All Things Urban

While purging the city of contamination from its difficult epochs, Berlin has been witness to a dizzying degree of demolition and rebuilding in attempts to detoxify. Less than even crumbling remains, some of Berlin’s most interesting landmarks have been (repeatedly) paved over and rebuilt, making past epochs difficult to access and likely to be forgotten. How do space and memory interact? Is memory lost when space is demolished? On this guided walk we will visit, at times physically and sometimes only in our imagination, many important architectural gems which have fallen victims to the continuous process of transformation of the city. While an over pouring of nostalgia and sentimentalism can be detrimental to urban development, it remains important to illustrate the passing of time with connectors, architectural narratives which physically demonstrate the elapse between epochs. We will discuss the interplay between buildings, memory and history and critically examine the process of removing artefacts from the city landscape and the problems this poses when looking at historical revisionism. Guided tour in English 2+1 for dedicated city explorers: Book two POLIGIONAL city walks this fall and join the third for free. DM.

Everyone who is interested in urban life and the city.

POLIGONAL organizes exploratory scholar-led tours for city aficionados and architecture lovers through the city of Berlin.