Architecture and Planning as a Mending Tool The Spatial and Morphological Consolidation of Berlin

Urban planning has often been defined as a public policy aimed at regulating land use in urban space through the orderly disposition of land, resources, facilities and services. From this point of view, planners and planning authorities regulate the distribution of different land uses by drawing administrative “borders” to distinguish between the functions of different areas. In contemporary theoretical discourse, however, urban processes and spatial dynamics are perceived as tangible realities shaped by, and in turn shaping, wider political discourses. Indeed, recent research acknowledges the constraints of social structures and the power of interest groups in shaping the information-based infrastructure within which planning outcomes are often determined. The process of planning, though commonly represented as “technocratic” or “neutral,” is thus more properly understood as a central tool with which dominant economic, social or ethnic groups work to preserve their dominance of urban space. In these ongoing struggles over exclusion and inclusion, planning and zoning enable the creation and preservation of economic or social partitions along the involuntary lines of status and power. Tensions between place and nation or between distinct economic interests are, of course, most visible along the external frontiers of the polity. Yet social, ethnic and economic partitions can also coincide with regional, municipal, urban and communal frontiers. Such internal frontiers, like external ones, are generally created on the basis of competing locational, regional or ideological demands for spatial control. In other words, the marking of internal urban frontiers enables the state apparatus to establish within the city a desired pattern of economic, social and political relations, to optimize conditions for economic growth and capital accumulation and to benefit powerful groups. In this article I will offer a “reverse” perspective on planning policies by approaching planning not only as a tool in the construction of social or economic partitions but also as a mending tool in the diffusion of communities and the deconstruction of such partitions. From this perspective, planning policies should also be understood (both during the planning process itself and within the framework of ex-post examination) as a valuable tool for removing social or economic partitions. In order to examine the validity of this basic argument and its constraints, I will explore the spatial and morphological development of post-Wende Berlin, focusing on the planning policies formulated after reunification. Whereas the existing theoretical discourse on the social role of spatial policies presents German unification in terms of absorption (of East into West) rather than merger, portraying the East-West relationship as an asymmetrical one in which West Germans are the dominant economic and social group, I will show how Land and Federal authorities attempted to utilize planning policies as part of a more general effort to shape a single, consolidated urban identity and to break down existing physical and mental partitions between the two communities. Because these same planning policies were themselves shaped by the aforementioned wider political discourses, post-Wende Berlin can serve as an interesting study case: its planners strove for physical and mental consolidation not only through architectural iconography but also by remaking the complex and dynamic mosaic of urban life through everyday encounters, opening the door to a discussion about the role of urban planning and other spatial dynamics in the remaking of this urban mosaic. In the social imaginary, the reunification of Germany is epitomized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, at which point a heretofore external frontier between East and West became an internal frontier within the newly unified Germany. Yet despite its historical centrality, the taking down of the Wall in itself removed neither the physical nor the psychological …