Cuvrybrache, Berlin
A wasteland along the Spree river, that soon became a place of refuge for those with no place in society. Evacuated from its informal inhabitants, the area has undergone restructuring to host a complex of luxury buildings. This piece of land of 10,000 square meters located near the river Spree remained for years an empty lot in which a configuration of multiple actors were trapped in the contradictions and oddities of post-modernity, as practices of meaning-making were being played out in a dead-end struggle to assert claims over the identity of such urban void. The complexities of the social dynamics that have constantly defined and erased the use of the Cuvrybrache throughout the years unfold on several overlapping layers. The most visible of these strata is the conflict for the material control of space, which mostly involves those who envision the Cuvrybrache as an appealing potential to generate economic capital and the Kreutzberg neighborhood, which attaches a cultural value to the territory, whose story is worth to be outlined briefly.
