For so many Berliners, Germans and people around the world, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has been a time to gather and look back at one of the defining moments of the past century.
But for Exberliner chief Nadja Vancauwenberghe and Berlin-based architect and filmmaker Dan Borden, this November is precisely the time to do the opposite: Look forward.
This Friday, along with a team of curators, the two are launching a campaign called “Save Berlin.”
It is intended to be an ongoing project that brings together artists, architects, performers, musicians and other creative Berliners to talk about the urban condition of the city today, assess how it has evolved in the past 20 years and, most importantly, generate ideas for its future.
As they write in the acerbic, five-point manifesto on their website, Berlin in 2009 is a fascinating city, full of “vibrant youth culture, high art, generous infrastructure and cheap rent.”
But the city is also in danger becoming “a sanitized Euro-capital,” replete with ugly shopping malls and luxury condos. “Creeping gentrification is pushing up rents and killing the vibrant mix of cultures, demographics and architecture,” they say.
Which is where the “saving” comes in: Berlin is desperate for a more inspired urban policy.
“When we decided to launch ‘Save Berlin’ in November, I think it was a way to be a little bit ironic,” said French-born Vancauwenberghe, who started the English-language Exberliner magazine in Berlin seven years ago, with a grin.
“We thought, ok, it’s nice that there are all these self-congratulatory events [celebrating the fall of the Wall] but we wanted to have a bit more of a critical approach.
What has happened in the past 20 years? What urban policy has been implemented since then and has this policy met the expectations of Berliners?”
Seeing Berlin from outside
Vancauwenberghe and Borden first hatched the idea to stage an intervention in their adopted city after Borden, a New York native who moved to Berlin in 1999, pitched an article to Vancauwenberghe about seeing Berlin from an outside perspective. Like so many New Yorkers who watched their city undergo enormous leaps of gentrification in the 1980s, Borden felt that Berliners, whose city remained relatively open and accessible, didn’t understand how lucky they were.
“We both felt that it’s kind of an amazing city,” said Vancauwenberghe, recalling her early conversation with Borden. “There’s still space, it’s affordable and we can be really creative here. We realized that sometimes, as foreigners – who are at the same time Berliners as well – we are in a better position to tell people what’s so great about it here because we have a distance. So we started to joke about what we could do to keep this crazy, irreverent aura of the city.”
The pair soon realized that the very people who contributed to making the city so special could also be part of the solution. Afterward, they put out a call for proposals for ideas that could be included in city-wide discussions about Berlin development and that could hopefully add a creative and alternative voice to those of government, city planners and private developers.
The results on display this weekend are a lively mix of ideas, some of which are designed to be feasible while others are more openly utopian: “To create and trigger debate and open minds,” said Vancauwenberghe. Among the proposals is one to turn Berlin’s recently closed Tempelhof airport into a giant lake. A competing submission suggests building the urban dystopia pictured in Fritz Lang’s famed film Metropolis inside the empty hangar.
Another submission plays on a cliché about Prenzlauer Berg, a neighborhood in the east of the city that has recently become the go-to destination for upper- to middle class young families, earning it the nickname “Pregnancy Hill.” In her proposal, the architect takes this stereotype to the extreme, envisioning the area as a children’s paradise, with no cars allowed and pedestrian walkways abounding.
A city in flux
In its aim and its provocative title, “Save Berlin” plunges into a heated debate going on between Berliners on all levels – and anybody who has ever passed through or dreamed about the city – about what Berlin is, what is was and what it should be.
Over the past 20 years since the fall of the Wall, Berlin has changed dramatically. Foreign capital has increasingly flowed into the city, spawning condominiums and shopping centers in its wake. Many squats around Berlin have been squeezed out and those remaining face increasing eviction pressures. The bombed-out area around Potsdamer Platz, left untouched throughout the entire Cold War, was turned into an artificial center of commerce in the late 1990s.
Then, there are the many changes that are initiated but not yet completed, like the nearly four-kilometer area on both sides of the river Spree that is currently beginning to be privatized under the Mediaspree investment project, which has already spawned buildings like the giant O2 World Arena. And there is perhaps the most disputed urban planning event: The decision to rebuild the Berliner Schloss, the castle where the kaiser once lived and a symbol of old Prussia, in the center of the city.
Whether these and the many others changes Berlin has undergone are seen as productive or destructive, the sign of a city finally coming into its own or of a city slowly losing its sense of self, is a question that is certainly answered differently by the many stakeholders involved in the debate.
But for Vancauwenberghe and Borden, the answer is obvious. Those stereotypes about Berlin, the ones that make people from all over the world flock to the city – its spirit of rebellion, decadent lifestyle, profusion of empty space and low cost of living – are real. These are the elements that combine to make Berlin such an attractive place to live, they argue, and equally these are the elements that are most vulnerable to disappear.
“People come here to push pleasure to the limits,” said Borden. “This is something that’s been true for a hundred years. If you look back, it’s a place that for some reason has been very open to gay people, to music, to alternative ways of living… this is something that can be crushed.”
But they are quick to note that their project is not meant to calcify Berlin or seek to recapture the past.
“We don’t want to be nostalgic at all,” said Vancauwenberghe. “It’s not about conserving something or going back to some sort of golden age. It’s much more about saying how great Berlin still is. But also that we should be really careful about how fast things may change and, while still progressing toward some sort of future, talk about how we can retain the things we like about Berlin.”
One of these things is Berlin’s wealth of empty spaces, both say. Its small patches of green space, bombed out buildings and concrete wastelands are not blemishes on the cityscape but instead places to dream through and about.
“There is this sense that Berlin is a city with an open future,” said Borden. “That it is a city that has reinvented itself again and again and again – and that it’s also a place where people can come and reinvent themselves. When you look at an empty lot, you’re filled with a sense of potential. Then it fills with a really boring apartment building and there is something lost there.”
To this end, one of Borden’s favorite proposals for “Save Berlin,” is a wrecking ball crane that would periodically knock down a building “just to keep this history of destruction alive.” “If I win the lotto,” he said softly, “I’m going to build it.”
While perhaps one of the more utopic suggestions in the campaign, the roaming wrecking ball nevertheless poses an interesting riddle: What would it mean to build through deconstruction?
Or, to put it differently, how can we change Berlin while still leaving space for others to change it too?
Jessica Dorrance/Expatica
The campaign kicks off this Friday with a three-day festival held in Stattbad Wedding, an abandoned swimming pool in the northwest corner of the city. The festival will profile the “new visionary schemes” for Berlin that participants have come up with so far and also be a chance to celebrate the creativity the city is rife with. The jam-packed lineup includes art exhibits, a bazaar of vintage clothing, art and crafts, film screenings, a panel discussion on 20 years of urbanism in Berlin and, in a nod to Liza Minnelli, a cabaret.
To find out more visit: http://www.saveberlin.blogspot.com/
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Jessica Dorrance profiles the “Save Berlin” campaign, which kicks off this weekend and hopes to inspire new and creative ideas about urban policy in the city.
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