Rotterdam was very badly destroyed during the Second World War, a fact that can still be felt today. Since its reconstruction in the 1950s, the city has been an experimental field for modern architecture.

Photographer Annette Kisling spent a year in Rotterdam in 2003 and gave her photographic impressions of the city’s multi-layered, lively, and at the same time fragile appearance. She continues her work in Rotterdam from 2017 to 2023. The city has changed a lot in the meantime. Diversity has remained Rotterdam, but a new exclusivity has been added. The city is focusing more and more on densification and economic upgrading.

With Verplaatst, an extensive photographic series has been created that gives a complex impression of the city’s development. The publication of the same name comprises a selection of 174 photographs that Kisling has compiled especially for the e-book.

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Rotterdam was very badly destroyed during the Second World War, a fact that can still be felt today. Since its reconstruction in the 1950s, the city has been an experimental field for modern architecture.

Photographer Annette Kisling spent a year in Rotterdam in 2003 and gave her photographic impressions of the city’s multi-layered, lively, and at the same time fragile appearance. She continues her work in Rotterdam from 2017 to 2023. The city has changed a lot in the meantime. Diversity has remained Rotterdam, but a new exclusivity has been added. The city is focusing more and more on densification and economic upgrading.

With Verplaatst, an extensive photographic series has been created that gives a complex impression of the city’s development. The publication of the same name comprises a selection of 174 photographs that Kisling has compiled especially for the e-book.

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This publication clears up misunderstandings and explains why social housing of the sort built in the German Federal Republic and West Berlin is a myth. Instead of meeting the long-term needs of low-income households it has so far primarily been about promoting economic development and private property ownership, instead of meeting the long-term needs of low-income households. This is reason enough to examine the principle of social housing and ask why it is so difficult to reform.

The third, revised edition of The Myth of Social Housing provides updated figures and content in Andrej Holm’s text, as well as a new introduction by the editors, Ulrike Hamann and Sandy Kaltenborn, which reflects on Berlin’s housing policy changes of the last ten years.

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Cultural scientist Angela McRobbie, who has been following Turanskyj’s work for a long time, introduces the material. The script is supplemented by preparatory material for the shoot from the filmmaker’s estate and by unpublished film clips.

“The first inspiration for my film was Richard Sennet’s book ‘The Corrosion of Character’. Sennet describes the harsh demands of postmodern capitalism on the individual. […] The more affirmative female characters – the City of Women – are contrasted by my heroine. She is a critic and doubter who tries in vain to adapt to the circumstances without losing her autonomy and dignity. But it is made clear to her that this can no longer be done – the price of adaptation would be the abandonment of her critical attitude towards the world.” Tatjana Turanskyj

The publication is published as a memorial and a call to “carry on” (weitermachen*) on the first anniversary of Tatjana Turanskyj’s death on 18 September 2022.

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For some time now, the housing question has once again been a subject of public debate: the issue of housing provision for those who have nothing to gain from a booming real estate market. This also includes people seeking refuge. The response to demands for more social housing, however, is limited: there has not been enough new construction to compensate for the number of social housing units lost due to the expiry of occupancy commitments for publicly assisted housing. But is the social housing system even capable of guaranteeing low rents in the long term?

This publication clears up misunderstandings and explains why social housing of the sort built in the German Federal Republic and West Berlin is a myth. Instead of meeting the long-term needs of low-income households it has so far primarily been about promoting economic development and private property ownership. This is reason enough to examine the principle of social housing and ask why it is so difficult to reform.

The second, revised edition of Die Legende vom Sozialen Wohnungsbau provides updated figures and content in Andrej Holm’s text, as well as a new introduction by the editors, Ulrike Hamann and Sandy Kaltenborn, which reflects on Berlin’s housing policy changes of the last ten years.

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In the first parliament of the reunited Berlin, efforts to anchor these expanded political rights in the new constitution were largely defeated. However, a provision for legislation by the people was adopted.

As a result, in the state of Berlin laws can be passed directly without the parliament by popular vote. In recent years, two laws have been passed in this way: the public disclosure of municipal water contracts and the preservation of the Tempelhofer Feld. Although a majority of Berliners—in all districts—voted in favor of the latter in May 2014, the governing parties soon tried to overturn this legislation passed by the citizens. In response, a new citizens’ legislative proposal, “Volksentscheid Retten”, was initiated in 2016 to strengthen legislation by popular vote in the constitution.

These two processes, in 1989/90 and 2016, aimed to enable all Berliners to participate in shaping the constitution. This book traces the connection between the two.

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“Commons is not something that just exists out there, nor is it something that is objectively present in certain resources or things. It is a relation of people with the conditions they describe as essential for their existence, collectively,” writes Stavros Stavrides, architect, activist, and author of Common Space: The City as Commons.

Stavrides understands the creation, development, and maintenance of commons as a social practice that radically challenges capitalist values and hierarchical forms of social organization. Constructed in this way, urban spaces differ both from private enclosures and from public space as we know it: common spaces are permanently inviting and continually in the making, spaces which are not simply shared but through which sharing itself is shaped.

This book, edited by Mathias Heyden, provides an introduction to Stavrides’ thinking about the City as Commons. Occupied squares, self-managed facilities and autonomous neighborhoods in Greece and Latin America exem-plify his theory of urban commoning, which, within the context of the global debates and struggles for social and economic justice, points in the direction of a truly emancipated society.

Reading sample (pdf):

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Stavrides understands the creation, development, and maintenance of commons as a social practice that radically challenges capitalist values and hierarchical forms of social organization. Constructed in this way, urban spaces differ both from private enclosures and from public space as we know it: common spaces are permanently inviting and continually in the making, spaces which are not simply shared but through which sharing itself is shaped.

This book, edited by Mathias Heyden, provides an introduction to Stavrides’ thinking about the City as Commons. Occupied squares, self-managed facilities and autonomous neighborhoods in Greece and Latin America exem-plify his theory of urban commoning, which, within the context of the global debates and struggles for social and economic justice, points in the direction of a truly emancipated society.

Reading sample

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On 4 April 2016, around forty people gathered to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Marx-Engels-Forum in Berlin Mitte. Most of them had attended the site’s dedication in 1986—the lived history of a place whose meaning has consistently been denied.

In the 1950s and 60s the site was earmarked for a high-rise tower for the East German government yet this never materialized. Then in 1973 plans were laid—and ultimately realized—for a forum in the form of a public park. After 1989 the park remained unchanged or possibly was even forgotten.

Today, there are two opposing camps: on the one hand those who advocate an exact reconstruction of the city’s ground plan as it looked here in medieval times—almost as if the historicism driving the reconstruction of the palace on the far bank of the Spree has proved contagious; and on the other, the ‘modernists,’ who are committed to preserving and further developing the last vestiges of East German Modernist architecture and urban planning.

Located as it is between the television tower and the future Humboldt Forum, the Marx-Engels-Forum is a place of commemoration par excellence. It has been closed to the public since 2010 owing to work to extend the subway line U5, but is set to enjoy a new lease of life as an urban recreation zone by 2019. This publication illustrates and puts up for debate both the history of the site and the recurrent negotiations regarding its use, including those of 2015 in which the public was invited to participate. How might an open space—since, YES, that’s what is all about—be preserved at a prime downtown location and configured such as to accommodate continually changing uses?

If freedom is to be a feature of the appropriation of the forum then freedom must be inscribed in the very design of this urban public space, from its inception. And what better solution therefore, than to base its development on the physical presence of various sculptural ensembles? After all, the sculptures were there first—and not only those of Marx and Engels!

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