Yes - Cardiff University

FUTURE CONSTRUCTIONS:
ANTICIPATION AND POSTPONEMENT
IN THE PLANNING OF ALEXANDERPLATZ,
BERLIN
Paper presented at the conference
“Future Matters: Futures Known, Created and Minded”
Cardiff, 4-6 September 2006
Gisa Weszkalnys, Oxford University Centre for the Environment
Abstract:
This paper discusses how futures are made and unmade in post-unification Berlin. Berlin has been
busy re-inventing itself for more than a decade. Numerous futures have been evoked, encapsulated
in images such as ‘metropolis’, ‘global city’, and ‘European city’. Pipes, roads, and train lines
have been reconnected; plans and schemes have been thought up to bring Berlin’s future(s) into
being. Commentary on what Berlin will become is often a commentary on its ‘emptiness’ – space
that has been found wanting. My focus is Alexanderplatz, a square in Berlin’s eastern part and the
object of a concerted planning effort. Rebuilt in the 1960s as the embodiment of a future socialist
society, Alexanderplatz does not match planners’ vision for a central square in the unified capital.
A new, and highly controversial, Alexanderplatz is to be built in its stead. Drawing on ethnographic
material, I show how planners assemble the future Alexanderplatz – in reports, drawings, models,
and meetings – at a time when it has not yet materialised. Paradoxically, failure seems inherent in
‘the plan’ itself. My examination of planners’ work highlights how futures can be eagerly
anticipated, often postponed, and continually deferred, and sometimes they threaten to disintegrate.
Gisa Weszkalnys, Future Constructions
1
Introduction
This paper will discuss how the future is assembled and postponed in contemporary Berlin. I focus
on Alexanderplatz, a large square in Berlin’s eastern half, which has become the object of a
planning controversy. I shall talk about Alexanderplatz as a public square [Figure 1], as a plan
[Figure 2], and as a future vision that has not yet materialised [Figure 3]. Alexanderplatz was rebuilt
in the 1960s GDR as a centre for the societal life of the fledgling socialist state. In the early 1990s it
was identified as an urban planning problem. Its design was felt to be inadequate for a large public
square in the new German capital. A solution was to be found through an urban design competition
launched by the Berlin Senat’s Administration for Urban Development in 1993. The winning design
envisages the supplanting of the socialist square with several high-rise buildings. The future
Alexanderplatz embodies a vision of prosperity, wellbeing and unity. Since 1999, this vision has
been enshrined in a ‘construction plan’ – a legally binding plan that specifies the parameters for any
future constructions in the square.
At the time of my fieldwork in 2001/2, however, there were few visible signs of the new
Alexanderplatz actually materialising. Explanations varied, but many echoed this account by an
urban planning administrator:
“In the beginning, there was the expectation that everything would happen relatively
quickly. Back then – the competition was in ’93, the time of the famous gold-rush mood
[…] – the investors did press tremendously, and we did the planning and the
competition within a relatively short time. Thus, the impression was that things were
going ahead fast. Despite this, the planning for Alexanderplatz fell behind compared to
what happened at Potsdamer Platz and in Friedrichstraße. A large number of projects
were all planned, built, and completed at the same time. Then it became evident that the
amounts [of office, retail space etc.] spilling into the market were a little too much. That
the market couldn’t absorb this straightaway was borne out by the first vacant buildings.
Those investors who were already quite in front in the pipeline with their planning
collectively stepped on the brakes. This is always very astonishing; […] they also call it
the ‘pig-cycle’ in the real estate and building sector.”
For administrative planners, the Alexanderplatz project was located in that slightly unpredictable
realm of the market and influenced by forces beyond their control. Although they had done
everything to ensure the good working of the project, the capricious behaviour of developers had
led to the new Alexanderplatz being continually postponed.
The planners that I will refer to in particular were the staff of the Alexanderplatz Frame
Coordination – a special planning office set up to direct the incipient building works. While
conducting ethnographic fieldwork towards my PhD, I spent much time there sitting in on meetings,
and chatting to people over coffee and lunch.1 Perhaps my focus on planners’ activities makes my
account biased, reflecting the dominant view rather than the many critical voices one could hear in
Berlin’s planning debates. However, in the short time I have available here, my aim is to bring
anthropological sensibility to a domain not often scrutinised in this way.
1
Staff were drawn from the Berlin planning administration’s civil engineering department as well as a planning and
engineering company. Some of them had previously worked together on another project, Potsdamer Platz, and I often
sensed considerable pride in what they felt to have been a successful mastering of the challenges Potsdamer Platz had
posed.
Gisa Weszkalnys, Future Constructions
2
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Gisa Weszkalnys, Future Constructions
3
Constructing a Future Berlin
Let me first say a few words about the numerous futures that have been evoked for Berlin in the
wake of unification. They include the ‘metropolis’, the ‘global city’, and the ‘European city’. The
imagery of the divided and re-unified capital has perhaps been one of the most critical images
shaping perceptions of Berlin. A key question has been what national self-understanding and power
structures will the cityscape of Berlin represent (e.g., Binder 2000; Gittus 2002; Ladd 1997; Welch
Guerra 1999, Wise 1998)? Post-unification Berlin has also been portrayed as having embarked on a
journey to (re)constitute itself as a ‘metropolis’ or a ‘global city’. While the latter, as anthropologist
Beate Binder (2001) has shown, appeals to ideas of newness and the beginning of a new era, the
‘metropolis’ evokes qualities that are thought to have been characteristic of Berlin for a brief period
– the Weimar period – the only other democratic period in the city’s life (Smail and Ross 2000).
These images are not abstract analytic terms but are considered of important consequence for Berlin
and Berliners. They are much talked about, inspected, and contested. Each of them entails a
different temporalisation of Berlin (cf. Fardon 1995). They make partial connections to particular
aspects of its past, or phases in the city’s development, that are conducive to the future in question.
The European City, for example – which is an image much favoured by Berlin’s planners and
enshrined in a master plan that guides the development of the city – the European city construes
Berlin as belonging to a specific pedigree of cities thought to have evolved within Europe over
hundreds of years. It is claimed to foster what is considered Berlin’s distinct identity and to be a
way of repairing particularly the destructions caused by the Second World War and by socialist
planning. The aim is to restore Berlin to what it looked like pre-1914, re-instating – at least visually
– the street layout and property relations which are reminiscent of that time and which clearly
distance Berlin from other city types, especially the American city and the (post)socialist city.
Adopting postmodern jargon, Berlin’s planners style themselves as ‘editors’ of the ‘text’ that the
city is (Stimmann 2001) – as if a city could simply be written and re-written!
The future Berlins are not mere rhetoric but are also being materialised, enacted, …performed:
Pipes, roads, and train lines have been reconnected; plans and schemes have been thought up to
bring Berlin’s futures into being. There have been numerous debates and exhibitions of models of
planned and accomplished achievements [Figure 4]; there were guided tours around buildings sites,
and open days in new buildings, that kept busy not only a host of planners, administrators and
politicians but also involved ordinary Berliners and tourists.
Figure 4
Gisa Weszkalnys, Future Constructions
4
Filling Emptiness
In an important sense, talk about what the future Berlin will become – a capital, a global city or a
European city – is talk about how to fill Berlin’s emptiness. Talk about emptiness, as anthropologist
Gary McDonogh suggests (1993) implies profound ambiguities. I found that ‘empty space’ – so
frequently referred to by Berliners – helped me think through the question of the future in Berlin.
Scholars such as Andreas Huyssen (1997) and Karen Till (2005) have used the term ‘void’ to refer
to the play of absences and presences in Berlin’s cityscape. Their primary focus has been on those
sites from which the past has been erased or that have been selected to embody it. By contrast, I will
discuss, inspired by Berliners’ talk about it and by Crapanzano’s (2004) recent work, the way that
emptiness is expectation and future.
In post-unification Berlin, empty space seemed both prolific and problematic: there were former
industrial sites, buildings that had lost their purpose, abandoned apartments, plots with disputed
ownership, and of course the empty stretch left by the Wall. For some people these spaces offered
alternative work and living space, for others this was wasted land which could be owned, sold and
built on.
After unification, many of the wide streets and large squares in Berlin’s eastern half were reconceptualised as a specific kind of emptiness typical of the socialist system. No other state
system, some planning administrators claimed, would allow itself to leave the most valuable land
in the entire city largely empty. Emptiness, here, is understood as a deliberate attempt to erase
history on the part of the GDR state and as a demonstration of socialist grandeur. Alexanderplatz
was one such instance, often cited [Figure 5]. With its department store, hotel, the Fountain of the
People’s Friendship, the World-Time Clock and surrounded by buildings such as the House of
Statistics and the House of the Teacher, Alexanderplatz was once to embody a future socialist
society. After unification, within different frames of evaluation, much of Alexanderplatz was
rendered superfluous. The need for restructuring Alexanderplatz, as an East German administrator
explained to me, had been an outcome of Germany’s reunification. “This oasis of socialist
planning,” he suggested, “doesn’t match the requirements of contemporary society. Even though
some of the existing buildings have been recently renovated, they are not designed for the longterm future.” The symbolic features in Alexanderplatz seemed vacuous, as the state that had
furnished them with meaning had disintegrated. In light of the various future images for Berlin –
the metropolis, the global city, or the European city – Alexanderplatz had come to appear
inadequate.
Notions of empty space have played an important legitimising role in discourses on both
development and colonization (Crush 1995; Hardt and Negri 2000:167ff.). Lands to be colonised
are considered uninhabited, empty of ‘civilised’ human life, or without a rightful owner. These are
spaces to be tamed and exploited. The Berlin of 1989 and 1990, and especially East Berlin, was
widely perceived as an unruly terrain, holding out promises of economic growth and prosperity.
Some critical observers suggest that what happened in post-unification East Berlin, and East
2
From the perspective of former GDR planners, however, it was not inadequate at all; rather, Alexanderplatz had
never been completed. Two of them, Joachim Näther and Dorothea Tscheschner, who had both been involved in the
planning of Alexanderplatz, talked to me about how Alexanderplatz’s potential had never been fully exploited and
how its envisaged destruction and make-over seemed precipitous and untimely. From their comments, Alexanderplatz
emerged as an ‘unfinished construction’, perhaps reflecting the always incomplete project of the socialist state (see
Ssorin-Chaikov 2003:110ff.). The 1990s plans to revamp Alexanderplatz, as we shall see, have transformed the
unfinished construction of the GDR state into the unfinished construction of another state, the FRG.
Gisa Weszkalnys, Future Constructions
5
Germany more generally, has been less a process of modernisation than of ‘colonisation’ – a
colonisation of the East by the West (Borneman 1992:322, 1997:96; Hain 2001:72).
Figure 5
In the 1990s, much effort was put into filling this ubiquitous emptiness that made the centre of
Berlin appear bizarre, particularly when compared with other European cities or western, capitalist
cities more generally. By the early 2000s, the new constructions had begun to generate their own
peculiar emptiness – by ‘standing empty’, producing Leerstände or vacancies. City planners
worried about these vacancies, about development projects falling through, and about the absence
of profitable investments. However, not to plan for land that was left empty seemed inconceivable.
One planner told me about a meeting he had attended concerning a high-rise project in Berlin’s
eastern part. He wondered why they still devoted so much time and effort to making such plans,
since everyone knew that there was a lack of investment. His picture of Berlin’s future was murky:
with the loss of all its manufacturing industries, Berlin’s economic situation was deteriorating, and
the city was shrinking. Now, the post-unification euphoria – when he, like everybody else, believed
that Berlin would boom as in the 1920s – had vanished. “Nobody believes in growth anymore!” he
claimed. Only a moment later, he turned to show me on the map on his office wall the areas
destined for further development. “Huge wastelands”, he called them, “deserts” currently used for
semi-permanent commerce but, in a city as broke as Berlin, far too precious to be left untouched.
Promising Plans
During my fieldwork, when I told people that I was studying Alexanderplatz, they would
sometimes say: “But nothing is happening there!”, and many were convinced that the new
Alexanderplatz would remain a figment of planners’ and politicians’ imagination. But from a
different perspective, quite a lot was happening. Although it was considered the developers’ task to
realise the project, Berlin’s planning administrators did not remain idle. They assembled the future
Alexanderplatz in numerous reports, drawings, computer images, models, legal documents,
publications, and meetings. They constructed the future at a time when it had not yet materialised.
In our conversations, planners presented the future Alexanderplatz essentially as an established fact.
They sought to persuade themselves and me that the plans had everything that bestowed certainty
on the future. They recounted the procedures that had been followed and the many legal
requirements that had been met. – Including the competition with its carefully appointed expert jury
Gisa Weszkalnys, Future Constructions
6
and the many rounds of citizens’ participation. – They enlightened me on how the new
Alexanderplatz fulfilled current planning goals and what rewards it would reap in the future. –
Their planning had been comprehensive – taking into account all the social, economic,
environmental, and legal aspects that together constituted the space of the project. – All this
seemingly attested to the soundness and unassailability of the plans. The plan embodied a teleology
of prosperity and unification. It thus played a crucial symbolic part in the constitution of the future
Berlin.
The work of anticipating the future Alexanderplatz did not stop with the construction plan. Aside
from public debates, exhibitions, models, and brochures, there has been, as I mentioned, a special
planning office set up to coordinate the constructions in the square. In this office, the future
Alexanderplatz was, quite literally, assembled: a large number of various infrastructure providers,
people from various administrative departments, and developers, were brought together in countless
meetings. Staff at the Frame Coordination office would frequently highlight the project’s
extraordinary size as well as the scale of anticipated ‘conflicts’. Alexanderplatz was, after all, a
functioning city centre, which made the project exceptionally problematic. Staff said they were not
so much planning or designing Alexanderplatz as ensuring that the envisaged design would be
implemented smoothly. They were much concerned with what was referred to as the ‘graphic
identification’ of conflicts. In this work of anticipation, plans and drawings were essential tools.
There were multiple translations at work: a prospective fence of a building site, a water pipe, or a
wall were rendered as lines in a two-dimensional plan; a third dimension – time – had to be taken
into account to see whether there would be a conflict once the building work started. To solve the
conflict lines had to be translated back into objects belonging to specific institutions, and conflicts
from the metaphorical into the social domain, and from the future into the now.
Postponements
Figure 6
Here [Figure 6] you see a press conference with representatives of private developers, the then
Senator for urban development, and various planning administration officials who are busy signing
the so-called urban building contracts for Alexanderplatz. These contracts specified the design
premises to which investors were to adhere, the desired dates of completion, and their financial
contributions to the infrastructure. They inscribed what a planning administrator called the ‘mutual
give and take’ between private and public in the private-public partnership Alexanderplatz. In the
Gisa Weszkalnys, Future Constructions
7
planning office, public and private constituted a persuasive reality reflected in plans and legal
discourses; and in the ways people dressed, talked and interacted with each other. The relation
between private and public was felt to be shifting; there now was a sense of interdependence. But
although private developers were considered conduits of the future Alexanderplatz, they were also
potential obstacles in the way to materialising it.
Despite all the busy drawing, talking, planning and scheduling, administrators sometimes seemed to
doubt that the new Alexanderplatz would ‘happen’. They bemoaned the exaggerated predictions
regarding Berlin’s post-unification boom and their own inability to forecast accurately. Though
developers’ were considered indispensable to city development, their involvement was wrapped in
ambivalence. Administrators and city officials might have felt they had ‘the law’ on their side but
they sometimes appeared to lack the economic and symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1977) that would
make them equal negotiators. Developers had an entourage of lawyers and a rhetorical clout, which
were forces to be reckoned with, as was their economic power. Their ‘internal politics’, obscure to
an outsider, and the apparent secrecy shrouding their activities were a contentious issue. As an
exasperated administrator noted, the representatives of one of the investors had once announced that
their building works would commence in March. But as March passed and nothing had happened,
he realised that they had never mentioned the year that they were to start.
The developers’ willingness to build seemed to be waning. Outside meetings, in the corridors of the
administration, and behind closed doors, there were whispers that the investors were not interested
in creating a beautiful, viable city, but solely in ‘speculation’. Crucially, investors’ seeming
defiance to commit themselves to dates and actions threatened to make the planners’ work futile:
timetables became outdated as soon as they were set, and plans redundant almost the moment they
were plotted out. Planners anticipated serious implications: If investors failed to comply with a
coordinated scheme, Alexanderplatz would become a building site for several decades. It would
remain an empty space.
Conclusion
Figure 7
To sum up: in this paper I have proposed a ‘literal’ or rather ‘material’ take on the conceptualisation
of the future as a an empty space (e.g. Adam, n.d.) – based on an ethnographic understanding of
post-unification Berlin. What all the different discourses about empty space and how to fill it share
Gisa Weszkalnys, Future Constructions
8
is the ways in which they generate Berlin. It is in empty space that the diverse future Berlins are
located. Emptiness is a city with potential for investment and economic prosperity in a globalised
world; it is the European city destroyed and re-written; a socialist capital now reinterpreted as
‘history’ or rather lack thereof; and for those who bemoan the disappearance of open spaces for
festivals and demonstrations, it is a city of public contesting and deliberating about the future
[Figure 7].
I took Alexanderplatz as an example of a perceived empty space to be filled with a future. Through
my discussion of the planners’ busy work I showed how this future is anticipated and created.
However, this future sometimes threatened to disintegrate. Plans, timetables and contracts helped to
anticipate, visualise and mediate the future. But planners also knew that the future would never be
like the plan. Compared to the plan any realised project could seem to have failed in some respects.
In a sense, failure was inherent in the idea of the plan. Planners were both frustrated and mobilised
by the specific hopes and imaginations of the future, and by the expectation of potential failure.
Importantly, however, for planners the realisation of the future Alexanderplatz had been merely
postponed – temporarily displaced. Similarly, the future Berlin exists in continuous deferral (cf.
Buchli 1999; Ssorin Chaikov 2003). Berlin, we may say, is its many futures – eagerly anticipated
and often postponed.
Gisa Weszkalnys, Future Constructions
9
Bibliography
Adam, B., n.d., “Futures told, tamed and traded,”
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/futures/ESRC%20PF%20Futures%20TTT.pdf (last accessed 29
August 2006)
Binder, B., 2000, “Political Stage-Setting. The Symbolic Transformation of Berlin,” In Myth and
Memory in the Construction of Community: Historical Patterns in Europe and Beyond. B. Stråth,
ed. Bruxelles: PIE Lang.
-- 2001, "Eine Hauptstadt wird gebaut: Zur Produktion neuer Wahrnehmungsweisen in Berlin," in
Wahrnehmung und Medialität. Edited by E. Fischer-Lichte, C. Horn, S. Umathum, and M. Warstat.
Tübingen and Basel: A. Francke Verlag.
Borneman, J., 1992, Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Bourdieu, P., 1977, Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Buchli, V., 1999, An Archaeology of Socialism. Oxford and New York: Berg.
Crapanzano, V., 2004, Imaginative Horizons: An essay in literary-philosophical anthropology,
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Crush, J. S. 1995, "Introduction: Imagining Development," in Power of Development. Edited by J.
S. Crush. London: Routledge.
Fardon, R., 1995, "Introduction: Counterworks," in Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of
Knowledge. Edited by R. Fardon. London and New York: Routledge.
Gittus, E.J., 2002, “Berlin as Conduit for the Creation of German National Identity at the End of the
Twentieth Century,” Space & Polity 6(1): 91-115.
Hain, S., 2001, "Struggle for the Inner City - A Plan Becomes a Declaration of War," in Urban
Planning and Cultural Inclusion: Lessons from Belfast and Berlin. Edited by W. J. V. Neill and
Hardt, M., and A. Negri, 2000, Empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard
University Press.
Huyssen, A., 1997, “The Voids of Berlin,” in Critical Inquiry 24(1): 57-81.
Ladd, B., 1997, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape.
Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
McDonogh, G. W.,1993, "The Geography of Emptiness," in The Cultural Meaning of Urban Space.
Edited by R. Rotenberg and G. W. McDonogh. Westport, Connecticut, and London: Bergin &
Garvey.
Smail, D., and C. Ross, 2000, "New Berlins and New Germanies: History, Myth and the German
Capital in the 1920s and 1990s," in Representing the German Nation: History and Identity in
Twentieth-Century Germany. Edited by M. Fulbrook and M. Swales. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Ssorin-Chaikov, N., 2003, The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia. Stanford, California:
Stanford University Press.
Stimmann, H. (ed.), 2001, Von der Architektur zur Stadtdebatte: Die Diskussion um das Planwerk
Innenstadt. Berlin: Braun.
Till, K., 2005, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Welch Guerra, M., 1999, Hauptstadt Einig Vaterland: Planung und Politik zwischen Bonn und
Berlin. Berlin: Verlag Bauwesen.
Wise, M., 1998, Capital Dilemma: Germany'
s Search for a New Architecture of Democracy. New
York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Gisa Weszkalnys, Future Constructions
10