Sandler, D. (2016). Counterpreservation: architectural decay in Berlin since 1989. Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library.
“In Berlin, decrepit structures do not always denote urban blight. Decayed buildings are incorporated into everyday life as residences, exhibition spaces, shops, offices, and as leisure space. As nodes of public dialogue, they serve as platforms for dissenting views about the future and past of Berlin. In this book, Daniela Sandler introduces the concept of counterpreservation as a way to understand this intentional appropriation of decrepitude. The embrace of decay is a sign of Berlin’s iconoclastic rebelliousness, but it has also been incorporated into the mainstream economy of tourism and development as part of the city’s countercultural cachet. Sandler presents the possibilities and shortcomings of counterpreservation as a dynamic force in Berlin and as a potential concept for other cities.
Counterpreservation is part of Berlin’s fabric: in the city’s famed Hausprojekte (living projects) such as the Køpi, Tuntenhaus, and KA 86; in cultural centers such as the Haus Schwarzenberg, the Schokoladen, and the legendary, now defunct Tacheles; in memorials and museums; and even in commerce and residences. The appropriation of ruins is a way of carving out affordable spaces for housing, work, and cultural activities. It is also a visual statement against gentrification, and a complex representation of history, with the marks of different periods—the nineteenth century, World War II, postwar division, unification—on display for all to see. Counterpreservation exemplifies an everyday urbanism in which citizens shape private and public spaces with their own hands, but it also influences more formal designs, such as the Topography of Terror, the Berlin Wall Memorial, and Daniel Libeskind’s unbuilt redevelopment proposal for a site peppered with ruins of Nazi barracks. By featuring these examples, Sandler questions conventional notions of architectural authorship and points toward the value of participatory environments.” – from Cornell University Press
Vasudevan, A. (2016). Metropolitan preoccupations: the spatial politics of squatting in Berlin. Wiley/Blackwell.
“In this, the first book-length study of the cultural and political geography of squatting in Berlin, Alexander Vasudevan links the everyday practices of squatters in the city to wider and enduring questions about the relationship between space, culture, and protest.
- Focuses on the everyday and makeshift practices of squatters in their attempt to exist beyond dominant power relations and redefine what it means to live in the city
- Offers a fresh critical perspective that builds on recent debates about the “right to the city” and the role of grassroots activism in the making of alternative urbanism
- Examines the implications of urban squatting for how we think, research and inhabit the city as a site of radical social transformation
- Challenges existing scholarship on the New Left in Germany by developing a critical geographical reading of the anti-authoritarian revolt and the complex geographies of connection and solidarity that emerged in its wake
- Draws on extensive field work conducted in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany” – from Wiley
Hessel, F. (2017 [1929]). Walking in Berlin: a flaneur in the capital (A. DeMarco, Trans.). The MIT Press.
“The first English translation of a lost classic that reinvents the flaneur in Berlin.
Franz Hessel (1880–1941), a German-born writer, grew up in Berlin, studied in Munich, and then lived in Paris, where he moved in artistic and literary circles. His relationship with the fashion journalist Helen Grund was the inspiration for Henri-Pierre Roché’s novel Jules et Jim (made into a celebrated 1962 film by Francois Truffaut). In collaboration with Walter Benjamin, Hessel reinvented the Parisian figure of the flaneur. This 1929 book—here in its first English translation—offers Hessel’s version of a flaneur in Berlin.
In Walking in Berlin, Hessel captures the rhythm of Weimar-era Berlin, recording the seismic shifts in German culture. Nearly all of the essays take the form of a walk or outing, focusing on either a theme or part of the city, and many end at a theater, cinema, or club. Hessel deftly weaves the past with the present, walking through the city’s history as well as its neighborhoods. Even today, his walks in the city, from the Alexanderplatz to Kreuzberg, can guide would-be flaneurs.
Walking in Berlin is a lost classic, known mainly because of Hessel’s connection to Benjamin but now introduced to readers of English. Walking in Berlin was a central model for Benjamin’s Arcades Project and remains a classic of “walking literature” that ranges from Surrealist perambulation to Situationist “psychogeography.” This MIT Press edition includes the complete text in translation as well as Benjamin’s essay on Walking in Berlin, originally written as a review of the book’s original edition.” – from MIT Press
Pan, L. (2016). In-visible palimpsest: memory, space and modernity in Berlin and Shanghai. Peter Lang.
“In the early 1990s, Berlin and Shanghai witnessed the dramatic social changes in both national and global contexts. While in 1991 Berlin became the new capital of the reunified Germany, from 1992 Shanghai began to once again play its role as the most powerful engine of economic development in the post-1989 China. This critical moment of history has fundamentally transformed the later development of both cities, above all in terms of urban spatial order. The construction mania in Shanghai and Berlin shares the similar aspiration of «re-modernizing» themselves. In this sense, the current experience of Shanghai and Berlin informs many of the features of urban modernity in the post-Cold-War era. The book unfolds the complexity of the urban space per se as highly revealing cultural texts. Also this project doesn’t examine the spatial changes in chronological terms, but rather takes the present moment as the temporal standing point of this research. By comparing the memory discourse related to these spatial changes, the book poses the question of how modernity is understood in the matrix of local, national and global power struggles.” – from Peter Lang
Hausdorf, N., & Goller, A. (2015). Superstructural Berlin: a superstructural tourist guide to Berlin for the visitor and the new resident. Zero Books.
“The book amalgamates poetry, cultural critique, narrative and art into a strange and unsettling medley, putting the reader in the bizarre position of ‘confused investigator’ whilst also giving them an alternate way to read and respond to the streets of Berlin.
This text, written by Nicolas Hausdorf and designed by Alexander Goller, is much inspired by Benjamin’s work. Like in Benjamin’s text, here we find a mixture of quotations from others (including important and still understudied writers of the city such as Georg Simmel), observations of the writer’s own and interesting art work from the designer, often eclectically arranged on the page, perhaps to simulate the feeling of rummaging through a Benjaminian archive. The book’s intention, put forward abstractly in the prologue or ‘act one,’ is to break from sociological models entrenched in academic rules and regulations, approaching the city from outside these limitations and producing a reading of the city or an experience of reading the city that is perhaps more honest and certainly more radical.” – from Hong Kong Review of Books