City-History-Identity 2: City Planning and Politics

Question 1

Ladd - Center and Periphery

Answer 1

their hope is to build a city center that resembles its periphery

The question for Berlin’s future is whether Berlin’s center will paralyze its periphery, or the periphery enliven the new center

Question 2

How successful are, according to Ladd, the efforts to plan and design the centre of the newly unified city of Berlin? What problems does he see?

Answer 2

• The problem is that Berlin continues to lack both the sheer size and the financial-sector wealth that can fuel the kind of extravagance merchants and developers dream of
  * Berlin will not dominate the most powerful sectors of the German economy anytime soon

         - West Berlin's industry died a slow death during the years surrounded by the Wall, 
         - East Berlin's industry collapsed precipitously after 1989.
  
   * Nor has it yet become the center of east-west trade that it's promoters envisioned a decade ago
   * In the Federal Republic of Germany, power and wealth do not flow to the center. Berlin the capital remains one of Germany's poorest cities
  
   • As the construction work peters out, no one sees a lasting substitute for the thousands of industrial jobs lost in the east with the collapse of the socialist economy, or for the massive Cold War subsidies that once kept West Berliners living in comfort
   - Berlin has more authentic urban life than most cities, but it thrives mainly in the older areas just outside the center

Question 3

What is the function of architecture and city planning when it comes to the capital of Germany? Which problems did Berlin face?

Answer 3

• Berlin’s hope was that good urban design would attract financially (and culturally) potent city dwellers
  * postmodern city planning, intended to heal the wounds not only of war and division-but also of the kind of urban renewal
  * Architectural modernism’s demolitions, wide-open urban spaces, megastructures, and self-consciously artless designs are now disdained around the world.

  * After unification Berlin's planners set out to repair the damage to the urban fabric by issuing strict design guidelines for the city center intended to restore the density and diversity that modernism destroyed
  * "critical reconstruction"

Question 4

“critical reconstruction”

Answer 4

—-> aims restore the lost character of Berlin’s urban environment
- The great question is whether “critical reconstruction” can in fact produce genuine urban life-whatever that is-or merely the kind of stage set that the typical urban entertainment district now resembles
• unconfident in its visual identity

Critical reconstruction

   - Trying to rebuild the character of the city as it once was 
    - Alone is not enough, you need a vision of the future 
    - Potsdamer Platz wants to remake that old city center, but make it new

Question 5

How does Ladd assess the memorials in Berlin, in particular those memorializing the Holocaust ?

Answer 5

• In their desperate wish to give meaningful form to their city, Berlin’s leaders often look to art to give coherence to their chaotic history.
  
  • The government thus leads the way in filling the vacant center and offering the city a new identity
  • .the anti-national monument
  • It is the aura of unresolved history-since 1989, and even since 1945-that makes Berlin look unfinished and feel unsettled, and gives it its intellectual charge.

Question 6

Potsdamer Platz

Answer 6

Gov and parliamentary buildings 
Totally destroyed after the war 
Also during the division of Berlin it was partially divided 
No man’s land 
Many thought that was appropriate 
What used to be the center had been turned into a no man’s land
How Germany could relate to its difficult past 
Artificial 
Commercial 
No soul 
Not a city center for the citizens 
Could be anywhere 
Feels like an American place 
Designed to be urban
Stage set 
Somehow the city became a spectacle 
Present Potsdamer Platz tries to feed on the history of the 20s and 30s 
SELLING ITSELF 
Using history as a marketing feature

Question 7

Dilemmas

Answer 7

What kind of city did Berlin decide to become after unification? AND how convincing was that?

Can we create a thriving urban space? Can you plan what is going to happen there?

The memorial architecture.

What kind of city do we want to present?

The idea of the new Berlin, was it a success?

Memorializing the past

For whom are these memorial?