kreuzberg

Berlin · codesign · housing · kreuzberg · participation · urban regeneration

DRAGONER AREAL, BERLIN

Dragoner Areal is a key area in the heart of Kreuzberg, one of the last plots available for development. It is the nucleus of a Regeneration area (Sanierungsgebiet Rathausblock) that was planned to be sold by the Institute for Federal Real Estate to private investors. It has been the object of a mobilisation of citizens against the privatisation, and after a series of controversial negotiation its property has been transferred to the Berlin government in 2019. Project models were planned and met with enthusiasm by both citizens and several stakeholders, collaborating to advance solutions that could foster social equality and ecological empowerment to the neighborhood. However, a recent sentence from the Berlin-Brandburg Tribunal has declared the reasons behind the transaction of the Dragoner Areal to the Berlin state as illegal. Therefore, the future of the place is still undecided.

activism · Berlin · blu · contested space · gentrification · graffiti · kreuzberg · media spree · street art · urban development

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.

art · gentrification · housing · kreuzberg · participation

THE LAUSE – BERLIN

WHERE AND WHEN? Lausitzer Strasse 10-11, Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany. 2019-2021 WHAT’S GOING ON? Similarly to other cases in the district, the Lause is being threatened by the possibility of an unaffordable rent increase due to the intention of the owner to sell the building to the highest bidder, by around 20 million euros – an […]

Berlin · collaborative mapping · kreuzberg · Mehringplatz · storytelling · urban reconnaissance · urban regeneration

MEHRINGPLATZ – SÜDLICHE FRIEDRICHSTADT

Suffering from its marginalized position during the years of the German division, the neighborhood was recognized and labelled as a deprived area in 2005 due to its low standards of economic development, its poor social integration and quality of life. These characteristics made the territory of Südliche Friedrichstadt a periphery in the centre of Berlin, as the area is located in the proximity of some of the city’s main attractive spots, such as the lively Mitte and the creative Friedrichschain-Kreutzberg. In a twenty-year time-span, a set of policies of local urban renewal has been gradually implemented to re-centralize the neighborhood, starting from the very re-centralization of the role of its residents in directly participating in small decision-making processes. This served to acknowledge, create and institutionalize their identity as a geo-social collectivity. Commercial, leasure and creative initiatives have begun to flourish in the area, projecting it as an emblem of juxtapositions and contradictory tendencies characterizing modern urban contexts, whereby transitions to new lifestyles are mediated by old identites and latent risks of gentrification, displacement and social conflicts.