# THE SOCIAL CITY

Urban Development and Housing Projects in Berlin and Naples in the Post-War Era – A Comparison: Theoretical Models, Implemented Projects, Social and Political Impacts Today

*Edited by Antonello Scopacasa*

**Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin**

*Antonello Scopacasa (ed.)*

# THE SOCIAL CITY

Urban Development and Housing Projects in Berlin and Naples in the Post-War Era – A Comparison: Theoretical Models, Implemented Projects, Social and Political Impacts Today

The book is the outcome of the research and academic exchange workshop *The Social City. Urban Development and Housing Projects in Berlin and Naples in the Postwar Era – A Comparison: Theoretical Models, Implemented Projects, Social and Political Impacts Today* by the Technische Universität Berlin and the University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli" which took place in June-July 2019.

Organized by Vittoria Capresi (project manager), Elena Manzo (project partner), Francesca Castanò, Antonello Scopacasa

Technische Universität Berlin Department of Architecture School VI Planning Building Environment Chair of International Urbanism and Design – Habitat Unit Strasse des 17. Juni 152, 10623 Berlin, Germany E-Mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli" Department of Architecture and Industrial Design Via S. Lorenzo, 31, 81031 Aversa (CE), Italy E-Mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Financed by DAAD, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, with funds from Auswärtiges Amt (AA) Referat P23 – Kooperationsprojekte in Europa, Südkaukasus und Zentralasien Kennedyallee 50, 53175 Bonn

We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Fund of Technische Universität Berlin.

The publication is also sponsored by STERN Stiftung, Soziale Stadtentwicklung Strassburger Straße 55, 10405 Berlin, Germany E-Mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
# THE SOCIAL CITY

Urban Development and Housing Projects in Berlin and Naples in the Post-War Era – A Comparison: Theoretical Models, Implemented Projects, Social and Political Impacts Today

*Edited by Antonello Scopacasa*

#### **Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek**

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek has listed this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografe; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

**Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, 2022** https://verlag.tu-berlin.de

Fasanenstr. 88, 10623 Berlin Tel.: +49 (0)30 314 76131 / Fax: -76133 E-Mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
This work**–**except quotes and where otherwise noted**–**is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence CC BY 4.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Additional information about the illustrations in the book concerning their archival location or the source, author or rights holder, exclusion from the Creative Common BY 4.0 standard is provided in Appendices, "List of illustrations and sources."

Scientifc review: Antonello Scopacasa (Chapter 1 and 2); Christoph Bernhardt, Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen, Andrea Maglio, Sergio Pace, Ines Tolic (Chapter 3)

English review: Marc Baldwin/Edit911, Natalia Kvitkova

Redactional style: Chicago Manual of Style

Front and back cover images: Antonello Scopacasa

Printing: docupoint GmbH Layout/Typesetting: Arina Kapitanova

ORCID iD Antonello Scopacasa: 0000-0002-8731-6037 http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8731-6037

**ISBN 978-3-7983-3143-3 (print) ISBN 978-3-7983-3144-0 (online)**

Published online on the institutional repository of the Technische Universität Berlin: DOI 10.14279/depositonce-9773 https://doi.org/10.14279/depositonce-9773

#### **INTRODUCTION**

#### **I DOCUMENTATION**

#### **II COMPARISON**

#### **III IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS**

#### **BERLIN**

#### **NAPLES**

Authors 433

# INTRODUCTION *Antonello Scopacasa*

#### THE TOPIC OF RESEARCH

This book focuses on two closely connected aspects of the recent history of the European city: urban development and social housing. Both fall within the scope of the public that, with the democratic and republican re-founding of European states after World War II, acquired a dimension never reached before and a Europe-wide spread that recalls, at least in its proportions and coherence, the great late Medieval urbanisation. From this point of view, it is both possible and, we hope, useful to compare two cities as diferent as Berlin and Naples, both deeply marked in their history by the housing issue.

This powerful action is based on the reconstruction challenge that followed the physical and moral devastation of a war that revealed the risks and, at the same time, the power of technique, as well as the universalism that human and social rights acquired in the new republican charters. The end of the war, for all parties, was a unique and fnal opportunity for redemption and produced a powerful source of energy. It was the great fault for some, and the ultimate leveller for others that allowed Germany and Italy, emerging defeated from the war, to free themselves from the oppression of dictatorships and to look forward to the future. Broadening the gaze, it was the beginning of an existential, antinomic condition, typically European, founded on universal principles and open to the impulses of identities and democracy.

The city, as the main representative place of every political regime, was one of the stages of the post-war challenge. The issue of distribution of work and of the little wealth available through the reconstruction of the cities and the improvement of housing conditions became an obvious political priority. This was the case with the INA-Casa Plan in Italy between 1949 and 1963, and also in West Germany with the frst and second Housing Laws (*Wohnungsbaugesetz*) of 1950 and 1956. A similar approach, although softened, also occurred in West Berlin with the Hansaviertel, between 1953 and 1957, and with the construction of the frst housing settlement in the central area after the ruins were cleared up, so much so that, as in Italy, prefab construction technology, although well known, was conveniently left on the side. Particularly in East Berlin, this issue was central with the construction of Stalinallee between 1952 and 1958, and then with the powerful programme

FIGURE 1

A street from the Naples city centre in *Le piazze italiane*, photo by Paolo Monti, 1978

of industrialisation of state housing that characterised the entire GDR in the following decades.

The reconstruction was in fact a dual tool, aimed at the economic support of the population and the resolution of the dramatic housing demand: in Naples, because of the contemporary urban drift from the countryside and from the Mezzogiorno (which, however, was mainly directed towards the industrial cities of Northern Italy and Europe) and especially to mitigate the age-old crowding of the central districts; in West Berlin, and in particular in the FRG, because of the migration of millions of Germans coming from the GDR and Eastern Europe due to the forced mobilisation of the German people because of the geopolitical conditions.

Besides the demographic and housing question—40,000 homes were destroyed or heavily damaged by bombing in Naples, and 400,000 in Berlin, in what were respectively the frst and last European cities to be freed by the Allies—with the end of the war, both cities entered a period of geopolitical change. Naples defnitively realised the loss of its status as the capital of the kingdom, whose claim Fascism had temporarily revived after the national annexation, and which was reduced to a super-regional centre. Berlin entered a period of sovereignty transfer that would end only with the national and city reunifcation, while its population decreased by 40 % in comparison to the pre-war period. In this sense, the housing issue was immediately linked to repairing the war damage (many of the citizens had moved to the rural areas) and very soon to the representation of the two regimes that, with the founding of the FRG and GDR in 1949, settled side by side within the same city perimeter.

What remained after this frst, vigorous thrust of reconstruction of the 1950s and sediments stifening during the '60s, in Italy as in Germany, was the large scale of public housing interventions, along with their geographical distinction in the wider city context and their claim to functional self-sufciency. This happened in Naples, with the satellite neighbourhoods of Scampia and Ponticelli, located in the extreme northern and eastern outskirts during the '60s and '70s. The same happened in Berlin, in the West, with the Gropiusstadt and the Märkisches Viertel located at the outer limits of the island city during the '60s, and in the East with the Stadtzentrum project and the Leipziger Straße, and then with the mass-housing neighbourhoods on the outskirts, and primarily Marzahn-Hellersdorf, in the '70s and '80s.

This trend shows a similar over-scaling approach, but also follows diferent interpretations of the urban form. In the West, the choice of the periphery and of isolation for the new neighbourhoods became a distinctive, almost symbolic fgure of the aesthetic-political mood, the manifestation of the new democratic and republican regimes. Particularly in Berlin, the two settlements opportunely faced the Wall, showing the state of art in urbanism to the nearby Eastern sector. In the East, this trend matched an integrated and radical

rethinking process about the whole city: nothing, in fact, more than the city itself, or rather, the particular urbanised environment that was imagined spread uniformly throughout the territory, seemed a guarantee for the realisation of socialism. From this point of view, the construction of the city, as well the social system and the state, fully overlapped.

The approach to the new mega neighbourhoods was well defned by the motto "Urbanity through Density" coined by Edgar Salin and Hans Paul Bahrd. It was typical of many interventions throughout Germany in the 1960s, and it was diferently enacted in Italy in a more monumental and fgurative way (Le Vele of Scampia, Corviale in Rome, Zen in Palermo, "Serpentone" in Potenza, etc.). However, it soon faded during the '70s to open up to diferent, new cultural infuences. The topics of historical continuity and uniqueness of place, the cultural fundamentals of the project, and the private dimensions and the democratic participation in the project all came into play. In the Italian case, the right to market value when buying land soon entered the feld, leading to the unavailability of afordable land for the construction of large public housing complexes.

Starting in this moment of deep refection and city planning revision, with the European Year of the Architectural Heritage, 1975 (which concluded a theoretical elaboration in Italy that had begun with the Gubbio Charter in 1960), the idea of the public city, which meant a city built for the common good, settled into a deeper and more cultural dimension.

The coeval, and from many points of view similar cases of the International Building Exhibition (IBA) between 1979 and 1987 and of the Neapolitan Extraordinary Programme for Residential Building (PSER) between 1981 and 1986 expressed the state of art well, not only in the difused architectural quality they achieved through social housing in the central area of the city, frst, and in the peripheral ancient *casali*, second, but also for the articulated, democratic process they established in the rethinking of the urban form, and for having focused on the city as an inalienable historical issue.

After this period of common action between urban development and social housing, after the frst post-war re-founding push, as in the emergency of the 1980 earthquake in Naples and the era of Berlin's *Spaltung*, starting in the 1990s, the topic of the public and cultural city in urban planning became a lower priority, while its main driving force, social housing, disappeared almost completely from the political agenda. Also, the Berlin and Naples developments increasingly diverged.

In Berlin, the main attention was focused on national and city reunifcation, on the morphological reconstruction of the pre-war urban fabric in the context of the unexpected stabilisation in housing demand and the depreciation of property values. Nonetheless, in the wake of reunifcation, the number of low-density housing estates in the outskirts increased. Starting in 2002, however, the Stadtumbau Ost programme started with a regenerative approach and many urban repair projects to deal with the degradation and depopulation of

#### FIGURE 2 (TOP)

The *Wohnkomplex* Karl-Marx-Allee under construction. Photo by Weiß, 1963

#### FIGURE 3 (BOTTOM)

Märkisches Viertel under construction beyond the Berlin Wal from the Eastern sector l. Photo by Klaus Mehner, 1970

mass-housing complexes, especially those on the Eastern side. It provided for the demolition of part of the building fabric, both residential and service buildings, the renewal of public areas with widespread use of landscaping, and the improvement and modernisation of the residential facilities.

In Naples, that is, in Italy, the cancellation of direct investment in social housing starting in the 1980s in favour of small-scale indirect support, especially the disconnect between urban and architectural design in the absence of a clear sociological projection, overlapped with the great, chaotic phenomenon of urban sprawl that covered the territory behind the coastal city, the large and fertile plain of Terra di Lavoro extending between Naples, Caserta and Vesuvius.

The ongoing dereliction of the large public housing neighbourhoods such as Traiano, Scampia and Ponticelli worsened the peripheral condition: the public city, as imagined at the dawn of the republic, then showed, in a time of political liberalism, all its heaviness, which was the more evident when the urban planning and design had been socially superfcial or weakly implemented. Above all, this condition revealed the distance between the project plans and the real construction and maintenance ability of the community. This is a condition that the generous participation of associations and individual citizens for public good in the same years seems to have balanced from below.

 urheberrechtlich geschützt

#### THE METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH

The research involved a series of historical analyses of the relationship between urban development and social housing for critical refection and to allow an informed evaluation of the contemporary condition. In particular, it investigated housing settlements realised in Berlin and Naples in the frst four decades of the post-war period, which corresponds to the period in which public housing was central in both political and urban planning terms. Some of the questions we put to ourselves were: Which were the theoretical patterns? How were those social housing projects planned, implemented and used? What is their state of conservation today and how are they inhabited? What are the current challenges as regards social conditions, architecture and adaptation?

Considering the period from World War II until fairly recent times allowed us to analyse any completed interventions that still provoke reactions, which historically are still problematic and open, and this also let us experiment on the idea of history as settled experience, as a conscious attitude that, on the one hand, tries to reconstruct sources and witnesses with scientifc detachment and aims to defne the shape of a multiform reality, and, on the other hand, continuously experiments and includes the value of personal and social experience and its sedimentation into personal or common memory.

With all the limits of a small research project, the book focuses on places of living, the city and the house. Consequently, it investigates the scale of the project and that of the intervention, the relationship between innovation and the cultural reception of urban phenomena and, again, between the stage of the project and the realisation and upkeep of the interventions, between democratic expectations and the adequacy of the administration system. These steps have a direct efect on the social identity that inspires, structures and transforms the planned and then built city, that continuous dialogue between form and content (the past) that occurs, in general, through progressive and mutual adaptations.

In the selection of the case studies, we have favoured interventions on the "periphery," which are those in which theoretical and aesthetic trends have best manifested themselves and in which planning and design cultures could develop most widely. However, the

periphery does not necessarily coincide with the geographical edges of the cities: both in Berlin and in Naples, historical events, or the particular topography have naturally shifted the "peripheral" location along a radius that only ideally starts from the city centre and often extends to its inner fringes. Rather, from a sociological point of view, the same interventions generally generate the peripheral condition, that is, marginalisation or social division. This, as we shall see, can be traced both on the large scale of the city and inside the neighbourhood.

To merge the research and refections of diferent authors together was not the aim of this work. Rather, it represents an attempt to combine and communicate a multiple message through a simple framing structure, a common vocabulary and recurring keywords.

The materials are arranged in the following way: the text is introduced by a graphic and synthetic presentation of the historical context in Berlin and Naples and the documentation of the twelve case studies. They provide a short reference to some recurring topics: the historical reasons, the design process, the excursus of realisation, the idea of city and housing, the state of preservation, the infuence on social form.

In the second chapter, Comparison, which was developed as the frst by the young scholars involved in the project, three theoretical issues highlighted during the seminars are better presented: The ability of the project to involve the social level; the experimentalism of the interventions, in particular in construction technology, social approach and democratic participation; the relationship between public and private in the phases of implementation and the upkeep of the programmes.

The third chapter, In-Depth Analysis, includes the contributions of the scientists involved to give a better articulated historical and critical analysis of many of selected case studies and of the wider urban and social context.

The closing editorial paper ofers a brief overview focusing on a selection of the theoretical nodes that emerged from the comparison of the materials from a contemporary perspective.

# INTRODUCTION *Elena Manzo*

#### A DAAD WORKSHOP ON SOCIAL HOUSING AFTER WORLD WAR II THROUGH FIVE NEAPOLITAN EXEMPLARY CASES. PRESENTATION

The 21st century architectonic debate appears to be paying attention to the theme of social housing again, but in a renewed and diferent way. For a long time, in fact, the interest in it had weakened. Investments and state actions had been scarce in this sector. Because of this, much social housing real estate has fallen into a state of neglect and is crumbling. Recently, however, a more conscious and complex approach has characterised the cultural and economic policies underlying the actions taken in this sector. Today, increasingly, social housing is being seen mostly as a response to the changed housing needs of the less well-of classes. Rather, as Claude Lamure pointed out in 1976, social housing is a primary aspect of city planning for future generations.

The challenge, that is, is aimed at flling the current shortage of afordable housing by providing operational programmes that prefgure real neighbourhoods with high environmental sustainability. Therefore, the syncretism between social aspects, economic issues and typological research constitutes a central factor of urban planning, to the point that, in many Western states—especially the American ones—the building of new social housing neighbourhoods in poorly urbanised contexts proceeds parallel with the approach of the topic in terms of community start-ups. Among the Italian cases, for example, there is the *Competence Centre* start-up on Smart Cities, founded in 2015 in Turin. Matters such as the relationship between construction and place, domestic space and landscape, permanent and temporary, are central to the regeneration of social neighbours and suburbs. To this purpose, the redevelopment of pre-existing buildings—and, in particular, those of architectural quality—the restoration of efcient connection networks and the planning of a more adequate number of facilities are primary aims. It is therefore a complex

#### FIGURE 1

Map of Afordable and Social Housing in Naples from 1943 to 2019. Main housing phases:

Being aware of this, the Italian Government has stepped up its legislative policy to support and encourage actions in the social housing sector, considering the changing needs and the topicality of the issues. Among these, we have to mention Law Decree No. 112/2008

issue that, today more than before, involves the theme of so-called "social inclusion" too.

FIGURE 2 The "Vele" by Franz di Salvo with the backdrop of Vesuvius, 2019

FIGURE 3 Art Metro stations in Naples: Piscinola Station and the researchers of the DAAD workshop

and the *Piano Nazionale di Edilizia Abitativa* (National Housing Construction Plan) approved with a DPCM (Decree President Council Ministry) of July 16, 2009, which has allocated over 800 million Euros to three macro-areas of intervention, one of which is specifcally public residential construction. Finally, Law Decree No. 47/2014, which was converted into law on May, defnitively approved the "House Plan."

Starting from these refections, teachers, researchers and scholarship holders of the Technische Universität Berlin and the University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli" have carried out joint research within the European project *Dialogue with South Europe 2019*, which was fully funded by the Deutschen Akademischen Austauschdienst (DAAD). The research has been entitled *The Social City. Urban Development and Social Housing in Berlin and Naples After World War II: Policies, Models, Emergencies, Achievements, Critical Issues and Perspectives.* Goals and results were shared in two workshops, the frst one in Berlin from June 25 to 29, 2019 and the second one in Naples from July 15 to 18, 2019. Both seminars aimed to assess whether there are elements to compare the two cities with regard to the urban management architectural policies of social housing from the postwar period to the present, highlighting their common characteristics and diferences. The workshops' results revealed some very interesting points of contact. First of all, Rationalism, namely the Italian version of Functionalism. That is, the design of neighbourhood plans based on homogeneous functional zones, on the type of housing and especially on the "minimum dwelling cell."

The Italian and Neapolitan research of the 1950s and '60s in the social housing feld, however, paid a great deal of attention both to the progressive giving up of the stricter aspects of Rationalism, and to a more organic approach to design. Another important aim was fnding inspiration in local contexts.

Agreeing with Stephanie Zeier Pilat, I think these foci are the main diferences we could fnd regarding our case studies in Berlin and Naples.

Just think of the Soccavo District, one of the most interesting examples in Italy—and perhaps in Europe—which started during the second post-war period. It is a large, experimental neighbourhood, made up of the three neighbourhoods Loggetta, CEP-Traiano and Soccavo-Canzanella. It has become a pilot model in Italy because it was designed by combining the placing and typological principles of Functionalism with values such as "human measure" and themes from tradition and environmental awareness. These values were necessary to rebuild the identity of the nation after the dramatic episode of World War II. The plan was supported and partially fnanced by many construction companies for shares, including the *Società pel Risanamento di Napoli* (Corporation for the Renewal of Naples) founded in 1888, the IACP (which is the acronym for the Autonomous Institute for Working Class Housing) founded in 1908 for research in the feld of housing, and INA-Casa (which is the acronym for National Insurance Institute that fnanced the houses). These companies have contributed to building entire neighbourhoods, conditioning the size and the shape of the current city.

#### FIGURE 4 (LEFT)

The workshop researchers during the on-the-spot investigation in Scampia District

#### FIGURE 5 (RIGHT)

On-the-spot investigation in the social community-managed CAP 8012 centre in Soccavo District

Beyond the subsequent national urban planning laws on social housing,1 one cannot ignore the relationship with those events, which determined the premises of their formation. Among these we must mention an important law on afordable housing, which is No. 43, *Provvedimenti per incrementare l'occupazione operaia, agevolando la costruzione di case per lavoratori* (Provisions to Increase the Occupation of Workers by Facilitating the Construction of Houses for Workers), enacted on February 28, 1949. It was preliminary to an impressive programme to build afordable dwellings for social neighbourhoods. This law is known as the INA-Casa plan, and it was in force until 1963. One of the programme's main aims was the achievement of healthy and modern housing, placed in new urban centres or neighbourhoods to ofer the possibility of improved housing conditions to thousands of families. Therefore, the new settlements ofered Italian planners and architects the frst real opportunity to shape the rapid and fragmented expansion that Italian cities were already undergoing.

Nowadays, many neighbourhoods built over the past 14 years still retain their precise identity. They are a signifcant testimony of the Italian twentieth century and constitute relevant parts of our cities. We agree with Zeier Pilat: «INA-Casa projects contributed to the spatial development of Italian cities at both metropolitan and neighbourhood scales».2 On the other hand, if we go «inside the post-war homes constructed under the INA-Casa plan to consider how family life was shaped by the new domestic settings. Through an examination of … INA-Casa foor plans in tandem with INA-Casa design manuals' guidelines for interior, it is possible to understand how both the administration and diferent designers envisioned the post-war working-class home. Domestic designs can refect notions of family, gender roles, class, and modernity through spatial relationships, the provision of amenities, the connection to nature, the arrangement of spaces, and the divisions between private and public spaces.… The preservation and protection of the family was at the heart of the political rhetoric of the Christian Democrats and the INA-Casa plan was a key component of their post-war strategy».3

It should be noted that the INA-Casa plan was funded by a mixed system involving the state, employers and workers. The employees helped their neediest companions through

#### FIGURE 6

The exhibition opening the DAAD workshop at San Lorenzo Abbey in Aversa, headquarters of the Department of Architecture and Industrial Design of the University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli"

deductions from their monthly salaries.4 The plan, therefore, appealed to the solidarity of all workers. Thanks to his very small contribution, that is, the worker who earned his workday would give others who had not worked the opportunity to return to the consortium to produce and earn. Until 1962, there were 20,000 construction sites scattered throughout Italy, and 40,000 employees worked on them every year.

On April 18, 1962, the *Consiglio Superiore dei Lavori pubblici* (Superior Council of Public Works) issued Law No. 167, which regulated public social housing. This Law was followed by two important legislative actions by the national government: frstly, the GEStione CAse per i Lavoratori, or GESCAL. Such as INA-Casa, it was a fund destined for the construction and assignment of houses to the workers thanks to contributions came from the workers themselves, from companies and partly from government funding. INA-Casa closed when Law No. 60 was enacted on February 14, 1963. Subsequently, the Consiglio Superiore enacted Law No. 765 in 1967. It was called "*Legge Ponte*" (Bridge Law), and it provided for the acquisition of extra-urban areas to build social housing settlements. In the case of Naples, these areas were in Scampia District, to the north, and Ponticelli District, to the north-east.

Houses for 65,000 inhabitants were planned in Scampia. The master plan gave great freedom of typological choice, to adapt the buildings better to the orographic characteristics of the area. Moreover, planning was regulated above all by the infrastructure and by a system of parcelling into "mega-lots" from 1 to 11. There are many diferences between the "Vele" by Franz di Salvo and the houses built in Secondigliano District, along 167 street, which is its main avenue, and which takes its name from the Law.

Finally, another new master plan was elaborated in 1970 and it was approved two years later. Although GESCAL was suppressed in 1973, to date, all its condominiums have been redeemed.

A new construction phase, however, began after the earthquake of November 23, 1980. It was characterised by the *Piano di Recupero delle Periferie* (Recovery Plan of the Suburbs), approved by a municipal resolution of April 16, 1980 and by the PSER, which is the acronym of the *Piano Straordinario di Edilizia Residenziale* (Extraordinary Programme for Residential Building), authorised by Law No. 219 of 1981.5

Operating in this historical-cultural and legislative framework, the Italian unit's researchers of the DAAD project have explored fve exemplary cases, which are:

due to law No. 167 in Scampia District, which was a neighbourhood in Secondigliano District until 1992, since when it has become an autonomous District;

• Monterusciello District (since 1983). Actually, it is in Pozzuoli, which is a city close enough to Naples to be part of its metropolitan district, the so-called "Metropolitan City of Naples."

In particular, Monterusciello is a settlement conceived and designed like a "new city." The plan was born after the bradyseism that in 1983 caused the evacuation of about 20,000 people from the high-risk zone, the so-called "A zone." This zone includes the entire historic city centre and a great part of the populated centre next to it. Ultimately, Monterusciello was born because the authorities decided to build a permanent settlement of about 20,000 rooms in about 5,000 fats quickly, instead of building temporary settlements of light prefabricated houses in safe areas.

Each of the case studies chosen to represent the Neapolitan panorama is an important pilot example of social housing in Europe. The study of the Italian unit was supported by documentary research carried out in the State Archive of Naples, the archive of the Municipality of Naples (specifcally, in the UrbaNa section) and the archive of the Municipality of Pozzuoli.

The workshop days at the Department of Architecture and Industrial Design of the University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli" included an exhibition to illustrate the complex issues concerning social housing in Naples better, above all the issues concerning these fve cases. The scientifc coordination of the exhibition was by Claudia de Biase and Elena Manzo, it was curated by Vincenzo Cirillo and it was carried out with the participation of 3rd-year architecture students of the Degree Course in Architecture of the Department of Architecture and Industrial Design of the University of Campania (2018-2019 Academic Year). Specifcally, the students were clustered into fve groups, corresponding to the fve cases.

FIGURE 7 The exhibition's panels about Scampia District

FIGURE 8 Scholars at work during the workshop

The panels exhibited—three for each of the fve exemplary cases—focused on the "historical context," the "urban context," and, fnally, a "focus frst analysis project." Giada Limongi, Ilenia Gioia, Dario Marfella and Vito Capasso were their tutors. Michela Russo led the scientifc secretariat.

As happened in Berlin the previous month, three days of lessons were held by expert teachers on the social housing topics, and on-the-spot investigations took place for two days to use a direct approach to the fve social housing neighbourhoods. Finally, the researchers and scholarship holders worked in group interactions on keywords, which cover the main topics of social housing both in Berlin and in Naples. These three events, the documentation on place, the scientifc investigation, and the dialogic comparison between the two city cases, based on the selected topics, were later developed by the participants to provide a realistic picture of this particular and polyvalent urban condition through this publication.

#### ENDNOTES

1  For an analysis of this, please refer to Claudia De Biase and Adriana Galderisi, "Strengths and Weaknesses of Public Housing Policies in Italy: The Naples Case Study," pp. 359–367.

2  Stephanie Zeier Pilat, *Reconstructing Italy, The Ina-Casa Neighborhoods of the Postwar Era* (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 76.

3  Ibid., p. 150. The coeval debate on the INA-Casa is recorded in L'INA-Casa al IV Congresso Nazionale di Urbanistica, Venice, 1952 (Rome: Società Grafca Romana, 1953); Giovanni Astengo, "Nuovi quartieri in Italia," *Urbanistica* (1951, n. 7). On the INA-Casa programmes during the Post World War Era, see: Luigi Beretta Anguissola, (ed.), *I 14 anni del piano INA-Casa* (Rome: Staderini, 1963); Paola di Biagi (ed.), *La grande ricostruzione: Il piano Ina-Casa e l'Italia degli anni '50* (Rome: Donzelli, 2001).

4  "Impostazione e caratteristiche funzionali del piano Fanfani," *Civitas* (1951, n. 9): p. 30. 5  Ibid.

# **I DOCUMENTATION**

# DOCUMENTATION: BERLIN

#### MAP OF THE BERLIN CASE STUDIES

TIMELINE

DATA SHEETS

Karl-Marx-Allee II *MinJi Kim*

Leipziger Straße *Antonello Scopacasa*

Märkisches Viertel *Natalia Kvitkova*

 Großwohnsiedlung Marzahn *Martin Spalek*

> IBA-Neubau on Northern Ritterstraße *Antonello Scopacasa*

 IBA-Altbau *Lorenza Manfredi*

**30** DOCUMENTATION

#### ACRONYM LIST

Building site of Karl-Marx-Allee near Alexanderplatz. Photo by Horst Sturm, 1960

# MAP OF THE BERLIN CASE STUDIES

# TIMELINE Wider City History *Antonello Scopacasa*

#### **RESIDENT POPULATION1**

Berlin's administrative territory is presently one of the largest of Europe's main cities (after London, Lisbon, Rome and Amsterdam), and it is the result of the 1920 city border enlargement (\**Gross-Berlin*). Originally administered as a municipality, this territory of about 89,180 ha coincides today with the State of Berlin (*Land Berlin*).

3,274,016 (2,202,241 WB; 1,071,775 EB)

# TIMELINE Social Housing in Politics and Administration

WEIMAR REPUBLIC'S HOUSE RENT TAX AND LAND STOCK POLICY After the Cooperative Act (*Genossenschaftsgesetz*) and the Disability and Old-Age Insurance Act (1889), which help social cooperatives with capitalization and tax benefts from the state for providing homes to employees and marginalised social categories, or to implement non-proft social projects, the Weimar Republic adds the *Hauszinssteuer* (1924) and the *Bodenvorratspolitik* (1925) to help with tax benefts and direct subsidies for land acquisition and the construction and maintenance of social housing projects promoted by cooperative associations—mostly powered by trade unions—and coordinated by municipalities.

#### FRG FIRST HOUSING LAW

1950: The frst *Wohnungsbaugesetz* is promulgated to meet the need for housing and to ensure the free-market principle in a situation of devastation in the main cities (nine million homeless)—but a good state of preservation in the rural centres, where many citizens repair—and immigration of German people from the eastern territories (over twenty million from Poland alone). The pillars of the action are direct funding, low-interest loans, tax credits for private investments (also to direct owners), provision of building land, obligation to rent for landlords and rent ceilings. In six years, the programme exceeds its target of 1.8 million dwellings through the country.

#### FRG SECOND HOUSING LAW

July 1956: The act better articulates the housing policy with a kind of free market as its centre. For public intervention it foresees three levels: (1) publicly subsidised housing (frst subsidy channel) for family or property homes and rented dwellings for low-income tenants; landlords charge rent at cost; (2) tax-privileged housing (second subsidy channel), for a maximum of ten years, until a certain dwelling occupancy rate; rent increases are limited; 3) free-market housing with prevision of a rent ceiling (*Mietspiegel*). The frst and second acts subside about 3.3 million dwellings during the 1950s in parallel to a free market production of about 2.7 million. The frst rate slowly and constantly declines during the decades: ca. 2 million in the 1960s, ca. 1.1 million in the 1970s, ca. half a million in the 1980s.

**1920 1930 1940 1950 1960**

#### FRG BERLIN RECOVERY LAW

The 1964 *Berlinförderungsgesetz* helps to stimulate business and property activity through massive investment grants and tax benefts for the disadvantaged, geopolitically representative West Berlin. As strong enhancement of a previous 1950 act, the law is reinforced in 1971 by the Berlin Funding Act, reviewed in 1983 and in 1990; it remains in force today.

#### FRG HOUSING SUBSIDY ACT

April 1965: The measure overlaps with the gradual reduction of direct state investment in housing projects. It introduces a balance between household size and tenant income with housing costs. Only 1–2 % of households presently receive the subsidy.

#### GDR BUILDING LAW AND SIXTEEN URBAN DESIGN PRINCIPLES

1950: The two funding acts reject the liberal city model and centralise the planning process, which involves technological research as well as building standardisation and regulation. The Building Law (*Aufbaugesetzt*) establishes quick instruments for the public acquisition of areas destined for new public building and primarily for housing, which constitutionally becomes a central target for socialist state policy. The 1958 Building Law incorporates agricultural and industrial production in its application's scope and extends its reach beyond urban boundaries.

**1970**

#### GDR BUILDING REGULATIONS

Main Tasks in Construction (*Die wichtigsten Aufgaben im Bauwesen*), the Guidelines for a Uniform Typological Planning (*Richtlinien für eine einheitliche Typenprojektierung*), both of 1955, and the Type Regulation (*Typenordnung*) of 1956 defne the new prefab processes and implement building types throughout the state.

GDR HOUSING ASSIGNMENT REGULATION

1955 *Wohnraumlenkungsverordnung* regulates the assignment criteria and the providing procedures by the state, municipalities and public housing societies for each citizen category. Tenants' rental costs relate to pre-war average level (ca. 1 mark/m² in Berlin and ca. 3 % of tenant's income elsewhere). Rental costs consequently cover only a quarter of the maintenance costs over time. The 1958 VEB *Kommunale Wohnungsverwaltung* better defnes the municipal agency that is responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the housing stock and can be commissioned by the state to issue bonds to fnance housing construction. Replaced in 1970 by the VEB *Gebäudewirtschaft* regulation.

GDR HOUSING PROGRAMME

1973: *Wohnungsbauprogramm der DDR* plans to overcome the lack of adequate housing throughout the state between 1976 and 1990. It foresees, and fully manages, to build ca. three million modern dwellings (for about nine million inhabitants) mostly by building extensive housing neighbourhoods and using prefab construction technology. The 1976 Complex Guideline for Urban Planning and the Design of Residential Areas (*Komplexrichtlinie für die städtebauliche Planung und Gestaltung von Neubauwohngebieten*) completes the regulation context.

#### FRG URBAN DEVELOPMENT PROMOTION ACT

1971: The *Städtebauförderungsgesetz* marks the switch from extensive to cautious urban renewal, in parallel with the Urban Recovery and Development Measures Programme of the same year. The 1976 Building Law (*Baugesetz*) also newly fxes the principle of citizen consultation in the urban planning process.

#### STADTUMBAU OST

2000: The federal programme focuses specifcally on shrinkage and social decay in the middle and main cities of the "new states" after reunifcation (about one million empty dwellings). The wide and complex programme envisages and fnances urban regeneration actions such as preserving historic city centres, demolishing or converting empty buildings in mass-housing neighbourhoods, and repairing and enhancing social contexts and public spaces.

#### HOUSING PROMOTION ACT

2002: The *Wohnraumförderungsgesetz* focuses on the weakness of previous legislation with a general, fnancial disengagement of the public hand from housing production: supporting those who really need social housing (large families, low-income people, special categories); providing greater consideration of the existing housing stock and of its modernisation; subsiding the acquisition of second-hand residential property; and promoting a closer integration of housing and urban development policies.

#### FEDERAL REFORM

2006 *Föderalismusreform*: Social housing competence becomes a shared matter between the country (*Bund*) and the states (*Länder*) with consequences for law making, setting living standards and fnancial support.

# TIMELINE City Planning and Programming

#### KLEIN-BERLIN

Berlin is an administrative unit under royal police control until 1875. Under the 1862 Hobrecht City Masterplan, the very lax 1853 Building Regulation, and the stricter rules of 1897, the city physically grows by half a million inhabitants every ffteen years, following the principles of liberal city—street alignments, height limitations (*Baufuchtlinien*) and free building density (*Baufreiheit*) within blocks and within the existing city boundary. The city develops as the capital and the main industrial centre of the kingdom, with the historical core as its directive and commercial city. In 1912, Berlin eventually becomes the city with the highest (ofcial) population density in the world (2.1 million in 6,700 hectares).

#### VERBAND GROSS-BERLIN

Intercommunal collaboration in urban planning between Berlin, the surrounding municipalities (Charlottenburg, Lichtenberg, Neukölln, Schöneberg, Standau and Wilhelmsdorf) and the Teltow and Niederbarmin districts.

#### GROSS-BERLIN

October 1920: Foundation of the wider communal administrative unit (Neue Stadtgemeinde Berlin) and related politics. The area grows to 87,800 hectares; the resident population in 1920 is 3.8 million.

#### 1925 BUILDING REGULATION AND 1925-29 "BUILDING ZONE" CITY MASTERPLAN

Both exclusively afect new building areas in which housing policy is greatly implemented by City Building Director Martin Wagner, favouring communal and public investments. The city's population steadily increases. Urban dimensional standards (number of foors, covering quote and building quote) are frst introduced. The planning foresees the preservation of wide green areas (Koeppen Plan, 1929) and the spatial separation of residential and industrial areas. Trafc routes do not infuence the whole composition much.

#### WEST BERLIN (WB) 1950 PLAN OF USES

After bombardments, half of Berlin's dwellings are badly damaged. The situation of industry, the directional and commercial buildings in the city centre, and the urban infrastructure is worse. On basis of the 1948 Bonatz Plan, focusing on Berlin as capital of a reunited Germany, the 1950 *Nutzungsplan* covers the entire Gross-Berlin territory, also providing plans for the bordering towns. City functions are strongly detached and homogeneously organised in three felds: living, leisure and work, ignoring the typical multi-purpose historical structure. Trafc planning is of frst importance, while a new radial system organizes the wide urban structure. The urban dimensional standards foresee a structured, loosened up and greened urban fabric.

STALINALLEE/KARL-MARX-ALLEE

	- (WB) CAPITAL BERLIN COMPETITION

1956/58

(EB) ZENTRUM DER HAUPTSTADT DER DDR COMPETITION, STATDZENTRUM BERLIN PLAN

#### 1958/59–1961

(WB) 1960 GREEN PLAN/1961 FUNCTIONAL BUILDING PLAN/ 1963 URBAN RENEWAL PROGRAMME

The 1960 *Hauptgrünfächenplan* foresees a ring-shaped and radial greening system for West Berlin. The 1961 *Baunutzungsplan* acts as a plan of uses and a building plan; The urban approach is similar to the 1950 plan of uses, with provision of a *City-Band* and a *Kulturband* crossing the urban fabric from west to east and hosting the main tertiary and the cultural functions, respectively. An urgent and subsidised housing programme, the 1963 *Stadterneuerungsprogramm*, implements the replacement approach (*Kahlschlagsanierung*) of the 1961 plan in the previously dense built areas of the city centre.

SPEER PLAN

#### (WB) 1965 PLAN OF USES

The 1965 *Flächennutzungsplan* follows on from the previous planning and refects the condition of the walled city. West Berlin develops multi centrally. Building density must be reduced in the central areas and increased in the periphery ("Urbanity through Density"). The functionalistic approach is further implemented, and a trafc rate proportioned to a fve million population results in an overlapping new highway net through the urban fabric.

#### (WB) 1984 PLAN OF USES

Relating to the superordinate Space Development Model, City Development Plan and Landscape Programme, the 1984 *Flächennutzungsplan* radically changes the urban philosophy of 1969 in favour of the intensifcation of existing uses, the preservation and the further development of the urban fabric and the reduction of new urbanization. Multi centrality, public transport, eco-sustainability, recreational and park areas are strengthened. The footprint of the functional separation and of the heavy roadways is reduced.

#### (EB) 1969 CITY MASTERPLAN

The *Generalbebauungsplan* is the frst real urban planning instrument for the GDR capital. It does not consider West Berlin any longer. It is conceived as a complex economic tool, whose plan of uses is the only part that is publicized. After the clearing up of damaged urban fabric, the plan foresees a representative city centre at the political and administrative service of the capital; a large-scale radial and tangent road network to connect this with the self-sufcient and widely greened surrounding neighbourhoods; clear separation between residential and industrial areas. In accordance with the new prefab construction system, and also, according to the principle of "Urbanity through Density," the plan foresees new extensive housing estates and a high population density (up to 600 inhab/ha in the city centre, up to 400 inhab/ha in the surrounding *Wohnkomplexe*). Building renewal projects are limited. The planning is released from 1977–80, and is basis of following, unimplemented 1989 *Generalbebauungsplan*.

#### (WB) 1974 URBAN RENEWAL PROGRAMME

In accordance with the federal 1971 *Städtebauförderungsgesetz*, the 1974 *Stadterneuerungsprogramm* changes the approach of its previous 1963 version and sets the preservation of the existing urban fabric as the priority.

#### IBA BERLIN 1984/87

The International Building Exhibition focuses on the motto, "city centre as living place." It deals with the historical urban fabric, the traditional building types and the local housing forms. On a laboratory area of about 7 km, and starting in 1978–79, it acts on the heavy damaged urban fabric with new building and cautious urban renewal, also serving as the theoretical model for the following plan of uses.

#### LAND BERLIN

After German reunifcation, West Berlin and East Berlin join in the city-state Land Berlin together. Its administrative territory mostly comprises that of pre-war Gross-Berlin, in the middle of surrounding Land Brandenburg. The attempt in 1995–98 at a political and administrative Berlin-Brandenburg unifcation fails.

#### 1994 PLAN OF USES

The 1984 plan is the basis of 1994 *Flächennutzungsplan* of unifed Berlin, where a multi-centre West Berlin matches a mono-centre, radially redeveloped East Berlin. The multi-centre concept prevails and new centralities of lower intensity are planned in the old and new eastern neighbourhoods. The foreseen 400,000 new dwellings must be realized via densifcation of the existing urban fabric, in addition to the mono-functional tertiary areas, as integration into mass-housing neighbourhoods, mostly in East Berlin. Wide green areas on the city outskirts and the Havel lake-wood landscape integrate a system of parks, street greenery and "free (private) gardens" to enforce the leading concept of "Green Berlin." The plan has been revised and consequently upgraded fve times.

#### STADTUMBAU OST

2002: The Berlin programme specifcally focuses on the mass-housing neighbourhoods of East Berlin and their shrinkage and social decay. It foresees the demolition of any unrenewed *Plattenbau* buildings (housing and facilities), the valorisation of public space, and service modernisation.

# KARL-MARX-ALLEE II *MinJi Kim\**

#### LOCATION Mitte district

AGENCY Staatlicher Wohnungsbau der DDR

#### DESIGNERS

Werner Dutschke and Edmund Collein (Urban planning), Josef Kaiser, Klaus Deutschmann (Architectural design)

BUILDING PERIOD 1959–65

SETTLEMENT AREA 64 ha

COVERING QUOTE 14 % (together with pre-existing buildings)

BUILDING STOREYS average 10 (1 to 13 storeys)

DWELLING NUMBER 4,674 for roughly 15,000 residents1

CONSTRUCTION TECHNOLOGY mostly prefab

\* TU Berlin, Chair of International Urbanism and Design (Habitat Unit)

The Karl-Marx-Allee II (hereafter KMA II) is the f rst housing estate built in East Berlin's centre according to the new prefabrication trend envisaged by Khrushchev, the general secretary of the Soviet Union, at the end of 1954: «build cheaper and faster».<sup>2</sup> In response to the post-war housing shortage situation, the industrialised building system, the *Plattenbau* (panel building), was extensively introduced in the completion of the socialist capital's avenue after the conclusion of its f rst sector in 1952–58 (hereafter KMA I), and it became the general system for new housing settlements throughout the country.

The large-scale settlement, with a reach of about one kilometre North-South as well as East-West, was realised at the west end of the working-class Friedrichshain district (nowadays Mitte), where more than 50 percent of the buildings were severely damaged by war bombardment.

The Karl-Marx-Allee, former named Stalinallee from 1949–61, belonged to the central axis (*Zentrale Achse*), from Brandenburger Gate to Strausberger Platz via Museum Island, envisaged by the *Zentrumsplan* of 19523 while the focal point of the new Socialist German capital converged at the city centre after the city's division. Due to its proximity to Alexanderplatz, KMA II accordingly became a centre-of-attention project in post-war social housing in the GDR.4

Along with this central political decision, the severe housing shortage and the economic privation pushed the country to turn to the newly industrialised construction method, so that the housing construction could be realised quickly at a low cost,5 also recalling the standardisation experience in Germany during the 1920s.6

KMA II was planned between 1958 and 1959, but in fact, the design started earlier. In 1957, Hermann Henselmann, architect in chief of the East Berlin Municipality (1953–59), designed a f rst settlement for 4,000 dwelling units as a continuation of the monumental Stalinallee, whose construction was concluding in those years (Fig. 2). The solution drafted an opened-up urban space rendered with point buildings and the prefabrication construction method,7 but strong opposition from the political apparatus, including criticism of the "anarchic character" by Kurt Liebknecht, president of Deutsche Bauakademie, stopped the proposal. This arose from the plausible comparison with West Berlin's Inter-

0 10050 200 500 m

FIGURE 1 Black and white plan of *Wohnkomplex* KMA II at present (ed.)

bau '57 in Hansaviertel and its emphasis on the loosened-up approach to city structure.<sup>8</sup> In September 1958, a decree specif ed a programme without any point buildings for a forthcoming internal competition, which saw the participation of any collectives from Berlin, Weimar and Dresden, the selection of Werner Dutschke's group of the State Planning Of ce Hochbau I at Magistrat Groß-Berlin (Fig. 3) and the f nal assignment to the Dutschke, Edmund Collein collective (Deutsche Bauakademie) and Josef Kaiser. With East Germany's strong commitment to the housing supply, the plan was expeditiously ref ned to f nalise the master plan in the same year and followed by the building plan one year later (Fig. 4).9 In fact, the f nal version was based on Henselmann's f rst concept,10 and it allegedly was not very dif erent from his early plan.<sup>11</sup>

Construction activities started in 1959 and ended in 1965. Part of the building programme remained unf nished owing to the new plan for Alexanderplatz, and the accordingly changed traf c plan, also unfulf lled, still included the demolition of any pre-war buildings on the western side (Fig. 12).12

KMA II was the prototype of the functionally autonomous Socialist *Wohnkomplex*, imagined as more than just a residential area, leading to the city centre by providing a citywide social infrastructure, such as a cinema, hotels, restaurants, and commercial and production spaces. Likewise, the width of Karl-Marx-Allee was broadened from the 70-90 metres of

urheberrechtlich geschützt

FIGURE 3 Competition mock-up of planning collective Werner Dutschke with Josef Kaiser, selected proposal, 1958

#### FIGURE 2

Hermann Henselmann's proposal for the fulflment of Stalinallee, 1957

KMA I (Stalinallee) to 120 metres, allowing for political propaganda and state events.<sup>13</sup> The neighbourhood also provided a well-connected centre that was densely populated, accommodating 15,000 residents in 4,600 housing units in an area of about 64 hectares.14 Symmetrically located along the central avenue, the public facilities were on the same building line as KMA I.15 The residential area, in accordance with the uniform composition style, consisted of 5-, 8- and 10-storey buildings with slight variations at rigid right angles to one another. Surrounded by high-rises at the southern edge of the settlement, kindergartens, schools and public services were designed and inserted as low-rise buildings in harmony with the widely greened spaces*.* Likewise, the colour concept was uniformly organized according to height: pale ceramic tiles for high-rises and brighter colours for lower buildings. In terms of the urban design concept, the stark diference from the organic style of the West Germany was expected; hence, KMA II could not avoid criticism from the Western newspaper *FAZ*16 and it was described as just a friendlier continuation of the colossal-looking KMA I.<sup>17</sup>

The public facilities, meanwhile, were designed as eye-catching pavilions and realised, albeit not completely, a few years later after housing construction started (1963–64). The characteristic pavilion architecture, such as Theatre Kino International and Restaurant Moscow, which faced each other at the junction with Schillingstraße, had a recessed ground foor covered by the wall and a glass facade with a lattice of steel on the frst foor. The architectural idea derived from Joseph Kaiser's intention, expressing a "modern Berlin building" exuding international folklore as well (Figs. 5–7). Among other buildings, the 13-storey Hotel Berolina, completed in 1963, was best known as the frst panel building with prefabricated decorations on its facade.18

#### FIGURE 4

Approved Building Plan of KMA II by Dutschke, Kaiser, Collein, 1959, with an indication of the public facilities: (1) neighbourhood centre, (2) primary school, (3) after-school care, (4) gymnasium, (5) auditorium, (6) food market, (7) restaurant, (8) laundry, (9) ambulatory, (10) national front, (11) nursery, (12) kindergarten, (14) "Haus des Kindes," (15) "Haus Berlin," (16) lightshow theatre, (17) hotel, (18) "Restaurant Moskau," (20) supra-local stores, (21) administration, (22) "Haus des Lehrers," (23) hall, (26) multi-storey car park, (27) underground garage, (28) workshop, (29) garden-care farm, (30) police station, (31) "Alexanderhaus," (32) "Berolinahaus," (33) Shopping arcade, (P) parking lots

#### FIGURE 5 (LEFT)

Perspective view of Karl-Marx-Allee from Strausberger Platz to Alexanderplatz in a competition sketch by Joseph Kaiser (attributed), 1958

#### FIGURE 6 (CENTRE)

Perspective view of Schillingstraße, sketch by Joseph Kaiser (attrib.), 1958 (ed.)

#### FIGURE 7 (RIGHT)

Aerial view of KMA II *Wohnkomplex*, sketch by Joseph Kaiser (attrib.), 1958 (ed.)

Meanwhile on the architectural scale, the prefabrication technique had been innovatively tested in many pilot projects.19 The QP series (*Querwandplattenbauweise*),20 where the long side of the building wall is the load-bearing element, was accordingly designed by Josef Kaiser for KMA II. This QP series is 3.6 metres wide, providing ca. 33 square metres (one room fat) to about 100 square metres (fve-room fat). The inner distribution of the residences usually contained an internal bathroom and a kitchen of about 6 square metres,21 along with a staircase outside and a cellar in the basement (Figs. 8, 9). In particular, the 5-storey apartments were mainly targeted at small families of four members: the room com-

urheberrechtlich geschützt

FIGURE 9 QP type construction system (ed.)

position included a half room for the kids and a connecting room for the living room on the western/southern side and a bedroom on the northern/eastern side. In the 8–10-storey buildings, there was also a lift, which was an improvement from the previous Q3 typology. The entrance to most buildings was on the northern side, but also on the eastern side in case the north- and south-oriented buildings.22

The QP series was named by the year of construction, and the number of storeys varied: QP 59 was built in 1959 with f ve storeys; QP 61 and QP 64, in 1961 and 1964, had eight storeys. Later, QP 64 had other variations with nine and ten storeys. The QP series was also one of the f rst *Plattenbau* typologies, together with P1 and P2, which contributed to the

#### FIGURE 10 (LEFT)

Construction site of Karl-Marx-Allee with the new revolving cranes at work on tracks, 1961 (ed.)

FIGURE 11 (RIGHT) Outer walls of 8- to 10-storey buildings before mounting in KMA II, 1961

later WBS 70 construction method, whose size of 1.2 by 1.2 metres enabled a more fexible spatial arrangement.23

East Germany's response to the housing shortage was in fact to exert all its power to provide residential units more quickly and at lower cost. This led to steady technical advancements from Q3 to QS, QP, P1, P2 and the dominant WBS 70 typology, complementing issues regarding the construction manner, the size and quality of the prefabrication elements and the curtailment of expenditure due to fnancial hardship. In particular, WBS 70, which developed on the basis of the KMA II Plattenbau system, was widely used for social housing development in Marzhan and Hellersdorf in the East Berlin Wohnungsbauprogramm der DDR (1976–90) and through the GDR in about 650,000 housing units between 1972 and 1990. Hence, the prefabricated panel building, as an architectural legacy of East Germany, had an impact far beyond its technological aspects. It was not only an element and a construction method, but also a space for living and furthering life, a tool of pressure for social conformity and ideological stifness from the regime's viewpoint (Fig. 15).<sup>24</sup>

After German reunifcation, most of the KMA II housing buildings underwent renovation in the frst 10 years, and they have been designated as heritage buildings, which allows us to recognise the frst Socialistic *Wohnkomplex* with the ceramic tile facade and to conserve it for future generation. Meanwhile, the public functions underwent diverse transformations: Hotel Berolina was demolished in 1995 and replaced by the Mitte District City Hall, a seemingly similar looking building, in 1998; The pavilions and other public facilities,

#### FIGURE 12 (LEFT) Realised (red) and not realised (yellow) buildings of KMA II (original plan at present)

#### FIGURE 13 (TOP RIGHT)

View of Karl-Marx-Allee and Restaurant Moskau from Strausberger Platz. Photo by Horst Sturm, 1963 (ed.)

#### FIGURE 14 (BOTTOM RIGHT)

The public facilities at the intersection between Schillingstraße and Karl-Marx-Allee. Photo by Joachim Spremberg, 1965 (ed.)

CC BY-SA 3.0

CC BY-SA 3.0

#### FIGURE 15 Aerial view of KMA II from the Television Tower. Photo by Rolf Vetter, 1970 (ed.)

which had been neglected and underused, became part of a new experiment involving an ongoing public participation project in the area surrounding Haus der Statistik.

#### NOTES

1  Maria Berning and Michael Braum, *Berliner Wohnquartiere: Ein Führer durch 70 Siedlungen*, 3rd Edition (Berlin: Reimer, 2003), p. 185; Irma Leinauer, "The Second Wave of Post-War Modernism in East Berlin: Karl-Marx-Allee from Strausberger Platz to Alexanderplatz," in *Karl-Marx-Allee and Interbau 1957: Confrontation, Competition and the Co-evolution of Modernism in Berlin*, ed. Jörg Haspel and Thomas Flierl, pp. 45–54; Beiträge zur Denkmalpflege in Berlin, Volume 52. (Berlin: Landesdenkmalamt, 2019), p. 46.

2  This motto was declared at the Building Conference of Socialist Allies in Moscow. See "Besser, billiger und schneller bauen," *Bauzeitung* (1955, n. 9, II): p. 50.

3  Wolfgang Ribbe, *Die Karl-Marx-Allee zwischen Strausberger Platz und Alex*, 1st Edition (Berlin: BWV, Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2005), p. 73.

4  Berning and Braum, *Berliner Wohnquartiere*, pp. 182–84.

5  Wolfgang Ribbe, *Die Karl-Marx-Allee*, p. 42; Peter Richter, *Der Plattenbau als Krisengebiet: Die architektonische und politische Transformation industriell errichteter Wohngebäude aus der DDR am Beispiel der Stadt Leinefelde*, PhD Dissertation (Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, 2006), p. 30.

6  Since the *Plattenbau* building system originated with military barracks, it was positively adopted in Germany during the 1920s in the period of the Weimar Republic for the Housing Programme (*Wohnungsbauprogramm*)*.* See Peter Richter, *Der Plattenbau als Krisengebiet*, p. 13.

7  Ribbe, *Die Karl-Marx-Allee*, p. 59.

FIGURE 16

View of Karl-Marx-Allee from Alexanderplatz to Strausberger Platz, 2020 (ed.)

FIGURE 17 Pedestrian walkway along Karl-Marx-Allee, 2020

FIGURE 18 Behind Karl-Marx-Allee, 2020

#### 16  Ibid.

17  The architectural design of KMA I refected the aims of the Socialist realism ideology and the stylistic approach inspired by the Berlin Classicism of the turn of the 18th-19th century in full accordance with the proclaimed Urban Design Principles (*Grundsätzte des Städtebaus*). See Wolfgang Ribbe, *Die Karl-Marx-Allee*, pp. 25–33.

18  Leinauer, "Second Wave," p. 52.

19  Before the prefabrication construction method was introduced in KMA II, it had been tested in the suburbs of Berlin and in other cities since the late 1950s, such as in Friedrichsfelde (Lichtenberg), Berlin-Johannisthal and Hoyerswerda. Due to the political and economic situation, the *Plattenbau* system was adopted for 30 percent of housing projects in 1958, increasing to 70 percent by 1960. See Herbert Schwenk, "Die Splanemann-Siedlung," Berlin Geschichte, 1997, accessed March 20, 2020, https://berlingeschichte.de/bms/ bmstxt97/9704detb.htm.

20  For example, the Splanemann-Siedlung, Friedrichsfelde started using the so-called Q3 typology, which in practice followed the conventional construction method by basically using the principle of brickwork (*Blockbauweise*)*.* QP typology has evolved from this model. See Ribbe, *Die Karl-Marx-Allee*, p. 86; Schwenk, *Die Splanemann-Siedlung.*

21  The frst building step for Karl-Marx-Allee (Stalinallee until 1961), the Palace for the Working Class (*Arbeiterpalast*), introduced the concept of comfort into popular housing: plenty of sunlight, spacious rooms, a heating system, fowing water (also hot water), a lift, a caretaker in the entrance and fats of up to 145 m². Wide and clearly defned gardens in front of the buildings were also part of the concept.

22  Ribbe, *Die Karl-Marx-Allee*, pp. 86–7.

23  WBM Wohnungsbaugesellschaft Berlin-Mitte mbH Wire Staff, *Jeder M² Du. Das Plattenbaukulturportal*, last modified 2020, accessed November 14, 2019, https://www.jeder-qm-du.de/index/; Sigfried Kress and Günther Hirschfelder, *Industrieller Wohnungsbau: Allgemeine Grundlagen* (Berlin: Verlag für Bauwesen, 1980).

24  Richter, *Der Plattenbau als Krisengebiet*, p. 6.

# LEIPZIGER STRAßE *Antonello Scopacasa\**

#### LOCATION Mitte district

AGENCY Staatlicher Wohnungsbau der DDR

#### DESIGNERS

Collective Peter Schweizer, Dorothea Tscheschner, Dieter Schulze, Lothar Arzt and Ulrich Neubert of Bezirksbauamt-Bereich Städtebau und Architektur at Magistrat Ost-Berlin Hauptstadt der DDR under the direction of Chief Architect Joachim Näther (Urban design); Werner Strassenmeier, Günther Wernitz, Arno Weber, Klaus Berger and Klaus Weißhaupt of VE Wohnungsbaukombinat (Architectural design).

BUILDING PERIOD 1969–81

SETTLEMENT AREA 12 ha

COVERING QUOTE 8 %

BUILDING STOREYS average 10–25 (Housing)

DWELLING NUMBER 2,058 (1-room f at 5 %, 2-room f at 37 %, 3-room f at 27 %, 4-room f at 20 %, 6-room f at 3 %, for ca. 6,200 inhabitants)

CONSTRUCTION TECHNOLOGY partly prefab

\* TU Berlin, Chair of International Urbanism and Design (Habitat Unit)

The Leipziger Straße was Berlin's most important commercial avenue at the turn of the 19th century, bridging the mediaeval city core of Berlin-Cölln and the f rst major railway stations built westwards near Potsdamer Platz between the 1860s and 1870s. It was one of the three main axes of the baroque city and, like the whole Friedrichstadt, it was characterised by a very dense building fabric consisting of multi-courtyard rectangular blocks (75 x 120–150 metres) with prevalent tertiary uses, which towards the end of the nineteenth century had replaced the former residential and boundary building morphology (Figs. 2, 3).

A deep transformation of the area occurred at the turn of World War II, between 1935 and 1955, with the expropriation of many Jewish properties by the Nazi regime, the physical dismemberment of the building substance due to the incendiary bombardments and the resulting clearing up works and, f nally, the death or f ight abroad of the grounds' owners. Lastly the building of the Wall in 1961 two blocks south of the ancient axis had broken the continuity of the surrounding urban fabric, both physical and social (Fig. 4). Also, even before the GDR Building Law (*Aufbaugesetzt*) of 1950, which, among other measures, enabled the immediate expropriation of land for public utility to implement urban programmes throughout the state, the area of ered little resistance to the major interventions foreseen by the grand *Stadtzentrum Berlin* project, which, from the mid-1960s onwards, af ected the historical inner city, the eccentric core of the new socialist capital.

The project was based on the results of the competition *Zentrum der Hauptstadt der DDR* held in 1958 in response to the competition *Hauptstadt Berlin* organised one year earlier for the same central area, but on a larger scale, by the Western administration. It was developed between 1958 and 1961 under the inf uence of the prominent political f gures, Walther Ulbricht, national secretary of the SED, and Paul Werner, secretary of the SED in Berlin. The plan foresaw a central representative core at the service of the capital of a reunif ed Germany under the banner of socialism, imagined as a superordinate centre to the system of *Wohngebiete* and *Wohnkomplexen*, which built up, by areas of interconnected autonomy, and with a refounding approach, the open and measured urban space. Four tangential main roads (*Tangenten*) organised the heavy traf c around the inner city, which hosted the main institutions of the central and local powers. The residence—which in the

0 10050 200 500 m

#### FIGURE 1

Black and white plan of Leipziger Straße housing complex at present

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FIGURE 3 Crossroad Leipziger Straße-Friedrichstraße. Photo by Waldemar Titzenthaler, 1910

GDR, with few exceptions, was public—was the main tool for the general spatial def nition, as happened in the case of the Marx-Engel Forum (1964–73) built between Alexanderplatz and Marx-Engel Platz along the *Zentrale Achse* in place of the medieval nucleus of Berlin. The plan envisaged Leipziger Straße as the southern tangential main road (*Südtangente)*, where, like the other four main roads, typical high-rises with residential and tertiary purposes marked the skyline of the city centre.1

The planning started in 1961 and implementation began in 1964. After four dif erent versions, the urban planning and the f rst architectural design f nished in 1969, following the approval in 1968 of the new City Masterplan (*Generalbebauungsplan Hauptstadt der DDR*), which f nally envisaged the "compact city" model for the central area and, specif cally for Leipziger Straße, the high-density standard of 600 inhabitants per hectare. The project was developed by the collective Schweizer, Tscheschner, Schulze, Arzt and Neubert of the Department for Building and Urban design in the eastern municipality under the direction of Chief Architect Joachim Näther in collaboration with the housing prefab building company (*VE Wohnungsbaukombinat*) under the direction of Werner Strassenmeier, which led the detailed design and all the construction phases.2

The overall architectural plan foresaw an ensemble consisting of four main residential towers of 22–25 f oors sited in line on the southern side of the street and directly facing the

#### FIGURE 2

"Straubeplan" of the inner city, detail of Leipziger Straße, original drawing scale by Julius Straube 1:4,000, 1910

FIGURE 4 The axis Leipziger Platz-Leipziger Straße after the rubble clearing-up works, aerial view, 1964

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Wall, a broad multifunctional two-foor slab at their basement, three line buildings, each with 10–14 foors on the northern side drawing back from the original limit of Leipziger Straße and enclosing the main historical square, the Gendarmenmarkt (newly named the Platz der Akademie) at their backs. A thirty-foor high-rise for directional purposes had to conclude the complex at the Spittelmarkt crossroad to the east, where the new *Südtangente*, which went to the Ostbahnhof should have joined the Gertrauden-Grünerstraße to the Alexanderplatz.

In the fnal version, the length of the intervention shrank at Charlottenstraße, instead of Friedrichstraße, while the four towers were moved eastwards to enclose the Dönhofplatz and to replace the high-rise at the Spittelmarkt (Fig. 5, 6).

The housing accommodation addressed mostly middle- and high-ranking civil servants, employers and diplomats assigned to nearby embassies, and foreign journalists. Trade, ofces, medical services, gastronomy, leisure and social facilities addressing the wider audience of the city were placed at street level on both sides of the street. An evaluation in 1986 about social facilities throughout the city reported that the Leipziger Straße settlement equalled or overstepped the targets of the original programme.3

The building enterprise started in 1969 and concluded in 1981, expressing the state of the art in construction and in the social organisation of the GDR well. The building technologies of the residential towers on the southern side foresaw a hybrid adaptation of the current *Platten* building system (Fig. 7).4 The pillars and beams were structured around a nucleus of steel-concrete and walled up by prefabricated elements (*Stahlbetonskelett-Montagebauweise, SK-WHH*)*.* Due to the multifunctional use of the basement, a modular and lighter steel structure should have been adopted at ground level. It would eventually be replaced by an easier detached building typology with prefab concrete components and organised on three levels: the cellar for delivery and storage served by an underground street; the ground foor for selling in open space and for preparing goods; the upper foor with a shop area, ofces and a learning area.

The interior distribution of the residential towers on the southern side involves a service nucleus, two street corridors and habitation lines (2–4 room fats) laid out on both sides of the building, counting on a singular viewpoint. Continuous balconies and French windows plastically mark the eastern and western fronts, while prefab hanging and volumetric facade elements turn around the buildings at the frst level opening up the street environment and uplifting the towers' masses (Fig. 8). Tower by tower, colour composition plays with blue and red tones on the generally prevalent white background.

Beside the two commercial pavilions, which are centrally located between the towers (3 and 5 in Fig. 6), a public garden ends at the western side the row of plane trees along Leipziger Straße, while a recreational and sport area occupies the opposite side in place of

FIGURE 5 Masterplan *Stadtzentrum der Hauptstadt der DDR*, detail on Leipziger Straße, released June 1969. Below, the trace of the Wall

#### FIGURE 6

Ground plan of the Leipziger Straße complex with indication of the public facilities: (1, 2) restaurant, (3) trade pavilion, (4) medical clinic, (5) gastronomy, (6) kindergarten, (7) shops, (8) cultural centre, bank, shops, (9) post, chemist, shops, (10) kids store

#### FIGURE 7 (LEFT, RIGHT)

Dossier on the Leipziger Straße project in *Wohnhochhäuser ˊ69*, 1970. The southern residential towers: bearing structure around the steel-concrete nucleus walled up by prefabricated panels (frst page) and the fronts (second page); model view of the complex eastwards

#### the previous Dönhofplatz, hosting the reconstruction of Gonthard's Spittelkolonnaden (1776) and many leisure facilities. Three additional playgrounds are conveniently located at the southern back skirt of the trade pavilions and well detached from the heavy trafc of Leipziger Straße (Fig. 10).

The line buildings on the northern side of the street ofer a wider displacement of the apartments, also providing a singular and double viewpoint (2–6 room fats). Their construction foresaw an adaptation of the current *Platten* building system with a longitudinal disposition of the bearing elements walled up by prefabricated facades (*SK-Bauten*) and cross-braced by staircases of steel-concrete*.* The in-line disposition of the buildings on the north side concludes eastwards with the housing buildings along the Niederwallstraße,

Housing inner distribution in the southern towers (left) and in the northern in-line buildings (right)

#### FIGURE 10 (LEFT)

Playground on the southern side at the back of a trade pavilion, 1986

FIGURE 11 (RIGHT) The residential towers of Leipziger Straße, aerial view eastward. Photo by Barbara Esch-Marowski, 1998

built partly in continuity with the historical urban fabric. In this case, the construction technology foresaw a more usual panel prefab type WBS 70/71.

Also because of the eccentric location in the wider geography of East Berlin, the ensemble had a quite autonomous life in the following years, which continues at the present time. The early 1970s agreements between the Federal Republic and the Eastern-bloc countries, and thus political stabilisation, weakened the dream of a national reunifcation under the banner of socialism, and thus symbolic rule for the inner city. Furthermore, because of a question of socioeconomic imbalance, the large mass housing on the outskirts of the city also overcame the target of *Stadtzentrum*, which deals within the municipal and national political programmes.

With the fall of the GDR in 1989, and until 2001, the housing-estate property of the Leipziger Straße complex was partly transferred to the newly founded communal public company (1990), the Wohnungsbaugesellschaft Berlin-Mitte (WBM), partly split up and privatised. Since 2000, the buildings have been progressively renovated to preserve most of the facades and to improve their energy performance.

For several reasons, the complex appears nowadays as an urban exception and not as part of a coherent, wider system. The functional and social density, especially that of pre-war times, as was the subsequent GDR *Diplomatenviertel*, is mostly lost. Residents take full advantage of the central location, but many of the original public facilities have disappeared, while shops and services at street level remain underused. Also, a visible daily street life, even in the very comfortable promenade proportions on the southern side, is difcult

FIGURE 9 Leipziger Straße once construction is complete. Photo by Gerhard Hofmann, 1977

FIGURE 12 (TOP LEFT) Leipziger Straße view westwards, 2019

FIGURE 13 (BOTTOM LEFT)

Marion-Grafn-Dönhof-Platz view with the reconstruction of the Gonthard's Spittelkolonnaden, 2019

FIGURE 14 (RIGHT) Promenade along Leipziger Straße, 2019

#### NOTES

FIGURE 15 Entrance to a residential tower, 2019

# MÄRKISCHES VIERTEL *Natalia Kvitkova\**

#### LOCATION Reinickendorf district

#### AGENCY

GeSoBau (Gesellschaft für sozialen Wohnungsbau)

#### DESIGNERS

Werner Düttmann, Hans Müller and Georg Heinrichs were responsible for the overall planning. Karl Fleig, Rene Gages, Ernst Gisel, Lothar Juckel, Chen Kuen Lee, Ludwig Leo, Peter Pfankuch, Hansrudolf Plarre, Heinz Schudnagies, Herbert Stranz, Oswald Mathias Ungers, Schadrach Woods, Astra Zarina-Haner, Siegfried Hof e, Erwin Eickhof , Jo Zimmermann and the construction department of DeGeWo provided additional designs.

BUILDING PERIOD 1963–74

SETTLEMENT AREA 3.2 km²

COVERING QUOTE 11 %

BUILDING STOREYS 5–20

DWELLING NUMBER 17,000 apartments across 65 buildings for 40,258 residents (June 30, 2019)

CONSTRUCTION TECHNOLOGY partly prefab

\* TU Berlin, Chair of International Urbanism and Design (Habitat Unit)

The Märkisches Viertel urban redevelopment area is in the Reinickendorf district, bordering the Pankow district in the east, Rosenthal district in the south, Wittenau in the west and Lübars in the north. Along with Gropiusstadt in the southeast and Falkenhagener Feld in the northwest, it was one of three large residential developments of the former West Berlin, as well as one of the largest in West Germany.

Before Märkisches Viertel became a showcase project of West Berlin's ambitious urban renewal programme, it was Berlin's largest (informal) allotment settlement, named Wilhelmsruh. Plots were originally rented out exclusively as gardening allotments for inner-city dwellers but, as a result of huge housing shortages in the wake of World Wars I and II, tenants started to live in their sheds (Fig. 2).1

The Märkisches Viertel settlement (hereafter MV) was redeveloped in accordance with the f rst Urban Renewal Programme passed by the government of West Berlin in March 1963. It aimed to demolish large areas of nineteenth-century tenement housing in the inner city and to resettle inhabitants into satellite settlements. The implementation of this costly programme received generous f nancial support from the Federal Republic of Germany because of its position in the middle of the socialist German Democratic Republic.

To construct the housing estate, the state-operated housing association GeSoBau (Gesellschaft für sozialen Wohnungsbau) bought 430 allotment plots over the course of a decade, evicted the residents and demolished the settlement. This occurred despite protests that characterised the destruction of the allotment homes as unconstitutional. Evicted residents received on average 1,700 marks' compensation.2 Construction on the housing estate began in 1963 under the supervision of DeGeWo (Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Förderung des Wohnungsbaues). Many of the former inhabitants of the allotments were moved onto the estate.3

Märkisches Viertel was planned as a self-suf cient satellite city (*Trabantenstadt*) according to the highly ideologized urban planning of the 1950s and 1960s, which was inf uenced by the principles of the Athens Charter. It stressed the importance of functional separation in the individual f ats, as well as the inclusion of spaces for outdoor recreation, a focus on separating automobile traf c from the buildings and pedestrian routes, and the provision of social infrastructure. This approach to the post-war discussion on urban development

FIGURE 1 Black and white plan of Märchisches Viertel at present (ed.)

<sup>0</sup> 10050 200 500 m in Germany was reinforced by the ideals of "*Urbanität durch Dichte*," or urbanity through density, promoted by planner Edgar Salin and sociologist Hans Paul Bahrd.4 The assumption that urbanity resulted from density supported the move to construct large housing estates that could replicate the social successes derived from the density of the inner-city core.

> Apart from that, the peculiar, newly representative location directly facing the Wall and the Eastern Berlin sector had also played a dealing role in the planning approach. After a long and complex elaboration by the Reinickendorf district that started in 1952

#### FIGURE 2

Landplan of Wilhelmsruh in 1950 with difuse plot system of detached single-family houses (ed.)

#### FIGURE 3 (LEFT)

Masterplan by Reinickendorf City Planning Ofce for the Wilhelmsruh recovery area, March 1962 (ed.)

#### FIGURE 4 (RIGHT)

First version of Märchisches Viertel masterplan by Hans Christian Müller, Georg Heinrichs and Werner Düttmann, July 1962 (original drawing scale 1:10,000). The three branches of high-density buildings, the surrounding greened areas and the detached single-family houses and the crossing natural corridor in the middle are highly recognisable (ed.)

(Fig. 3),5 architects Hans Christian Müller, Georg Heinrichs and Karl Fleig received the assignment for the defnitive urban concept in April 1962 from the Senate of Berlin (Senator for Building and Housing). At the beginning of 1963, Senate Architect in Chief Werner Düttmann replaced Fleig in the team that oversaw the overall planning, while notable architects of the time such as Oswald Mathias Ungers contributed individual building designs.6

The aim was to create a new urban unit with a clear orientation to its own centre and a strong confrontation with the natural elements. In the authors' words: «An attempt will be made to enclose both the preserved and newly planned detached single-family houses, which are to be understood as "greened area," by means of large and comprehensive gestures with multi-storey housing construction; in the central part of Wilhelmsruher Damm

#### FIGURE 5 (LEFT)

Landscape concept for open spaces, with the little tree raster (6 x 6 metres) covering the parking places around the buildings, the wider raster as the greened areas, the widest raster for sports and playgrounds. Design by Elisabeth Kutschera, 1966 (ed.)

#### FIGURE 6 (RIGHT)

Model view of Märchisches Viertel, state of the project, 1970 (ed.)

they will be joined together to form a centre.… The three branches form spaces that are to be developed as green areas».7 After a quick procedure, the planning ended in 1963 and construction began (Fig. 4).8 Landscape designer Elisabeth Kutschera laid out the greened areas, while six artists provided a concept for plastics and playgrounds aiming at variegating the public space (Fig. 5). This concept included the colour plan of Utz Kampmann.

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The resulting structure of Märkisches Viertel was composed of distinct, massive housing blocks with colourful facade designs. The building heights varied and included singlefamily homes, but, on average, they were between fve and fourteen foors with higherdensity buildings up to eighteen storeys staggered on the edges and the middle of the estate (Fig. 6). Among them was the large block nicknamed "*Der lange Jammer*" (The Long Lament), designed by Rene Gages to provide inhabitants with living rooms and balconies that profted from the southern sun.

The individual fats included modern, private bathrooms and kitchens, balconies, district heating and lifts (Fig. 7). These features had all been lacking from the historic tenement quarters from which residents had been relocated. The measures were seen as a way to improve living conditions and to facilitate societal renewal.

A green belt was formed surrounding the buildings; several parks, hilly meadows and a network of small streams linked the artifcial lakes Segelluchbecken and Mittelfeldbecken. Cutting through the middle was the main road, Wilhelmsruher Damm. At the estate's "centre" on an east-west boulevard were the main commercial and cultural amenities.9

Märkisches Viertel incited controversy in 1968 as the result of the exhibition Aktion 507 which was set up by an infuential group of architecture students from West Berlin's Technical University. The exhibition was held at the ffth Bauwochen (Building Fair) in 1968, and it was intended to commend the success of the urban renewal programme.

#### FIGURE 7

Housing interior in a building in northern MV by Hans Müller and Georg Heinrichs. Central core distribution, apartments with single and multiple exposition from 40 to 110 m² (ed.)

#### FIGURE 8 (LEFT)

Panel contesting urban politics at a plot in Wilhelmsruh before the construction of the new settlement. Photo by Johann Willa, 1964

#### FIGURE 9 (RIGHT)

View from the south-west of Märkisches Viertel under construction. Photo by Hans Seiler, 1968

Instead, the group criticised the "*Kahlschlagsanierung*;" the demolition of the fairly intact nineteenth-century urban fabric across Berlin, the displacement of residents of inner-city tenements to housing estates and the subsequent destruction of the existing social coherence of the localised urban networks. The programme and the entire design of Märkisches Viertel was accused of perpetuating top-down, patronising planning instead of collective, resident-led planning. Critics also pointed to the multitude of realisation defciencies that plagued the early days of residents of the settlement.

During these early years of its implementation, the number of residents living in Märkisches Viertel quickly surpassed the capacity of its infrastructure, including shops, restaurants, schools, kindergartens and playgrounds across the estate.

The newly planted green spaces did not have sufcient time to grow, leaving the estate looking bare and dominated by the concrete of the buildings. Criticism also targeted the shoddy workmanship and the monotony of the overall building designs. Media reports exacerbated opinions that residents were sufering from the anonymity of the housing estate and unable to identify with their new environment. It developed a bad reputation as an epicentre of youth crime.

Furthermore, the frst residents of Märkisches Viertel were promised a subway connection by the end of the 1960s. There was already an S-Bahn station in Wittenau, although it was not considered a transport connection. It was boycotted by most of the estate residents because it was operated by Deutsche Reichsbahn, the state railway of the German Democratic Republic until 1984, when the BVG, the West Berlin railway company, took over the line. However, by the mid-1980s, the infrastructure had been sufciently implemented, technical construction defciencies had been rectifed and the negativity surrounding the image of the estate waned.

Today, GeSoBau continues to own 15,000 residential units in Märkisches Viertel. By 2015, it had completely modernised the entire complex, at a cost of €440 million, including support from the Federal Ministry for Transport, Building and Urban Afairs for upgrading the energy conservation capacity. This included a new heating system, window replacment, facade insulation and the installation of intelligent electricity meters in 10,000 apartments. GeSoBau also redesigned green areas and outftted paths with better lighting at night.<sup>10</sup>

#### FIGURE 10 (LEFT)

View of the parking areas beside the MV commercial core. Photo by Jürgen Henschel, 1977 (ed.)

#### FIGURE 11 (RIGHT)

Seggeluchbecken, part of the MV inner natural corridor. Housing buildings by Chen Kuen Lee in the background. Photo by Rolf Kohler, 1977

There is ample social infrastructure, commercial and service amenities on the estate, along with 14 crèches and 11 schools. Residents are a mix of social classes and nationalities, with an immigrant population of roughly 13 %, largely comprised of people with Turkish and Polish backgrounds.11

There is a high proportion of senior citizens, largely of German origin, many of whom have lived in Märkisches Viertel for decades. In recent years, more families with young children have been moving to the estate. GeSoBau has worked alongside the district of Reinickendorf to support social and cultural development and to continue to improve infrastructure.

#### NOTES

1  Dieter Voll, *Von der Wohnlaube zum Hochhaus. Eine geografsche Untersuchung über die Entstehung und Struktur des Märkisches Viertels in Berlin (West) bis 1976* (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1983), pp. 5–26.

2  Roughly 4,000 Euros in current value.

3  Florian Urban, "The Hut on the Garden Plot: Informal Architecture in Twentieth-Century Berlin," *Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians* 72, no. 2 (2013).

4  Florian Urban, "Large Housing Estates of Berlin, Germany," in *Housing Estates in Europe. The Urban Book Series*, ed. D. Hess, I. Tammaru, and M. van Ham (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018), p. 103.

5  Voll, *Von der Wohnlaube zum Hochhaus*, pp. 31–73.

6  The anomaly of the commitment is quite remarkable: frst for the direct assignment, second because an architect in chief at Berlin Senate (*Senatsbaudirektor*) entered a planning group formed by an independent designer, third because Düttmann was replaced in 1966 by Müller in his leading role in the Senate. See Jörn Düwel and Niels Gutschow, "Städtebau vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis zu den 'Grenzen des Wachstums' in den frühen siebziger Jahren. 1918–1975," in *Berlin und seine Bauten. Teil I: Städtebau*, ed. Harald Bodenschatz et al. (Berlin: Jovis, 2009), p. 328.

7  Werner Düttmann et al., "Planung," in *Der Städtebau* (1963, n. 14/15), pp. 390–91.

8  In total, more than 35 architects contributed to building designs for the estate: the DeGeWo planning ofce for its own sector, independent architects such as Fleig, Gagès, Ungers and Pfankuch for the GeSoBau sector, and Werner Düttman for the Debausie sector.

9  Thomas Knorr-Siedow, and Christiane Droste, *Large Housing Estates in Berlin, Germany: Opinions of Residents on Recent Developments*, Utrecht: RESTATE (Restructuring Large-scale Housing Estates in European Cities: Good Practices and New Visions for Sustainable Neighbourhoods and Cities), Report 4b, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, 2005, p. 16.

10  *Modernisation of the Märkisches Viertel in Berlin: Integrated Development Concept for a 1960s Era Large Residential Development* (Berlin: GeSoBau, 2009), pp. 9–15.

11  Ibid., p. 21.

#### FIGURE 12

Greened areas around the north-west MV housing designed by Hans Christian Müller and Georg Heinrichs. Atelier apartment are located on the roof, 2019

FIGURE 13

Housing by Chen Kuen Lee near Seggeluchbecken viewed from Senftenberger Ring, 2019

# GROßWOHNSIEDLUNG MARZAHN *Martin Spalek\**

LOCATION Marzahn-Hellersdorf district

AGENCY Staatlicher Wohnungsbau der DDR (GDR Housing Department)

DESIGNERS Roland Korn, Peter Schweizer, Heinz Graf under, Dieter Schulze among others

BUILDING PERIOD main period 1976–85, further additions until 1992

SETTLEMENT AREA about 14 km2

COVERING QUOTE 13 %

BUILDING STOREYS (MIN-MAX) 5–21

DWELLING NUMBER 62,600 in Marzahn; additional 53,000 in Hellersdorf

CONSTRUCTION TECHNOLOGY mostly prefab

\* TU Berlin, Chair of International Urbanism and Design (Habitat Unit)

The *Großwohnsiedlung* Marzahn today counts as one of the largest coherently planned and developed housing projects in Europe. The area was created primarily on previously agricultural land to the east of the city core. Within nine years, a total of 62,600 apartments were developed from south to north, and in later additions to the residential areas north, west and east of the initial residential areas, *Wohngebiete 1–3*. With the later developments in Kaulsdorf-Nord and Hellersdorf, more than 110,000 apartments were built with an industrial production typology in the present-day district of Marzahn-Hellersdorf until 1990 (Fig. 2). While the housing construction in the 1960s created 80 % of the housing in 49 dif erent locations, the residential complexes of Marzahn, Hohenschönhausen and Salvador Allende Quarter were responsible for about 80 % of the housing construction in Berlin from 1981–84. Marzahn's share of the population of Berlin increased from 5.6 % in 1979 to 15.6 % in 1985.

With the decision on an ambitious GDR Housing Programme in 1973 (*Wohnungsbauprogramm der DDR*), the City Council of East Berlin initiated a long-term development concept for the eastern part of the city. The concept followed the reinforced principle of radial development in the 1968 City Masterplan (*Generalbebauungsplan Hauptstadt der DDR*), extending the urban fabric in the direction of existing settlement centres, without creating housing beyond the administrative limits (Fig. 3). The decision to establish the residential area for Marzahn was formally authorised by the highest party organs of the SED in 1975. Before this, the area layout by the chief architect of East Berlin, Roland Korn, emerged as the basis for the development in an internal urban planning competition (Fig. 4). Until 1976, he and fellow architect Peter Schweizer worked with an interdisciplinary working group of experts of the dif erent administrative bodies related to housing and planning (Büro für Städtebau des Magistrats, Bauakademie, Ingenieurhochbaus, and Wohnungsbaukombinats und Tiefbaukombinats of Berlin, as well as the Staatliche Plankommission and the Bezirksplankomission) on detailing the development concept. In the same year Heinz Graf under was appointed chief architect and supervisor of the site. In mid-1977, the f rst *Wohnungsbauserie 70* (WBS 70) slab for a ten-storey residential building was set in southern Marzahn (*Wohngebiet* 1). While the f rst complexes were built as intended in the initial development concept, changes to the plan were made from the early 1980s on.

#### FIGURE 1

Black and white plan of Marzahn's central area (*Wohngebiete* 1-3) at present. Hellersdorf settlement is on the right (ed.)

#### FIGURE 2

Integration of green spaces throughout the district. The Wuhletal Park was set to be the central recreational zone, accessible from all complexes in Marzahn and neighbouring Hellersdorf and Biesdorf

Due to dwindling fnancial resources, restrictions were progressively placed upon further complexes. While density and standardisation increased the efciency of land use at the cost of public space and social infrastructure, cost-cutting measures reduced the amount of concrete used in the slabs and simplifed interior fttings. 1:50000

Marzahn is located about twelve kilometres east of Alexanderplatz–the representative and cultural centre of Berlin-East. Its integration with the overall organism of the city was pursued by the continuation and broadening of the Landsberger Allee and the 1982 extension of the S-Bahn from Friedrichsfelde Ost to Ahrensfelde.As a north-eastern radial, the Landsberger Allee ftted into the historically traced radial system of the city, with the S-Bahn and later U-Bahn connection adding to the intended close functional relationships of Marzahn and Hellersdorf with the historic centre.The expansion of the entire new development area covers a length of almost seven kilometres and a width of up to three kilometres. Housing zones of 1–1.5 km in width were planned to provide quick access to major infrastructure routes into the city and to recreational zones.

The basis of Marzahn's concrete urban planning and all the other residential areas was the complex guideline for urban planning and the design of residential areas (*Komplexrichtlinie*

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FIGURE 6 Inner organisation of a *Wohnbereich*. Photo Hubert Link, 1984 (ed.)

FIGURE 3 Overview of East Berlin urban development in a plan by Roland Korn, 1976

#### FIGURE 4 (LEFT)

Proposals at an internal urban planning competition for the frst three *Wohngebiete* of Marzahn: (from the top) collective of Roland Korn, architect in chief of East Berlin's Municipality; collective of E. Henn (Erfurt); collective of R. Lasch (Rostock); collective of H. Siegel (Leipzig)

#### FIGURE 5 (RIGHT)

Extract of plan of Marzahn southern termination: example of a *Wohnbereich* (housing zone) as the primary cell of a superordinate *Wohngebiet*. Residence line buildings enclose the "social centre" on three or four sides hosting the local primary facilities: market (a), restaurant (g), leisure centre (k, *Feierabendheim*) and many kindergartens within the extensive gardening inside the complex. The school (b) is an element of the higher *Wohngebiet* and it is reachable on foot without crossing major roads. Outside the living area, there is plenty of room for mobility

*für die städtebauliche Planung und Gestaltung von Neubauwohngebieten,* 1976). The residential buildings are grouped in three- or four-sided closed block-like forms in residential complexes organised like villages. Each residential complex (*Wohnbereich*) has associated social infrastructures and a centre with basic residential facilities (Figs. 5, 6). This was supposed to ensure that essential facilities are never more than 600 m from the fats and that crossing major roads is not necessary. Several residential complexes form a residential area (*Wohngebiet*) with superordinate residential area centre of recreational and supply facilities. These should be designed as a social core and a central meeting point of a lively neighbourhood. Each building, though, is strictly mono-functional. The residential areas are spatially separated from each other by the main development axes. There is no transit trafc within the residential areas. The residential complexes are thus sources and destinations of residential trafc only. The linking of the residential areas with the regional centres ensures that key access points for public transport and recreational areas connect to a branching pedestrian main axis from south to north (Fig. 7).

The residential development of Marzahn consists mostly of fve to eleven-storey prefabricated WBS 70-type buildings (Figs. 10, 11). The façade elements of the buildings were made with washed concrete, and the balcony railings were cladded with corrugated iron or concrete. The housing plan allowed only standardised foor layouts.Nevertheless, a certain fexibility could be achieved by combining normal and end segments and having diferent assignments of individual rooms. With an average size of about 61 square metres, 40 % of the apartments have one or two rooms; 60 % have three or more. The apartments and living functions were designed so that at least the multi-room apartments have two outer walls with windows.

#### FIGURE 7 (LEFT)

Mobility organisation in Marzahn *Wohngebiete* 1-3: avenues (black), metro and tram lines (grey)

#### FIGURE 8 (RIGHT)

Apartment typologies in a line building realised with the WBS 70 prefab system (top) and in an 18-storey high-rise realised with the WHH prefab system in Marzahn *Wohngebiet* 1 (ed.)

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FIGURE 9 Housing buildings along Mehrower Allee. Photo by Monika Uelze, ca. 1982

The construction of prefabricated housing estates exceeded the sole purpose of solving the housing problem for the state. It was also intended to support the creation of the socialist way of life and its deeper ideology. Public housing assignment policies were aimed primarily at the settlement of young families. Older people and people with alternative forms of life were disadvantaged or consciously refused these ideologically charged living situations. As a result of this assignment policy, the large housing estates were largely generational homogenous.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent end of the GDR state-directed planning, a self-reinforcing change began. Refurbished blocks of fats in the previously neglected inner-city areas and new homes in the immediate vicinity of the city presented new alternatives. The subsequent growing vacancy of in some parts up to 30 % had the tendency to self-reinforce and led to a reduced structural and social attractiveness in the residential areas in the following decade.

FIGURE 10 (LEFT) Prefab building types WBS (Wohnungsbauserie 70) and VHH (Wohnhochhaus Serie) in Marzahn *Wohngebiete* 1–3

FIGURE 11 (RIGHT)

Montage of an eleven-storey prefabricated WBS 70 type building in Marzahn. Photo by Heinz Hirndorf, 1983 (ed.)

The urban renewal programme *Stadtumbau-Ost* was an essential program to ensure the future viability of large housing estates in former East Berlin and in the territory of the former GDR. Between 2002 and 2016, the programme supported some 1,200 urban redevelopment measures by the federal government and the Länder. Currently Marzahn-Hellersdorf is tending toward a steady increase in population in connection with Berlin's overall demographic development. Between 2010 and 2015, the population of Marzahn-Hellersdorf increased by 4.1 %. Based on the population forecast of the Senate Department for Urban Development and Housing, further growth of 9.1 % (or 20,000 inhabitants) by 2030 is expected.

#### FIGURE 12

Aerial view of Marzahn district under construction. Photo by Karl-Heinz Schindler, 1981 (ed.)

FIGURE 13 Landsberger Allee, the main trafc axis reaching Marzahn from the city centre, 2019

FIGURE 14 Under ordinate mobility in *Wohngebiet 1*, 2019

FIGURE 15 Public greened areas within two *Wohnbereiche*, 2019

FIGURE 16 Inner greened areas with kindergarten at the core of a *Wohnbereich*, 2019

FIGURE 17 Springfuhl Park at centre of *Wohngebiet* 1, 2019

FIGURE 18 Helene-Weigel-Platz, centre of recreational and supply facilities beside Springfuhl Park, 2019

# IBA-NEUBAU ON NORTHERN RITTERSTRAßE *Antonello Scopacasa\**

#### LOCATION Mitte district

#### AGENCY

Land West Berlin (client), Klingbeil-Gruppe (customer and building contractor)

#### DESIGNERS

Rob Krier (Urban design advisor, 1977); D. Bangert - B. Jansen - S. Scholz - A. Schultes, A. Liepe - H. Steigelmann, E. Feddersen - W. von Herder, J. Ganz - W. Rolfes, Rob Krier, U. Müller, T. Rhode (Overall planning and architectural design, 1978-79); J. Halfmann, C. Zillich (Landscape design); AG Ökologischer Stadtumbau

BUILDING PERIOD 1982–83 (Block 28, southern part), 1988–88 (Block 31, northern part)

#### SETTLEMENT AREA:

ca. 5,5 ha (including the intervention on the southern side of Ritterstraße)

COVERING QUOTE 54 %

BUILDING STOREYS 4–6

DWELLING NUMBER 314 (in 35 blocks of f ats)

CONSTRUCTION TECHNOLOGY traditional

\* TU Berlin, Chair of International Urbanism and Design (Habitat Unit)

Following the approval of the second Urban Renewal Programme (*Stadterneuerungsprogramm*) in 1974,1 housing projects started to promote a new critical approach towards functionalistic and traf c-oriented urban planning throughout West Berlin. They envisaged a return to the legacy of the historical urban fabric and to the traditional building typology, which the international discourse had started to debate during the Sixties, and which the f rst European Architectural Heritage Year in 1975 had of cially envisaged.<sup>2</sup> This was the case for the housing intervention at Vinetaplatz in Wedding (building period 1975–82, whose Block 270 had been designed in 1971 by Josef Paul Kleihues, foreseeing for the f rst time in Berlin a return to the traditional block-enclosed urban typology (Fig. 3); Rollberg-Viertel in Neuköln (1976–82) and Heinrich-Zille-Siedlung in Tiergarten (1976–81). This was also the case for the long-term and participative projects led by Hardt-Waltherr Hämer throughout the districts of Wedding, Charlottenburg and Kreuzberg after 1968 and the promotion of the "cautious urban renewal" of the pre-war building heritage.

The new conditions settled after the 1971 agreements between the Federal Republic and the Eastern-bloc countries, and thus political stabilisation, cooled the representative interest in urban planning, while the idea of a city reunif cation had already become unrealistic. The ef ects on the planning panorama, however, were revealed in the second half of the decade; by 1976, the established *Kahlschlagsanierung*—literally urban renewal through demolition—envisaged by the f rst Urban Renewal Programme in 1963, had produced 18,000 new f ats vs. only 400 renovations; an approach of substitution that had mostly af ected the inner city, which was also suf ering from remoteness and decay due to the closeness of the Wall. Otto-Suhr-Siedlung along Oranienstraße (2,300 dwellings, built from 1956–63), Mehringplatz (1,500 dwellings, built from 1967–75), and Neues Kreuberger Zentrum (367 dwellings, built from 1969–74), all interventions realised in this southern area, represent the theoretical evolution of urban development over time well, especially concerning the "renewal" issue, starting from the mono-functional, well detached, low density and highly greened environment of the Fifties, leading to the motto "Urbanity through density" of the Sixties.

$$\underbrace{\bigcirc\_{\text{2000}}}\_{\text{2000}} \underbrace{\bigcirc\_{\text{2000}}}\_{\text{500}} \underbrace{\bigcirc\_{\text{2000}}}\_{\text{500}}$$

#### FIGURE 1

Black and white plan of wider IBA-Neubau intervention area at present: Southern Tiergarten (left) and Southern Friedrichstadt (right).

FIGURE 2 Extract of the housing intervention on northern Ritterstraße

The discussion about organising a planning demonstrative instrument for this internal, and at same time, marginalised area of the western city, as well as for implementing the theoretical switch from the "cleaning up" approach to the "careful renewal," started in 1976 and ended in 1978, when the West Berlin Senate of cially promoted a new vision for the whole city, which led some years later to the new Plan of Uses of 1984.3 To reach these targets, the Senate founded an external structure at the end of 1978, the public society Bauausstellung Berlin GmbH, commissioning it to develop the master plan for the southern area of the old city centre, to coordinate democratic consultations and the architectural design in collaboration with architects, urban designers, administrators and building stakeholders and to begin to realise it in the context of a long-term International Building Exhibition (IBA) planned for 1984/87.4 The "inner city as living place" was the motto, while the key topic was the rediscovery and recovery of the historic urban fabric (Fig. 5).

To this bridging period also belongs the little housing intervention on northern Ritterstraße. According to the 1965 Plan of Uses, which is still in force, Southern Friedrichstadt was included at the centre of the *City-Band*, the never-implemented city belt of tertiary destinations connecting West and East with a service highway, the *Südtangente*. To explore replacing this plan, the Senate started experimental framework planning in 1976–77, envisaging a mix of functions involving housing and commerce. Invited consultant Rob Krier

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FIGURE 3 Block 270 at Vinetaplatz by Josef Paul Kleihues. Design 1971, construction 1975–77

FIGURE 4 *Ideal Plan* by Rob Krier, 1977. Master plan proposal for the reconstruction of Friedrichstadt and surrounding areas

proposed an *Ideal Plan*, which referred to the original enclosed baroque structure, embellished it with new plazas and public gardens, reduced the original very extensive block dimensions and fxed the maximum building height at six foors (Fig. 4). The planned area extended beyond the city border incorporating the whole baroque urban system with the «assumption that Berlin would not be divided forever».<sup>5</sup>

The ideal master plan was then adopted as the basis for an architectural competition held in 1978 for subsidised housing for the northern Ritterstraße, on federal state property that had been deeply cleared up during the Fifties and which was presently used as parking place for the nearby Springer publishing company. The programme foresaw a new "piece of city" around a (to be) reconstructed Feilner Haus, previously designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1829 and demolished in 1956. 6 The site was also delimited by Lindenstraße, the medieval commercial road and eastern boundary of baroque Friedrichstadt, and the parallel Alte-Jacob-Straße, part of Luisenstadt, the frst city expansion of the mid-19th century built on the master plan of the king's gardener, Peter Joseph Lenné.

Open to fourteen invited architects, the competition resulted in the formation of seven planning groups, who were given the task of preparing the master plan and implementing the architectural design, including Rob Krier, who was responsible for the central core. The estate's funding was made possible by dedicated government funding of 50,000 DM for each dwelling unit to fnance the development of new foor plan typologies and by the newly implemented First Funding Channel (*1. Förderungsweg*) introduced in 1972 and last revised in 1977, as the most important and newly very proftable instrument for subsidising social housing.7

#### FIGURE 5

Masterplan Berlin 1984: the frst overall urban development plan which points beyond the International Building Exhibition 1984/87 to possibilities of longer-term urban interventions. Plan made by 70 sheets, original drawing scale 1:5000

The intervention on Ritterstraße was eventually adopted in the wider IBA programme starting in the same year; it became its frst and representative case study, the main site of exposition (the Merkurhaus, which was restored and integrated in the programme) and it was one of the frst to be concluded, even partially, at its opening in 1984. The intervention follows the principles of the previous *Ideal Plan* concerning the recovery of the old baroque plan and proportions and the organisation of green spaces in alleys, courtyards and private gardens, in a continuous but clear and separate grading. The previous Feilnerstraße is replicated orthogonally, generating a pedestrian cruising system of semi-public spaces focusing on the reconstructed Feilner House. The little regular square hosting this city memory can be entered from all four sides through gates, while additional passages from the corners lead to landscaped courtyards (Fig. 6).

In general, the relationship between the buildings' urban disposition and the fats' inner organisation is immediate, resulting in clear urban typologies, among which are the "Cornerhaus" (Fig. 7) or "Double Cornerhaus," the "Courthaus" (Fig. 12) and the "Haus at Gate" or the "Gardenhaus."

#### FIGURE 6 (LEFT, RIGHT)

Overall architectural plan of the southern (31) and northern block (28) at two sides of Feilnerstraße: the little parcelling of the housing units (plan left) and the street and gardening furnishing (plan right). Garden planning by Jasper Halfmann and Clod Zillich. Ritterstraße is on the southern side of the blocks

In the central square designed by Krier, the pre-existence of the Schinkel buildings provides the main reference for the organisation of the frontages; even the Senate eventually decided not to attempt a true reconstruction.8 Terracotta materials and vaulted facades connote the composition of the buildings. A rich apparatus of possible dwelling foor plans characterises the interiors and tries to satisfy diferent kinds of addressee. The living room, for example, is imagined as a meeting place, «accessible from many sides, allowing

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FIGURE 7 (LEFT, RIGHT)

Cornerhaus (House 19) by Urs Müller und Thomas Rhode. Ground foor and maisonette foor plans. View from Alte-Jakob-Straße crossing Feilnerstraße

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#### FIGURE 8, 9

Schinkelplatz: Layout of the housing inner distribution, drawing with annotations by Rob Krier, 1978 (left); Double facade-screen system, exploded axonometric projection with sketches by Krier, 1978 (right)

the organisation of the fats to be adopted to any orientation: to the street, to the square, to the courtyard»9 and corresponding to the small central square (Fig. 8). Geometric reduction helps to emphasise the space hierarchy within the fnancial resources provided by the funding system, while the internal complexity, as in a game of hide-and-seek, is articulated by a double facade-screen system, which shields inner life from external view (Figs. 9, 10). The architectural composition and the front materials are clearly inspired—almost as a quotation—by Schinkel's memories.

#### NOTES

1  Harald Bodenschatz et al., *Berlin und seine Bauten. Teil I: Städtebau* (Berlin: Jovis, 2009), p. 414. 2  A public debate about the topic of urban *Sanierung*—how "hard" the renewal should be—started the day after the approval of the 1963 Urban Renewal Programme without providing any relevant results. The frst critical voice was Wolf Jobst Siedler with his *Die gemordete Stadt* (Berlin: Siedler, 1963). See *Berlin und seine Bauten*, pp. 286–93.

3  A similar evolution was also established some years later in East Berlin, fxed by the 1978 "*Abrissstop*" (stop to demolitions) and the 1982 implementation of "*innenstädtischen Wohnungsbau*" (inner-city housing) policy,

FIGURE 10 Street view of the Schinkelplatz after construction, 1983

FIGURE 11 (LEFT) Courthaus at Ritterstraße by Rob Krier, 1983

#### FIGURE 12 (RIGHT)

Following: view of the house from the landscaped courtyard, 1983

see Florian Urban, *Berlin/DDR—neo-historisch. Geschichte aus Fertigteilen* (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag-Berlin, 2007), pp. 91–96. During the Seventies, the municipality of East Berlin started recovering corners of the historical fabric, as in Arkonaplatz (1970–84) and Arminplatz (1973–84), Ibid, pp. 74–77.

4  In parallel, the Senate reduced and strictly regulated the areas destined for renewal interventions. See *Berlin und seine Bauten*, p. 414.

5  See monograph journal "Rob Krier. Architecture and Urban Design," *Architectural Monographs* 30, no. 1 (1983): p. 37, also available at http://www.robkrier.de. Krier had been very active since 1968 in the European context with projects and theoretical investigations on urbanism based on the preference for an enclosed, physically well defned urban space conception and on the tradition of the historical European city, especially medieval and baroque. Among other publications, see Rob Krier, *Urban Space* (London: Academy Editions, 1979), frst published in Germany in 1975 and available online at https://robkrier.de/urban-space-engl.php#page-001.

6  The house of the Feilner family of terracotta producers, also designed by Schinkel, was near their factory. Of note is the motto expressed by Harry Ristock, Senator for Building and Bousing, «A living city needs testimonies of its past», in "Vorwort," *Berliner Baubilanz '78* (Berlin, 1978), p. 7.

 Ein Höhepunkt des europäischen Städtebaus*, ed. Harald Bodenschatz, Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, and Deutsches Institut für Stadtbaukunst (Salenstein, Switzerland: Niggli, 2012), pp. 85–87.

8  See Andreas Salgo, "Schlüsselprojekte der Neubau-IBA," p. 31–33.

9  "Rob Krier. Architecture and Urban Design," p. 45.

# IBA-ALTBAU *Lorenza Manfredi\**

#### LOCATION Kreuzberg Luisenstadt and SO36

#### AGENCY

Senatsverwaltung für Bau- und Wohnungswesen Berlin, S.T.E.R.N. Gesellschaft der behutsamen Stadterneuerung Berlin mbH

#### DIRECTION AND COLLABORATORS

Hardt-Waltherr Hämer, Thomas Edding. Collaborators working in the Luisenstadt area: Peter Beck, Jörg Forßmann, Günter Fuderholz, Undine Fülling, Michael Kraus, Peter Kurt, Peter Molline, Hilde Pinnekamp, Gabriele Rösler, Christian Schmidt-Hermsdorf, Dietmar Schuf enhauer, Martin Strasburger, Yavuz Üçer, Axel Volkmann, Christiana Weber, Birgit Wend, Theo Winters. Collaborators working in Area SO36: Uli Bülhof , Jörn Dargel, Bahri Düleç, Wulf Eichstädt, Cornelius van Geisten, Kostas Kouvelis, Claudia Mende, Jochen Mindak, Sue Sahin, Monika Taeger, Hans Tödtmann.

BUILDING PERIOD 1979–87

INTERVENTION AREA ca. 320 ha

BUILDING STOREYS as preexistence, 2–6 f oors

\* TU Berlin, Chair of International Urbanism and Design (Habitat Unit); IUAV University of Venice, Department of Architecture, City and Design

The *Internationale Bauausstellung* 1987 (IBA, International Building Exhibition) is part of a tradition of international architecture exhibitions stimulating a debate around the construction of the city and realising exemplary architecture. The specif c objective of the IBA, initially planned for 1984 but subsequently postponed until 1987, was a strategy of enhancement for specif c central areas of West Berlin. In fact, the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 caused an immediate loss of urban attractiveness in many adjacent areas that suddenly became marginal and lost most of their infrastructural connections, interfering with or preventing the normal f ows of citizens and goods.

Established in 1979 in West Berlin by Hans Christian Müller, the Senate director of the building activities, the project's slogan was "The inner city as a place to live," and its aim was to realise plans and interventions as result of a ref ection on methods and possibilities for the urban renewal.

The search for new models of urban development was also necessary because of the protests of many citizens and students who strongly criticised the model the city authorities used from the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s—the *Kahlschlagsanierung.* This involved creating a tabula rasa by demolishing entire building complexes, making space for the construction of the "new city." The consequences of this path were increases in living costs and resettlement for low-income residents. The f rst Urban Renewal Programme of 1963 clearly encompassed this approach: as Hass-Klau reported, only 30 % of the existing housing stock was seen as worth modernising, leading to the almost total demolition of the old housing stock and the reconstruction of entire areas.1 This dramatic approach, in conjunction with an increase in empty f ats caused by a system of state speculation, soon became an extreme housing problem. As reported in studies on the area produced by the IBA-Altbau, by 1980, one in eight citizens of Berlin was involved in an urban renewal programme,2 while many residential units were left unoccupied: in the area of Kottbusser Tor at the beginning of the 1980s, 1057 of 4612 residential units were empty, and more than 60 % of them were state owned.

The latent protests caused by the housing problem increased to the point of becoming urban riots, with a rapid spread of squatting activities: in January 1981, 36 houses were occupied, but the number increased to 167 in only f ve months.<sup>3</sup>

As an instrument for dealing with this conf ict, the IBA soon became able to stimulate

FIGURE 1 Black and white plan of the intervention area of IBA-Altbau at present

# DWELLING NUMBERS AND OTHER

QUANTITY DATA 360 new f ats, 7,000 renewal f ats; reconstruction and expansion of 10 schools, 27 nursery schools; 30 streets and squares have been reconstructed or plants added to reduce car speeds, 370 backyards have been turned into gardens in consultation with the inhabitants; many social projects, like meeting places for young people and for inhabitants from dif erent cultures, sport facilities.

CONSTRUCTION TECHNOLOGY traditional

important policy changes—while the IBA-Neubau brought new attention to the historical city plan, the IBA-Altbau managed to set a new path of dealing with the existing bottom-up urban renewal activities and with the existing fabric of the city.

0 10050 200 500 m

The IBA group working under the concept of careful urban renewal—the IBA-Altbau was coordinated by Hardt-Waltherr Hämer and focused on the district of Kreuzberg, a traditional working-class artisan area with unique problems of decaying tenement housing, large-scale immigration, industrial decline and social tension. The Luisenstadt and the much larger eastern area of SO 36 were selected as testing grounds for the IBA-Altbau, two areas half surrounded by the Berlin Wall but that had not been extensively damaged by the war and that were still densely inhabited. The buildings were in poor condition, but—un-

#### FIGURE 2

Cartographic representation of IBA-Altbau interventions completed in 1992 in the areas of Luisenstadt and SO36 in Kreuzberg. Repair/ modernisation (blue and black), new building (red and orange), social facilities (ochre), refurbishing of public spaces (grey), trade building modernisation/ new building (dark blue)

like other parts of the city—still habitable, ofering an option for lower income inhabitants: students, young people and guest-workers, mainly from Turkey and the former Yugoslavia, began living there. Moreover, the increase in rents after modern renewal interventions in other parts of the city caused the arrival of new inhabitants from surrounding areas. The squatting movement found in this context a fertile terrain—the houses were not just occupied, but there were self-initiated projects to restore individual units. *"Instandsbesetzers"*  (from *instandsetzen*—repair—and *besetzen*—occupy) created a network while sharing material help, skills and technical knowledge for repairing the buildings, as a form of DIY urbanism. Furthermore, the squatters activated abandoned or leftover spaces, proposing a programme of public and shared activities for the neighbourhood—all of this happening in an area with poor living conditions and where social activities were almost absent.

The IBA-Altbau succeeded in entering into contact and working together with this existing network, making studies "fat by fat."<sup>4</sup> Their local interlocutors had been squatters as in-

#### FIGURE 3

The tenant advisory service (*Mieterberatung*) represented the interests of the inhabitants during the whole renewal process

dividual citizens, often organised by associations, such as the Mieterladen Dresdnerstraße, the Mieterrat Waldemarstraße, the Bürgerinitiative SO36 and the Verein SO36.<sup>5</sup> Religious institutions also played a big role—by 1977, the "parish of the workers" led by Klaus Duntze involved the building department senator in the organisation of a citizens' call for proposals for the Kreuzberg area. The *Strategies for Kreuzberg* competition received 129 ideas from the population, ofering a frst overview of the creative energy present in this specifc urban context. The IBA-Altbau studied the existing activities, created a connection with their protagonists and with the associations and, in most cases, was able to support their projects—by providing specifc knowledge and ofering technical skills or by creating coalitions with the institutions.

The ties between the IBA-Altbau and the people and authorities and the singularity of the context of Kreuzberg explain the work of the group coordinated by Hämer, revealed by complicated procedures involved in collaborations: on one side with active citizens and on the other with the city authorities. The main goal was often to coordinate and pilot existing processes, becoming a bridge between those heterogeneous and divergent groups.

#### FIGURE 4 (LEFT, RIGHT)

Meeting in the youth leisure centre in the Reichenberger Straße 44-45 for the renewal process (left) and the establishment of the neighbourhood centre "Regenbogenfabrik" in 1981 (right)

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FIGURE 5 For example, diferent kinds of interventions in Block 10 on Oranienplatz (ed.)

**1** Mariannenstraße 50/Naunystraße 76: Duplex fats, tenants' self-management.

**2** Naunystraße 77: New housing typologies, tenants' self-management, roof, frewall and façade greening.

**3** Naunystraße 78/79: Garden for ecological recovery, adventure playground for neighbourhood use. **4** Naunystraße 80: Tenants' self-management, solar collector as heating support, grey water purifcation and use on site, eco-friendly construction materials. **5** Naunystraße 82: Tenants' self-management of the training workshop Kreuzberg e.V. Low-temperature heating, photovoltaic energy production, eco-friendly construction materials, courtyard greening. **6** Naunystraße 84: Self-help renewal of side-wing

building, roof greening. **7** Naunystraße 86/88: Energy-saving renewal of three post-war buildings, roof greening.

**8** Manteufelstraße 39: New housing typologies, water-saving sanitary technology, eco-friendly construction materials, roof greening.

**9** Manteufelstraße 40/41: New housing typologies, housing and commerce self-management, eco-friendly construction materials, façade and roof greening, playground for block use, connection to the heat-power network.

**10** Manteufelstraße 42: New housing typologies, self-renewal works, eco-friendly construction materials, façade and roof greening, rainwater-saving sanitary technology.

**11** Oranienstraße 3: Central rainwater collector for the water-saving sanitary technology of the entire block.

**12** Oranienstraße 4: New housing typologies, self-renewal works, heat recovery from the service water.

**13** Oranienstraße 5: grey water purifcation and use on site, rainwater recovery and percolation.

**14** Oranienstraße 3/6: solar collector system (240 m² on four roof surfaces) for recovering / exchanging heat.

**15** Oranienstraße 6: Manufacturers and services in the courtyard.

**16** Oranienstraße 7: Ownership model by self-help, housing and commerce use, artists' studios.

**17** Oranienstraße 13: New housing typologies, tenants' self-management, grey water purifcation and use on site, frewall and roof greening, eco-friendly construction materials.

**18** Oranienstraße 14: Tenants' self-management, courtyard greening, eco-friendly construction materials.