Berlin's new centre

"Now, what is a centre, if not a producer of rhythms in social time?" (Lefebvre 1996, 239)

"The new Berlin came into being on 9th November 1989, the day the wall came down. …". Well, that's the claim. One made boldly by Berlin's Senate Department for Urban Development. Just a little further into the Senate's web site you'll find a number of images, "photos after the fall of the Wall". Each has its own, brief caption. One image shows what looks like a queue for rationed goods. The caption reads "Long queues form in front of the money exchange points in east Berlin - as here on 10th November 1989". Money was to cascade eastwards and help to heal the wounds of 'two ways of being in the twentieth century.

The flows of money were to be an important resource to be drawn upon in making the city one again. That was the idea. Most of the investment flows however never got very far and were directed instead into huge commercial property developments that were to rise from select sites within Berlin.

Potsdamer Platz is one such site. Until the fall of the Wall, Potsdamer Platz was described variously as a 'wilderness', a 'point of transition from the past to the future', Berlin's 'prairie of history'. And it was for this location that at almost the moment the Wall fell "Plans were soon drawn up for a new city centre". The significance of this location should not be forgotten as it…

"…has always been a non-place - literally a utopia - a site upon which to project fantasies of desire and fear, power and powerlessness. …Its ambiguous spatial character was matched by its phantasmal presence in time: Potsdamer Platz always seemed [to] be on a point of transition from past to future…. repeatedly called to embody architecturally the political ambitions of its masters." (Caygill 1997 pages 27-28)

By the mid 1990s the redevelopment of Potsdamer Platz had begun. At 15 hectares and for several years the world's largest construction site, the latest transition of this centre has been shaped by its new masters - private sector corporations such as Sony and DaimlerChrysler - and is now almost complete.

Echoing Kracauer's observation of Berlin in 1930s, it seems that at locations such as Potsdamer Platz once again the…

"…city has a magical means of wiping out all memories. It is the present and puts its ambition into being absolutely present…Elsewhere, too, the appearances of squares, company names, and stores change; but only in Berlin do these transformations tear the past so radically from memory."

International networks and abstract monetised flows are now the 'magical means' that promise Berlin its latest presentness, to aid its reorientation, its reimagining and rebuilding.