. The cultural production of locality in Berlin 299 brought the triumph of the ‘rationalist-critical reconstructionist’ faction, some startling conversions to this group (the case of Hans Kollhoff), and the support of influential theorists like Vittorio Lampugnani. The professional and popular press gradually began to whisper about the ‘power cartel’ (Machtkartell) of Kleihues, Kollhoff and Sawade, chief proponents of ‘Berlin architecture’, who played the leading role in setting the city’s architectural trajectory. Besides the ‘Berlin architects’ there were other important players. The city building director Hans Stimmann was undoubtedly the most important of them. While Stimmann came to Berlin in 1991 from the north German city of Lübeck, he was no newcomer to the capital. Until the mid-1980s he had worked as an urban planner at the Technical University and was considered a follower of the ‘careful city renewal’ movement. He showed the same intellectual influence of the 1960s scene as the older generation of Berlin architects. Between 1991 and 2006 he alternated between two of the most important local government positions in urban planning; the mark he left on the new Berlin can be debated but its significance cannot be denied. He was, in fact, often likened in the press to Baron Georges Haussmann, the archetype of the urban planner, who planned and supervised the building of modern Paris in the nineteenth-century (Zohlen, 1994; Mönninger, 1995). But Stimmann was in many ways an ‘inverse’ Haussmann: whereas Haussmann demolished most of medieval Paris to make room for the modern city, Stimmann wanted to build back the nineteenth-century city, weaving together the fragments of the old, and causing a great deal of destruction (this time of the modernist city) with his reconstructionist effort. Finally, there was Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm, the urban theorist and critic also from the 1968 generation, who fervently attacked ‘Berlin architects’ and grew increasingly bitter about the implementation of critical reconstruction. He was involved in the 1980s with projects of the ‘Alt-IBA’ in the West-Berlin district of Kreuzberg where architects and planners tried to revive the nineteenth-century block development and the ‘residential barracks’ (i.e. tenements) by showing their continuing viability. The rehabilitation program had a strong social component and experimented with methods of public participation in planning. In the 1990s he pursued the same principles in trying to make the ‘European city’ the cornerstone of urban redevelopment in Berlin. He was even dubbed the ‘lot-philosopher’ (Parzellenphilosoph) in reference to his zealous attempt to define the individual lot, derived from the nineteenth-century grid structure, as the basic unit of urban reconstruction. He was the author of several important expert studies on key city areas (e.g. Pariser Platz), and of the grand scheme of the Planwerk Innenstadt that put critical reconstruction into practice. But he became gradually critical of the prevailing practice, which in his view proved that critical reconstruction did not fulfill its function of taming the will of private developers and was also completely deprived of a social agenda (Hoffmann-Axthelm, 1994).17 Berlin has consciously attracted high-profile foreign architects to build in the city since the 1950s and showered them with lucrative assignments in order to soften the social and cultural isolation of West Berlin. The 1990s construction boom brought a new rush of foreign architects to the city. Some estimates put the share of building projects headed by foreign architects at 20% in the mid-1990s, and a great number of foreigners participated in the international architectural competitions (Mönninger, 1995: 78). Their presence felt even greater than it actually was because they often worked on high- visibility prestige projects. In general foreign architects followed three strategies to cope with the guidelines of urban reconstruction in Berlin. 1 There were those including Rem Koolhaas and Daniel Libeskind who disdained the urban and architectural concept derived from the ‘European city’ idea from the very start. Koolhaas was the first to leave in protest declaring the planning atmosphere in Berlin hopelessly reactionary. Libeskind stayed somewhat longer, but after his defeat

17 For a more detailed discussion of network ties within this group of actors, see Murray (2008).

in the debate on ‘Berlin architecture’, he decided to dismantle his Berlin office and move back to the United States. 2 Several foreign architects complied with the regulatory framework because they happily identified with the objectives of the ‘European city’ project. Renzo Piano, for instance, argued that the starting point of his Potsdamer Platz plans was the vision of a piazza, the symbol of vibrant (‘European’) urbanity (Schneider, 2001: 90–1). 3 Architects with a ‘business attitude’ focused on meeting the client’s needs, whether those of a private investor, as in the Potsdamer Platz, or of the German parliament. Norman Foster drew dozens of cupolas at the request of parliamentary deputies ‘projecting them onto the building like assorted wigs on a mannequin’ (Wise, 1998: 129), although he won the architectural competition for the Reichstag with a design that emphatically did not restore the famous cupola structure of the original building. Others, like the German-born, Chicago-based architect Helmut Jahn, who had a track record as successful corporate architects and were backed by corporate giants, could largely ignore the Berlin architectural directives and transport their own trademark into the city.18 East German architects, the builders of the ‘capital of the GDR’, were quickly marginalized after the fall of the Wall. They were devalued in parallel with how the value of their work, the architecture of postwar (socialist) modernism, plummeted in the wake of the rebirth of the ‘historical European city’. Institutional changes, the imposition of the existing West German professional institutional structure, also presented great challenges: most East German architects encountered grave difficulties in trying to reinvent themselves as members of a free profession after being used to working as employees for immense socialist conglomerates. The few architectural offices headed by East German architects were often used as ‘token East Germans’ in competition juries, in an effort to pay lip service to fair representation and appease those who criticized the absence of East German professionals in the reconstruction process. But, once on the jury, their opinion was usually not accorded much attention (personal interviews with East German architects). At the same time, they are likely to have made some impact as architectural critics. Bruno Flierl or Wolfgang Kil, both architects by training, have been astute critics of Berlin’s rebuilding; their views have been aired through the major media channels and they have attained a high degree of prominence.19

The triumph of the ‘European city’ The mapping of the ‘European city’ model suggests three main reasons why it became the dominant paradigm of urban reconstruction. First, through a set of nested concepts (‘European city’, ‘critical reconstruction’, ‘Berlin architecture’) it spawned an intellectual apparatus that had great internal coherence and cultural force, enhancing its potency as a political resource (see Figure 6). Second, the concepts were promoted by architects and planners who were ﬁrmly anchored in the Berlin architectural and cultural scene, often from before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Their claim to local knowledge, on the one hand, made their interpretation of Berlin’s history and traditions appear more authentic than that put forward by ‘outsiders’. On the other hand, they were also more effective in building a united platform because they made up a group whose history predated the fall of the Wall. By

18 Jahn’s Sony-center on Potsdamer Platz was nevertheless harshly criticized by the ‘expert public’ for planting a piece of America in Berlin. 19 Kil was, for instance, awarded the prestigious ‘Best Architectural Critic’ prize of the German Architects Association in 1997.

‘European city’

‘Critical reconstruction’ ‘Berlin architecture’ - historic (nineteenth century) - commercial architecture of the street network early twentieth century - building height - ‘Prussian style’, ‘New Simplicity’ - building cubature & layout - mixed use - façade materials

Figure 6 The nested concepts of the ‘European city’

contrast, the opposition was fragmented and largely made up of loners. Rem Koolhaas, who was already lambasting the ‘European city’ idea in 1991, left in protest instead of trying to find allies to launch a counteroffensive. Others who vigorously attacked the ‘Berlin architects’, including Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm and Daniel Libeskind, could not form a coalition because they fundamentally disagreed about the concept of the city and desirable architecture for a new Berlin. Hoffmann-Axthelm was no enemy of the ‘European city’ concept, but disapproved of the manner in which it was being implemented, growing increasingly troubled by the aestheticization of the discourse. Libeskind, however, deeply detested both the architectural and urban planning principles that came to define the ‘European city’. East Germans were never given a real chance to exert influence over the production of city visions. Third, advocates of the ‘European city’ capitalized on their local professional reputations and personal links to officials of the city building administration, both of which predated the fall of the Wall, and this helped them win over Hans Stimmann to their cause. The city building director’s embrace of their program elevated the ‘European city’ model into the official policy of the city government, which, despite its weakening planning capacities, remained an important player in urban development. Measuring the tangible impact of the ‘European city’ model on Berlin’s built environment would be an intricate task, but a number of important effects are nonetheless discernible. Public buildings, which were designed and built in great quantities as a consequence of the transfer of the government to Berlin and the restoration of the city as Germany’s capital, have a defining pull over city character, and these are the buildings that most indisputably bear the mark of the ‘European city’. It was in this arena that the city administration could most directly enforce this model, since the projects were wholly or partly sponsored by the local and federal state. Several commentators have remained skeptical as to how effectively the ‘European city’ concept kept in check profit-hungry private investors and developers (Sewing, 1998) — after all the nineteenth- century city was understood by contemporaries, and criticized later by modernists, as the city of capitalist speculation par excellence. Yet it did pressure them to comply with specific spatial and architectural forms that otherwise they might not have employed. Interestingly, the ‘European city’ model held sway even though the boom expectations of the early 1990s proved to be hugely inflated. The city’s growth has been much more modest than predicted and developers’ scramble for building opportunities waned by the second half of the 1990s. The easing development frenzy certainly helped to cement the dominance of the ‘European city’ frame. But this tight ideological grip was also owing to the effectiveness with which its proponents used the model to create the image of a substantial threat to the integrity of Berlin’s urban development in the first place, which in the end turned out to be more consequential than the real menace.

The ‘European city’ achieved hegemonic status as the normative model of urban and architectural design by the mid-1990s and successfully dislodged alternative narratives about the past and future of the city. Its rapid and broad dissemination beyond the design professions sent out a powerful verdict about what kind of architecture and urbanity are deemed authentic and culturally legitimate, signiﬁcantly imprinting how city dwellers (especially the middle and upper-middle classes) see and appropriate the new Berlin.

Conclusion The stormy story of Berlin’s post-1989 reconstruction highlights the role of architects and urban planners in the symbolic redefinition of locality. The intense building activity that characterized Berlin throughout the 1990s provided a unique laboratory to demonstrate that the built environment, architectural and urban forms, ‘do not just represent, or reflect social order, they actually constitute much of social and cultural existence’ (King, 1990: 404). The analysis has underscored the great hopes and weighty expectations that were piled on architects and planners to reinvent the city, to recreate its one time grandeur, and to provide new sites of cultural identification. Architects’ efforts to redesign the city at the historical intersection of post-socialist transformation and the tightening grip of globalization betrayed how actors understand and symbolically manufacture the relationship between local and global, underscoring the great flexibility in what qualifies as local versus global. Locality and globality came to be constructed as historically and spatially multifaceted notions around the nested concepts of the ‘European city’, ‘critical reconstruction’ and ‘Berlin architecture’. The careful reconstruction of these concepts shows that the latter two were derived from the idea of the ‘European city’ and aimed to operationalize it: ‘critical reconstruction’ by providing rules for an urban syntax, and ‘Berlin architecture’ by suggesting a building vocabulary, an architectural style that was viewed as compatible with the ‘European city’. The intellectual and institutional linkages lent coherence to this set of progressively integrated concepts, which then made it possible to utilize it credibly as cultural ammunition against a perceived global uniformity, to secure an advantage to a small group of local architects in the face of fierce competition, and to combat the embarrassing imperfection and backwardness of the East. In the process, the redefinition of Berlin that was initially linked to the broad supranational notion of the ‘European city’ became an increasingly exclusionary concept. ‘Critical reconstruction’ and ‘Berlin architecture’ considerably narrowed the range of acceptable interpretations: they equated the ‘European city’ with a romanticized nineteenth-century model of Berlin and defined a ‘Berlin tradition’ that delegitimated several layers of Berlin’s architectural history. By rejecting specific periods of the city’s architectural history — such as postwar socialist modernism — as points of reference for a new Berlin architecture, the European city model also implied the exclusion of certain social groups — such as East Germans — from having a say in the refashioning of the city. While there was fairly broad support among planners and architects for the general principles of the ‘European city’ (Gruppe 9. Dezember, 1991), there was no consensus about ‘critical reconstruction’ and ‘Berlin architecture’ being the only ways to operationalize the ‘European city’ (Bodenschatz et al., 1995). Definitions of locality quickly became politicized and monopolized to reflect the vision of a fairly small group of local architects and planners (enjoying the support of like-minded foreigners). Interestingly, a more pluralistic approach to urban reconstruction was repeatedly rejected in the name of having to combat ‘globalization’ (e.g. the pressures of international real estate developers) as a ‘united front’, suggesting that this could only be achieved by pledging undivided allegiance to the ‘European city’ model. At the same time, the personal ties of ‘Berlin architects’ to the locale, their ultimate legitimacy claim to

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.2 © 2010 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. The cultural production of locality in Berlin 303 authenticity, compellingly overshadowed the fact that they themselves were strongly inspired by international architectural trends: postmodernism’s emphasis on the resuscitation of historicist regionalism in general and the Italian Rationalist School in particular. In turn, global uniformity was incarnated by a strategically fabricated image of the ‘American city’ that took the historically specific example of the postwar American city best known for urban renewal, white flight, suburbanization and deindustrialization and froze it into a timeless archetype to be avoided at all costs. Local idiosyncrasies of the ‘European city’ were then derived systematically in relation to this contrast. As a result, not only the contemporary ‘American city’ was deemed undesirable as a planning model, but the urban planning and architectural legacy of every period in the city’s history that manifested the influence of American ideas was rejected as a reference point for the redefinition of locality. The triumph of the ‘European city’ as an urban planning model in Berlin could in fact be hailed as an instance of successful ascendancy of local over global forces. But it should rather caution against the common fallacy of uncritically celebrating every form of ‘local’ resistance to globalization. Berlin’s rebuilding shows that the ‘local’ in this case reflected the cultural understanding and priorities of a fairly small professional group, which was then imposed on other local actors, who were then barred from contributing to the symbolic and social redefinition of the city. It similarly pinpoints that participants in struggles over globalization can never be neatly grouped along the local-global divide. Recently, many have noted the presentism of social research on global city formation (Abu-Lughod, 1999; Brenner, 2001; Sites, 2003). But even rare exceptions that adopt a historical perspective capture the role of history solely in terms of path dependence (Abu-Lughod, 1999). In contrast, Berlin’s rebuilding demonstrates how history is a ‘living’ cultural and political resource in urban development, as enabling as it is constraining, and most importantly a matter of ongoing struggle between different social and political groups. Closer scrutiny of how ‘tradition’ is ubiquitously used as a strategy to construct local singularity can help develop a less static view of how history imprints contemporary urban development in cities under the spell of globalization. Finally, the cultural framework that shaped the rebuilding and reinvention of Berlin also offers an important reflection on broader processes of social change. The conservatism of urban reconstruction exemplified a more general feature of (post- socialist) social transformation. In a time of turbulent social change architects and planners (joined by most policymakers) turned to previously ‘tested’ and ‘proven’ models instead of experimenting with new ideas, judging this the best strategy to cope with social change. By setting the fairly distant, i.e. the nineteenth-century, past as the point of reference for the future, they hoped to avoid the failures and the ambiguity of the immediate past, particularly of the socialist, but also of the Nazi, experiment.

Virag Molnar ([email protected]), Department of Sociology, New School for Social Research, 65 Fifth Avenue, New York 10003, USA.

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Résumé La reconstruction du Berlin de l’après-1989 sert ici à explorer le rôle des milieux culturels, illustrés par les architectes et urbanistes, dans la production de localité. À partir d’une analyse des débats, concours en architecture et projets de construction, l’article établit comment le modèle de ‘ville européenne’ est devenu le paradigme dominant de la reconstruction urbaine dans les années 1990, et ce que l’expression ‘ville européenne’ représentait exactement. En parallèle, l’analyse montre comment la notion contestée de ‘tradition’ a été mobilisée en tant que stratégie principale de localisation en réaction à une intense internationalisation. L’article expose comment la localité a fini par être conçue par opposition à d’autres entités spatio-culturelles (comme la ‘ville américaine’) et à certaines strates historiques de la ville (comme celle de l’ère socialiste). Les vives controverses à propos de la reconstruction de Berlin illustrent clairement comment les acteurs élaborent, sur le plan symbolique, le ‘global’ et le ‘local’ en tant que catégories relationnelles, ces catégories elles-mêmes n’étant pas figées mais composées de plusieurs strates, chargées de valeurs, historicisées, contestées, sans cesse redéfinies et restructurées.