Reactivated in the winter of 2019/20 at the nGbK, the Spielclub Oranienstraße 25 offered Berlin school classes the opportunity to play in a model of Kreuzberg’s Oranienstraße. The focus remained on pressing issues of urban development, including rental policy and participation in social change. With money always playing a central role.

Some of the children’s questions were:
“So what’s the hotel owner up to with the mayor?”
“Who owns the wasteland?”
“What’s missing here, on our street?”
“Can anyone actually win the game in the play club?”

This publication locates the historical play club within both the trajectory of ideas of self-governed children’s republics and in the context of artistic-activist projects of the 1970s. Spielclub. Kinder Stadt Geld reflects on the relationship between children and artists, play and reality and shows the differences between the projects realised 50 years apart.

The e-book is supplemented by a film excerpt on the Spielstadt in the Märkisches Viertel, a temporary extension of the Schöneberg Spielklub from June 1971, as well as two audio contributions.

Produced on the occasion of Spielclub Oranienstraße 25, nGbK, 2019/20

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But who are the real players behind the economic exploitation of urban space? What allows them to act the way they do – and how can their actions be politically and societally monitored, controlled, and thwarted?

X Properties examines the impact of financial capital on the social and cultural production of the city, its forms of relationality and subjectivity. The book is published on the occasion of the homonymous research and event project at neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK). The text contributions by Christian (Syndikat-Kollektiv), Christoph Casper, Jana Gebauer, Kathrin Gerlof, Katrin Lompscher, Louis Moreno, Raquel Rolnik & Isadora Guerreiro & Paula Freire Santoro and Pheli Sommer combine Berlin case studies with global perspectives on the de/financialisation of the city.

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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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But who are the real players behind the economic exploitation of urban space? What allows them to act the way they do – and how can their actions be politically and societally monitored, controlled, and thwarted?

X Properties examines the impact of financial capital on the social and cultural production of the city, its forms of relationality and subjectivity. The book is published on the occasion of the homonymous research and event project at neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK). The text contributions by Christian (Syndikat-Kollektiv), Christoph Casper, Jana Gebauer, Kathrin Gerlof, Katrin Lompscher, Louis Moreno, Raquel Rolnik & Isadora Guerreiro & Paula Freire Santoro and Pheli Sommer combine Berlin case studies with global perspectives on the de/financialisation of the city.

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The journal tells the story of the development of Europacity, which generated virtually no public debate until shortly before its completion. A collage of voices documents the view of Europacity from the perspective of the neighbouring districts. The text contribution by political scientist Teresa Pullano deals with the connections between a historical-cultural image of Europe and forms of economic and political capital as they appear in Europacity.

The research and field reports were developed as part of the artistic project Am Rand von EuropaCity (2018/19), which brought residents, artists and theorists into conversation with each other through processes of ‘collective listening’.

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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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The most famous are Carl Hagenbeck’s plans for a so-called future animal park, meant to exhibit animals and people for both entertainment and educational purposes. Driven by German colonialism, these and other partly exotic attributions contributed to the definition of the neighbouring African Quarter.

Constanze Fischbeck and Sven Kalden collage annotated photographs, images, and documents. Together with an essay by the artist Akinbode Akinbiyi, they tell and expand the history of this place from the end of the 19th century to the present day. The fragile nature of a sand dune reflects the complex process of the urbanization of an unusual landscape.

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The meeting in Tunix was a breeding ground for new project formulations. The term project stood for networking, flexibility and self-determined activities. Since then, the use of the term project has shifted – the project itself has become a model of neoliberal forms of work and organisation. Forty years after Tunix, this ambivalence, as well as the political concerns inherent in the praxis of projects, must be re-considered.

Produced on the occasion of Wiedersehen in TUNIX! Eine Revision der Berliner Projektekultur, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, 2018

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One of the last large developments to be built in East Berlin was Neu-Hohenschönhausen, with Erich Honecker himself laying the foundation stone in February 1984. Many of the apartment buildings were ready for their new tenants as early as 1987—the high-rise at Zingster Straße 25 counted among these.

Three decades later, the artist Sonya Schönberger inquired what had become of the buildings’ original tenants. Who still lives there? Who has since moved in?

Based on interviews, the stories in this book offer a glimpse into different everyday realities, interconnected through the outer shell of the Platte. They tell, in a very personal way, of daily life in the GDR, of the change of the political systems, and of the present day in reunified Germany.

Leseprobe (pdf):

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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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Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, local citizens took the initiative and began replanting a section of the former border strip between the districts of Prenzlauer Berg in East Berlin and Wedding in West Berlin.

They thus literally laid the groundwork for a public park whose completion would prove to be a bone of contention for the next twenty-five years—a period in which participatory planning procedures exhausted civic engagement, and social and spatial polarisation became increasingly extreme.

As this detailed reconstruction of the history of Mauerpark illustrates, the site is no isolated example but rather symptomatic of developments in many parts of Berlin and other cities too: for what is at stake here is the reach of representative democracy.

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