Influences and building materials

Divided for so long, Berlin's rebuilding brings with it, as the above suggests, a new play of influences as the city works itself into new or at minimum, altered international connections. To help make material the dreams of a desired and yet still opaque future, the city has harnessed architects, engineers, builders, property developers, and others. The output and effect of these city builders can be seen in some of the most historic sites in Berlin, such as along the former death strip between Potsdamer Platz and the Reichstag.

The form of urban development taking place in Berlin - grand scale demolition, redevelopment and smothering of the symbolic spaces and monuments of another regime of being - is meant amongst other things to signal an impatience with its styles, its materials, its surfaces and memories. Perhaps in more striking ways than in other western cities the army of meanings wrapped up in redevelopment processes is meant here to convey the obliteration of the old order. This is most notable perhaps where the latest networks connect Berlin into the economics of international markets in commercial property. This economics not only makes and introduces the idea of obsolescence through the ways it speaks about and sees the city, juxtaposing old and new surfaces and making the former seem inadequate, but acts also as a carrier of calculations about urban viability and vitality.