Architecture, Urban Space, City Research, Town Planning, Urban Development

2005 marked the 40th anniversary of the publication of Alexander Mitscherlich’s Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte (The inhospitability of our cities) – and amazingly, hardly anyone in Germany noticed it. Yet this anniversary should really have provided a welcome opportunity to reflect on what has happened to and in our cities since then and how the city and our relationship with it have changed.

Great Unease

After all, the title of this “pamphlet”, as the author himself termed it, continued to be used as a slogan by those taking a critical view of “modern” architecture and urban planning right into the 1990s. It is true that Mitscherlich stays very vague and abstract in his (psycho-)analytical arguments when it comes to specific suggestions and ideas for the different approach to urban planning he called for, but he gave clear expression to a great sense of unease prevalent at the time: many people really did sense that “their” cities were in the process of changing into faceless, hostile environments thanks to the prevailing urban, residential and mobility concepts advocated by planners, investors and politicians back then.

The Dream of the House in the Country

Of course, in Germany this was partly related to the massive destruction caused during the Second World War: large parts of many cities needed to be rebuilt, so that it was necessary to form a totally different architectural identity over the decades. In particular, the reconstruction was intended to document a break with the past and a connection with an international and democratic modernity. As a result, the seventies and eighties in particular were characterised by questioning the quality of life and the future prospects for the cities which had re-emerged as products of the economic miracle: is the total functional separation of work, commerce, residential areas and leisure the right approach? Do we really want to set the paradigm of the “car-friendly city” in stone for the coming generations? Is it really necessary for all historical structures, especially those of the late nineteenth century, to be removed –except for a few picturesque areas suitable for tourists? Many people experienced the city as “inhospitable”, people generally dreamed of a “house in the country”, and the movement to reconquer the city centres only developed slowly.

Who Does the City Belong To?

As always, this “trend” started life as a subcultural phenomenon, including the widespread squatter movements, and was always accompanied by questions which were also central to Mitscherlich in 1965: Who does the city belong to? And who decides how it is used?

Inevitably, the answers have become much more pragmatic than they were 30 or 40 years ago. It is no longer about a pan-societal “system” which has to be resisted and changed. Rather, it is about individual roads, squares and neighbourhoods, which need to be made more livable-in as part of a diverse urbanity with good infrastructure – for young people, singles, families and the elderly alike. The activists and avant-gardists of today develop projects on their own initiative which, when linked up with a network consisting of other projects and all sorts of partners, represent a potential for models of sustainable improvements.

“Bottom-up” Urban Planning

Right in the heart of Hamburg’s St. Pauli district or in Berlin-Kreuzberg, residents are joining together to take charge of buildings, working with committed architects to convert or erect buildings which meet their individual needs and influence the surrounding area. Starting a family no longer automatically means – despite all the difficulties of living in a large city like transport, pollution and poor quality of public spaces – a move out of the inner city to the suburbs or the countryside. The people who have stayed are going in for more and more “bottom-up” urban planning as a genuine form of participation, and regard their street and their neighbourhood as formable terrain, going far beyond taking on responsibility for playgrounds. This shift from a “revolutionary” to an “evolutionary” understanding and approach naturally has the advantage of being non-ideological, open and flexible. But in particular it highlights an interesting aspect which may be even more remarkable and influential than the changed interpretation of societal conditions: a new form of home-making is happening.

Positive Image

The general attitude towards urban living seems to have undergone a fundamental change in this country. Although one still sees critical or pessimistic cultural analyses, today’s view of the large city is much more optimistic than in the years and decades of inhospitability following Mitscherlich’s depressing diagnosis. At that time, the shape and (in both senses) the climate of the urban environment had finally mutated into a threatening adversary – and not just in Germany, with its post-war developments. In the first decade of the 21st century, in contrast, the large city tends rather to have positive connotations again. The city is (once again) viewed as a cultural landscape with an attractive infrastructure and aesthetics, as a complex structural and social conglomerate which is riddled with empty parts awaiting some sort of activation. A structure which – despite all the faults and deficiencies which will always be there – is far more vital and renewable than the “country”, an area which has now become the post-industrial landscape of the commuters and builders of “dream homes”. From the point of view of what is progressive today, the constructive critical potential lies in discovering and taking possession of undefined places and situations in an urban context – in terms both of specific usages and of joining others as creative shapers of a modern place to live in.

A New Concept of “Home”

Whilst this taking possession of intermediate urban spaces may be rather modest in societal terms – back in the seventies the talk would have been of “conformity with the system” – two opportunities are emerging as a result: firstly, the calm development of new residential and living patterns which correspond to the changed societal, social and ecological conditions. And, secondly, the emergence of a new concept of “home”, which, conscious of social and cultural roots, develops a non-symbolic, one might say emancipated, image of home. One which is burdened neither with sentimental clichés of Gemütlichkeit nor with monumental excesses; rather, one which consists of identifying oneself with an overall organism and its contrasting atmospheric and structural aspects. The artist Merlin Bauer has already devoted a campaign to this new sense of “home” in his very own way: taking the motto Liebe deine Stadt (Love your city) he designated a total of twelve buildings from the fifties and sixties in Cologne as particularly worthwhile in 2005 – 2007, in order to help foster the formation of an urban identity.