Abstracts of Papers

Brian Ladd:
Urban Design, Place Memory, and Resistance to Globalization in Berlin

By most criteria of globalizing urbanism, Berlin is an absurdity. The politically motivated subsidies to Berlin by both postwar German states have been followed by the unified Germany's political commitment to Berlin as capital, building not on the city's vanished economic potential but rather on images and memories of its cultural signficance. This commitment to urban mythology both draws on and promotes a belief in the importance of public-sector urban planning shared (if differently interpreted) by intellectuals and officials from both halves of the former divided city. Outsiders are struck by the dirigiste consensus as well as the weak private sector. For theorists of the "global city," then, Berlin is quintessentially provincial, lacking the private-sector economic dynamism of New York and the other cities Berlin would like to be compared to. But Andreas Huyssen's reminder of the importance of memory in a national and local framework (in his presentation at the New York conference) suggests a way of seeing backward-looking Berlin's public sphere as an alternative model of urbanism, rather than a pathetic anachronism. Berlin has become internationally recognized for its controversial attempts to use urban space to explore and reinterpret German history, through both its placement of memorials and its planning guidelines for architecture, streets, and public spaces. The international attention to Berlin suggests that Huyssen may be right in his argument about the importance of memory in urban space and that Berlin may represent a resistance to certain tendencies of globalization - a resistance that reaches far beyond insular debates about the physical form of the "European city." My presentation will explore the question of whether Berlin's debates about memory and urban design represent German insularity or German innovation.