urban reconnaissance: “observe, assess and represent the urban context from a specific perspective, and to single out particular elements, rhythms or systems concurring in the production of the overall urban identity” (Tripodi).

The specific perspective I was given was names: “Investigate names given to places and streets or recorded in monuments: how when and by whom were they assigned? Which memories and culture they represent, how are they related with present life and culture? How names are related with colonial practices and / or post-colonial thinking?”

my explorations took me to power.

power city – the city is a field of forces, a territory of conquest and domination. It is shaped by competition, by individual and corporate appetites, by social claims and the ruling and intermediary presence of public institutions and constitutional powers. The distribution and confrontation of powers determine spatial development, concentrations of wealth and facilities, segregation and subjugation. Either manifest or obscured, power affects the way centres and centralities are created and related to one another, how peripheral and interstitial spaces are produced and how antagonistic and social movements take root in urban society.

Power sits within the appropriation section on the wheel.

reflections on power

Power is an essentially contested concept but I will use the understanding of power as a relation, not a resource to be distributed. A division exists in the philosophical literature between those who define power as power-over and those who define it as an ability/capacity to act, or power-to-do-something.

POWER-OVER

Power in the reconnaissance wheel, is conceptualised as a relation of domination, or power-over: an illegitimate, unjust and oppressive force.

Kaiser-Wilhelm Platz – sketches and photos from the reconnaissance

The square was named after Wilhelm I as there was a monument to him on the square. The monument was removed, yet the name remained. Wilhelm I was German Emperor from 1871 until his death in 1888. The notorious Berlin Conference of 1884-5 took place under his rule, organised Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, which formalised the “scramble for Africa”. The German colonial empire controlled colonies in German New Guinea, German East Africa (present day Rwanda, Burundi, and mainland Tanzania), and German South-West Africa (present day Namibia). From this era onwards, many Africans migrated to Germany.

Decolonial scholars in South America delve into the character of power (Quijano, 1989, Mignolo, 2000). The “coloniality of power” captures the continued substance of colonisation, well beyond the strict limits of colonial administration: in other words, decolonization did not eliminate coloniality, “it merely transformed its outer form” (Quijano & Wallerstein 1992, p.550).

POWER-TO

Power may also be positive. While power-over has masculinist connotations, power-to points to transformative and empowerment-based conceptions of power. Power is an ability, a capacity to transform oneself and others.

For Hannah Arendt, power is communal – it can only be practiced with others. She focused on collective empowerment and feels power’s capacity dissolves the moment humans disperse/do not act together in concert.

Audre Lorde proposes the erotic is a source of power-to (which I will be mapping in Lab 2).

An example of power-to, in the realm of remembering, is conjuring silenced voices in the Alter St Matthäus-Kirchhof cemetery, Schöneburg. Ziyaret is a 12 min film essay by Aykan Safoglu, 2019, exhibited in Bethanien, Berlin (September, 2020).

“you can hear the words of those resting here if you read them from the silence”.

Aykan Safoglu explores boundaries between private and public memory and between loss and memory during a walk. The encounters he and Gülsen Aktas - a Kurdish activist, feminist, social worker and long-time friend – had with people like May Ayim, Ovo Maltine, and Birgit Rommelspacher, whose resting places lay in the cemetery, become testimonies to the persistence of those figures’ biographies and activist lives. By overlaying narratives via the graves of the Brothers Grimm, Heinrich von Treitschkes, and Friedrich Drakes, Safoglu asks which hegemonial logics are pursued by remembrance culture. Ziyaret is an aesthetic and symbolic moving-closer to the cemetery as an archaeological site: it makes visible forgotten and marginalised stories of migration, anti-colonial movements, and AIDS activism in Berlin.

My colleague Giulia and I were assigned the mission of “Gender and diversity”. From the beginning, we assumed that our walking tour would not be able to capture the issue in its entirety because of the limitations of our own subjective experience – especially for a cisgender man as I am-, but still we decided to wander around the area of Schöneberg Nord. We already knew that this part of the neighbourhood had a strong LGBT community presence, so it seemed like the right way to go in order to build a deeper understanding of diversity in the neighbourhood.
During our walk, the general feeling was of an apparent absence of conflict. Diversity was openly celebrated, and the streets were filled with the particular sense of harmony that Berlin irradiates as soon as it is a sunny. In this context, both Giulia and I focused our attention on trying to identify these expressions of diversity and we came across two interesting examples.
On the one hand, we came across a little cabin in the intersection between Eisenacher Straße and Fuggerstraße, with a sign that read: “Info-Punkt Regenbogenkiez” or translated to English “Rainbow-neighbourhood Infopoint”. As we proceeded to read the written materials on its façade, we realised that this cabin served a variety of purposes. It was simultaneously a tourist information point that provided information regarding night life and historical places for the LGBT community, and an experimental site for conflict resolution regarding violence against the LGBT community through the figure of a “Nachtbürgermeister” or “Mayor of the night”. This place also allowed us to identify one key actor: Mann-O-Meter e.V.

On the other hand, not so much of an example, but more of a trend, we observed a continuous commodification of diversity throughout the neighbourhood. The rainbow flag was used as an attraction for commercial services, stripped down of its meaning in most of the cases -as the rainbow ATM shows. Our walking tour ended with the feeling that Schöneberg is yet another example of how the city of Berlin is commodifying most of its alternative spaces.

The afterwork that Giulia and I did went in different directions given the difficulty to find the time to create a shared outcome from this material. So, I decided to expand the lenses through which we were looking at the city with the definition of “Possible City” since the connection with “Heritage and the Commons” seemed immediate to me. Utopian and radical traditions represent an interesting way to understand the conflicts and potentialities of the present, especially in a context with such a pioneer LGBT community as Schöneberg.
The objective of this was twofold. On the one hand I intended to trace back terrains of struggle of relevant actors, as well as utopian visions of the past, and on the other hand to identify commonalities with the present and room for transformative action. Based on our walking tour we could see that the commodification of leisure could potentially be a terrain of struggle, and this thought was supported as well by a consultation process of 2019 that identified “non-commercial meeting places for all” as a key demand of the citizens’ of the area (1).
With this mind I submerged into the history of these movements with the intention to find non-commodified imaginaries that would shed light into the inquiry. This led to identify actors like Mann-O-Meter e.V (1986) or AHA e.V (1976) that were key in the promotion of the non-commercial gay scene in Berlin; and Potse (1980) and Drugstore (1972), which were also key in the promotion of free culture (although not exclusively LGBT). However, the richness in the history of the movements in this area soon proved to be overwhelming and it became obvious that the next steps were beyond the phase of reconnaissance.
A couple directions crossed my mind as how the inquiry should continue, but it all came to the point of establishing contact with these local actors, who are undeniable recipients of the historical struggle of the neighbourhood, and to find what kind of outcome could be meaningful in this context.
(1) https://www.berlin.de/ba-tempelhof-schoeneberg/politik-und-verwaltung/gremien-und-ansprechpersonen/buerger-innenrat/schoeneberg-nord/artikel.851356.php

Mission 6 was prompted by the investigation of the neighbourhood as a pedagogic field, a place for learning and growing.

Which are the spaces, structures and learning practices that are available to or appropriated by children and youth? How are these specialized or segregated rather than integrated into urban public spaces? What kind of imprint and learning do they transmit to the users?

I focused my attention on the variety of spaces available to the people in the neighbourhood. After some observation around during a long stroll, I sorted the sites into 3 main categories, based on the different use of the space: playgrounds on a vacant lot, as institutional sites or as reclaimed spaces.

Playground on a vacant lot

This is the most common typology of playgrounds in the neighborhood: they are built on vacant lots, which were emptied by buildings during the Second World War. Even if there's no real pattern for their placement(as they can be found nearly everywhere, from the street corners or between blocks), they are part of a strategy, crafted by the municipality, that takes advantage of a law dating back from 1979, which aims to give 1 square meter of public amenities for each inhabitant.

These playgrounds present a common set of features, with standardized equipment, a clear user target and restricted rules to use them. Their main advantage is the accessibility granted by their integration in the urban fabric.

Institutional Playground

Maybe the most traditional in functions, these spaces are related to educational institutions, placed most of the time nearby a "kita"(kindergarten) or religious institutes, which have a dedicated space for their users.

These areas are the most exclusive, as the access is permitted only to a certain kind of users and only when the linked institution is open.

Playground as a reclaimed spaced

This category gathers all the spaces whose functions have been changed by the presence of the playgrounds, either as part of a planned project or as a consequence of the users' actions.

This is the case of the school playground in Eberstrasse, which has been directly placed in the street, blocking the circulation and forcing a reroute of the car traffic.

A different relationship with space is depicted by the last two images, which represent a different kind of reappropriation of space by the users. Both of the images were taken in the proximity of Winterfeldplatz, where a big open playground encourages people to take over the space surrounding it, either to play with urban furniture or to do a dance class in the little square nearby.

These behaviors could be seen as a positive spillover favored by the playgrounds' presence, prompting kids but also adults to participate in playful activities.

The conclusion is that the neighbourhood presents a marked attention for needs of playing of the kids, in different settings and parts of the day. Even if certain freedom is offered in the kinds of movement and actions that the users can do inside the playgrounds, all of the spaces are usually fenced and regulated. Nonetheless, wherever the surroundings make it possible, spontaneous activities flourish anyway, redefining the citizens' perception of public space.

For our secret mission no. 1, we decided to focus on the Hauptstraße - from U-Bahnhof Innsbrucker Platz to U-Bahnhof Kleistpark - in order to create a timeline of events that influence the streets as we know it today. We wanted to see what historical traces we could find in the urban space and what information they gave us to understand its past. We have also tried to link our observations with other secret missions and try to extend our research into the historical events concerning the entire municipality of Schöneberg.

At the beginning of our expedition we didn't find any evidence of remembering that explains the historical reasons for the Hauptstraße of being a main street except this strange column with the inscription “1 Meile von Berlin” located in the middle of the traffic.

After some research on the internet, we found that originally called Dorfstraße (village street), it was the only road that existed in the village of Schöneberg (between Akazienstraße and Dominicusstraße was the centre of the village). This street became important in the 18th century when it got included in the main connection from Berlin to Potsdam. The column corresponded to a former unit of measurement (in this case about 7.5 km).

During our exploration, we were surprised by the important place taken by the use of the car and the green stripe in the middle of the roadway having no obvious function. We asked ourselves how this street was at the beginning of the 20th century and in fact, the urban planning of the Hauptstraße has changed a lot at the beginning of the 20th century and especially after the second world war. Major changes which radically transformed the street such as the significant loss of architectural heritage, the disappearance of the tram or even the creation of 6 car lanes which radically changed the uses of the public space.

In the middle of our walk we stopped in the Wilhelm-Kaiser-Platz. This square was named by the king of Prussia, and until the second WW was the town hall of Schöneberg. Really interesting to notice is the presence of old buildings and that after years of discussion, the square continue to be named after the King. The current town hall of Schöneberg is not in the Hauptstraße anymore.

The current town hall of Schöneberg is now in the J.F -Kennedy square, were the former president of the USA had is famous speach in the 1963. During the Cold War the town hall had a very important function and was at the center of the West-Berlin's policy.

The Hauptstraße is not very known as a place with many bars. An exception is the Cafe "Neues Ufer". This LGBT+ bar was a pioneering bar which at the end of the 1920s contributed to establishing Schöneberg as the "Rainbow-district". The north-area of the district was well know all over the world as a safe place for the queer community until the 1932 and again starting from the 70´s. Nowaday almost all Berlin is well know as a queer-friendly place, and also the district mantain his fame. Although it started as a political fight and continues to be so, now the pinkwashing of the movement is also very present in Schöneberg.

Among the abundant offer of shops and restaurants in Hauptstraße, the cultural diversity and especially that of the Turkish community is very evident. As a result of the immigration of "guest workers" in the 1970s, the Turkish community contributed to Schöneberg's culture and is still strongly present today.

The postoffice in the Hauptstraße was one of the biggest and most important place for the Post and the audio/TV technique before and after the second WW. Today just a small part is still a postoffice, while most of the area was renoveted and is now a mix of offices, shops and apartments. The company that was responsable for the modernization, Trockland, is one of the biggest investors in Berlin. In this way our research meet the thematic of the gentrification in the neighborhood, visible not only with this example but also through some old shops changes into a luxury delicatessen or co-working space. We discuss that since some years gentrification is one of the biggest ongoing conflict in Berlin.

Author: Francesco Scardaccione and Arthur Nihoul

After exploring borders in and of Schöneberg during the first workshop meeting, I decided to focus my personal contribution on a different species inhabiting cities all across the world. They are known to cross human-made borders effortlessly, frequently bypass the boundaries of regulations and desired use of public spaces and surely divide human city dwellers into two camps; the ones who like, feed and protect them, and the ones who are annoyed, disgusted and worried of transmissible diseases.
On an exploration of the neighbourhood, I set out to find visual clues of how pigeons shape Schöneberg. The following photos document traces of their bodies, humans’ strategies of adapting to their presence and headlines representing pigeons as the subject of public, political and ethical discussions.

Map forms of cultural expression or identities you find in the area: are there institutions, monuments, practices? Compare dominant / official culture vs subcultural expressions and minority or ethnic cultural practices. Are there material artefacts or intangible practices and languages? Reflect on their specific attachment to / relation with the local territory.

We decided to sit in Heinrich-Lassen-Park to analyze our mission while observing social cultural practices performed by citizens in the park. We asked ourselves what is culture? With the Schöneberg map in our hands, we started to understand more about the neighbourhood institutional culture by firstly checking the toponymy of the streets. Were there preeminent historical characters? Were they sharing common histories or features? To add? But more than institutional culture, we have been interested in grasping beneath the surface to find more about local subcultures/countercultures and we identified an initial research path in graffiti and street art to orient our exploration: which kind of graffiti can we find in Schöneberg? Where are they located? Which are the main conveyed messages? Do they reclaim something? Are they linked to local groups? Is commissioned street art or spontaneous tagging?
We walked through the Akazienkiez between Akazienstraße, Dominicusstraße, Hauptstraße and Eisenacher Straße, then we discovered the neighbourhood around Crellestraße and Feurigstraße, close to the train trails, when finally we entered the area that is referred to as “Rote Insel” (red island). While walking, we spotted graffiti, we focused on dichotomies: institutions and monuments vs subcultural expressions, dominant cultures vs ethnic minorities cultures, socio-cultural practices vs material cultural expressions. We found out that monuments are used as gathering space and kids playgrounds, they are recognized by residents as places to perform social practices. Apostel-Paulus-Kirche is surrounded by cafés and restaurants and the churchyard was crowded by people eating and enjoying the sunlight. Sculptures, close to playground are used by children to climb on.
A common social practice is urban gardening. Inhabitants take care of small public green areas and this might be linked with environmental activism (we found many Fridays For Future and Extinction Rebellion stickers) which is also confirmed by the good election results of the Green Party in the neighbourhood.
Also the presence of the LGBTQI*-community is made visible by activists through stickers, posters and rainbow paintings.

We collected pictures of all the expressions of (political) activism, clustered them in themes and combined them in a collage, to have a colorful overview of topics. But it was also clear, that the expressions are more isolated and don’t dominate the overall picture of the neighbourhoods.

History of Activism at “Rote Insel”

During some general desk research on Schöneberg, we randomly stumbled upon the Rote Insel (Red Island) history, a former working-class residential district in the south-eastern part of the neighbourhood, whose borders are constituted by the railways in a triangular shape. Following our interest in subcultures, we tried to investigate what was left of the political culture for which the block was famous, which is its legacy and whether it has taken other forms in the last decades. Therefore, we carried out a second exploration walking along the Rote Insel’s borders and through the historical working-class block. Borders are porous and are places of high exchange and interaction. They can be essential in the process of identity construction of a place. What we noticed is an interesting social activities “hub”/community center in Crellestraße, close to the railway border. This might suggest a metamorphosis of the traditional leftist political culture into a community mutualism and bottom-up social activities trend. From political activism linked to parties to a slighter community activism untied from clear political identification. This characteristic has been noticed by other participants to the training program too.

One of the few strong suggestions to a rooted leftist area is visible in one of the Rote Insel’s entrances, in Yorckstrasse. This is attributable to the proximity of the Rote Insel squat, the only one still existing among those occupied in the ‘70s within the area.

The workers block, which was mainly localized in Cherusker, Goten, Leber, Gustav-Müller and Naumannstrasse, is now a quiet residential area.

Commodification of the local political culture and history
The general process of subsumption and voracious absorption and commodification of the historical and cultural layers of the city happening in the whole Berlin doesn’t spare Schöneberg and its Rote Insel. Its history is sold in touristic tours and real estate investors are using subcultures codes as street art to advertise their companies.

What is love in the city? And how is it expressed in the commons of the city – shared spaces, resources, principles?
Let’s put on a pair of pink rose-tinted glasses and go for a walk hand-in-hand around Berlin’s Schöneberg district to ‘feel the love’ in its streets.

In the world of urban research and critical practice, it is somewhat unusual to take an emotional perspective on the city, and even less usual to take an approach which deals with one of the happier and more positive emotions that one can experience rather than the darker, more negative ones. This odd blind spot in the perspective of the urban investigator does not however reflect a lack of valid potential for finding new and valuable insights hiding through the lens of affirmative emotional experience, instead it perhaps illustrates more accurately the complexity of trying to shape those perspectives into something which could form the basis of rigorous scholarly investigation and radical action for change.

One of the startling difficulties in exploring love in an urban environment is to define how it should be characterized and interpreted in the context of space, place and community. Can you sense love flowing through a neighbourhood? If so, how? By what means and through which indicators should it be detected and measured?
Is love visible architecturally, experienced through through municipal resources and services, mediated by public art or simply present in the faces and movements of local inhabitants?
Does a community love collectively? And if so, what kind of love does it openly express?

A quick check on Wikipedia gives us some starting points to consider on our emotional safari:
“Love encompasses a range of strong and positive emotional and mental states, from the most sublime virtue or good habit, the deepest interpersonal affection and to the simplest pleasure. Most commonly, love refers to a feeling of strong attraction and emotional attachment...human kindness, compassion, and affection, as ‘the unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another’”

Though love may initially appear to be a positive emotional experience, it can also have a darkside. In Greek mythology, Aphrodite, the goddess of love, had a vengeful rage when betrayed which lead her to curse various people to terrible fates, including incest, murder, infidelity and suicide. In more modern readings, love can also be interpreted as the basis for manic obsession and even addiction.
Keeping all this in mind, what would be some useful concepts of love to consider while out looking for it in the city?

Searching for Love

Ancient Greeks philosophers thought a lot about love and ultimately identified various distinct forms of loving that humans can experience, including: familial love (called 'Storge' in ancient Greek), friendly love (Philia - also known as platonic love), romantic love (Eros), guest love (Xenia - e.g. hospitality), self love (Philautia) and divine/spiritual love (Agape).
Though these definitions have been radically expanded upon by other cultures and in more recent periods, they form a useful foundation on which to begin understanding how to identify loving gestures and actions.

To explore how these concepts of love translate in the urban environment, I went on a series of walks with Tesserae founder and urban researcher Lorenzo Tripodi in which we tried to identify acts and expressions of love in the commons of Berlin's Schöneberg district.
We chose a route around the neighbourhood which seemed appropriate to our theme.

Traces of some of the forms of love that the Greeks identified are immediately visible in Schöneberg.
The presence of a large concentration of families in the neighbourhood, particularly those with young children, is immediately clear through the plethora of children’s care and play spaces, as well as through a range of family care services providers in the area.

These spaces not only represent a type of familial love, a desire for family members to engage with each other and take responsibility for each other’s well being, but also reflect a form of social care and commitment, in which resources are distributed and made accessible for the benefit of the broader community. These support structures perhaps connect to another distinct form of love, a kind of altruism or good will, charity even, a love for fellow humans (love thy neighbour?) resulting in an offer of support and solidarity. The concept of offering a 'helping hand' to those in your community fits in with the Greek's concept of Agape, divine love, and is commonly practiced by many religious groups around the world. In fact, a number of the children's care spaces in Schöneberg are run by local churches.

Further expressions of a desire to offer support, generosity and the redistribution of resources for common benefit are also visible elsewhere in the neighbourhood.

Various indications of compassionate comradeship, a friendly form of love between equals (Philia), were visible throughout Schöneberg, including signs of partnership, acceptance, equality, inclusion, friendship and bonding.

Through independent acts of decentralized beautification and the autonomous creation and upkeep of common local facilities, the Schöneberg community not only expresses an offer of friendship to its fellow neighbours, but by extension also engages both in a type of self-care (self-love or Philautia) and an offer of hospitality to people visiting the neighbourhood (Xenia)

Romance, Eros as the Greeks knew it, is a form of love that can both be sexual and affectionate, enduring and fleeting, complex and transactional, and all of these aspects are reflected in the Schöneberg landscape

I personally particularly appreciate the fact that in the last picture above, which shows the doorway to the Club King George burlesque venue, another small example of support and inclusion is visible – a special extra bell for wheelchair using guests!

One key form of loving emotional expression that is highly present in Schöneberg is empathy. It takes many forms in the neighbourhood, including some of the examples we’ve seen above already, but none are more striking than the outpouring of grief and compassion that can be found in the monuments of remembrance and mourning present in the district – particularly those which commemorate the marginalization and murder of Jews during the second world war. These are numerous and spread liberally throughout the neighbourhood, and form a subtle background discourse that brings important context to the present day architecture of the area, as well as serving as magnetic poles around which remorse and mourning can circulate and find meaningful orientation.

Conclusion

This short survey of Schöneberg has provided me a valuable insight both into the neighbourhood and into a new filter through which to examine and demarcate the urban fabric – that of loving emotion.
Although the perspective of love did not reveal any features of the neighbourhood that would have otherwise remained totally unseen (i.e. previously invisible architectures or histories), it did succeed in highlighting a set of otherwise imperceptible relationships, bringing many disparate aspects of the district together into a new and unexpected constellation. There are few other processes of enquiry which would have found unifying connection between holocaust memorials, a burlesque dance venue and patches of urban gardening. Mapping emotional activity through a built environment whose primary concerns are practical, residential and commercial has revealed a hidden network which, while at first subtle, resonates strongly within its surrounding environment and has a significant and profound effect on shaping one’s psychogeographic experience.

In order to make this kind of urban reconnaissance easier in future, I have tried to collate a set of keywords that can be used to approach and examine city spaces through the lens of love (I have highlighted the ones which I found most useful):

• Care, Duty, Commitment, Loyalty, Support, Charity, Generosity, Benevolence, Sacrifice Selflessness, Inclusion

• Solidarity, Partnership, Acceptance, Warmth, Bonding, Friendship

• Random Acts of Beauty, Environmental Care, Community Care, Social Care, Kindness

• Sex, Sexuality, Eroticism, Playfulness, Intimacy, Lust, Passion, Affection, Romance, Joy

• Empathy, Compassion, Remembrance, Grief, Mourning

Future Work

As I touched on briefly earlier, love is not only always a positive experience or emotion. Grief and mourning resulting from loss and tragedy express a kind of sunken love, weighed down by sadness, but love can also find negative expression in passionate anger, rage, obsessive craving and addiction.
Additionally, there are still further, more modern philosophical definitions of love beyond those defined by the Greeks which I have not explored at all.
In continuing this work it would be useful to delve into some of the other peripheries of love and see what new insights they might reveal when applied to urban environments.
In the mean time, the work that has already been done here could now be used as the basis for proposing a new category within Tesserae’s urban reconnaissance toolkit, as well as exploring what other emotions could also be added in the future.

Author: Ben Sassen

Thanks to Lorenzo Tripodi for contributing to the ideas in this article, for taking the photographs and for joining me for walks around Schöneberg.

Squatted houses was a social phenomenon that affected the entire German capital, albeit in different ways. First West Berlin (80's) and then East Berlin (90's). In both contexts they were strong attempts to experiment with community lifestyles. Restrained by alternative schemes to the dominant capitalist logics and aimed at finding new sources of sustenance.
Within these protest and occupation movements the most diverse political and social groups and subcultures (punk, autonomous, environmentalist, gay) were represented. Although different, they all had in common a new way of imagining life together. They thought about new forms of sharing living and public space. New social projects and alternative economies to the capitalist one.
The conservative party CDU, supported in the Senate by the socialist party SPD, declared zero tolerance towards squats. It began a campaign of repression against demonstrations and occupied houses. The Hausbesetzer were divided into two categories, those open to negotiation and criminals. The wave of repression caused violent clashes with the police, reaching its peak on 22 September 1981. On that day Klaus-Jurgen Rattay, who had just come of age, was killed in a clash. From that moment on, the initiatives of the movements began to diminish. Alongside the occupations that began to prefer legal and peaceful ways, however, the rebel ones continued to exist. They did not negotiate and ended with police evictions. In 1984, 105 houses were legalised with rental contracts and 60 were evicted.

Gender as kaleidoscope. Reflecting on an urban exploration 19.09.20

As we started not-so-aimlessly walking North through the backstreets branching from Hauptstraße, Luismi and I had the vivid impression that the questions asked by mission 7 – Gender and diversity – required explicitly grappling with our own positionality and identity.
As we tried to roam – and cross the space with awareness and intention – we reflected on how we, two young cisgender, educated people with EU migratory backgrounds, could only read a spec of the urban fabric, when it came to gender and diversity. Our positionality prevented us from being exposed to certain challenges or accessing certain spaces – there are only so many identity components that can be activated and made salient by any given situation, only so many spaces one can access with one’s identity; there is only so much one can experience with their – albeit intersectional and fluidly identified – body.
As an upshot of these reflections, our lenses to read gender and diversity were necessarily bound, even blinding?
Our footsteps took us back and forth in lanes across parts of Schöneberg, mostly around Martin-Luther-Straße, the Regenbogenkiez (Rainbow neighbourhood), Nollendorfplatz, Eisenacherstraße. We sat down in the middle of Barbarossaplatz, as the toponomy was too evocative, and the sunshine too inviting not to stop by. I used the Strava app to record our wandering and exploration. Figure 1 reflect what the app recorded.
A few days later, as I was dwelling on the impressions collected on that urban exploration. The overall atmosphere has conveyed superficial and immediate feelings of a harmonious, diverse and well-engineered neighbourhood, with plenty of inclusive spaces for leisurely walks and for spending time outdoors.
Indeed, there were many more inputs to look at gender and diversity that would be possible to frame as lenses – instead, I opted for the metaphor of gender as a kaleidoscope. Irrespective of how hard one may try, kaleidoscopes cannot replicate the same perspective twice, producing endlessly new arrangements of similar and recurring components and elements. With such an overwhelmingly rich spectrum of possibility to talk about gender and diversity, I started questioning what would be feasible to focus on.
Coming into a space with little previous knowledge on the gendered history of the neighbourhood other than its centrality for the LGBTQ+ movements since the 1920s, I conducted more desk research into the initiatives that had been carried out, deciding to focus on the individuation of spaces across the neighbourhood where potential conflict or friction could arise.
More specifically, the desk research conducted revealed some of the many ongoing initiatives that the municipality, the district, social movements, and civil society perform to enhance gender quality, representation, and inclusion. This is a short survey of few of the initiatives (spanning from governance, to urban planning, to arts and culture, to activism, to tourism) that explicitly address gender-relates themes in the Schöneberg district.
· A Femmes City Program and art exhibition at U7 Kleistpark · Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwilcklung Gendermainstreaming · Gender Equality Framework for Berlin · Fetish and sex shops · Instances of rainbow-washing (ATMs, bus stops) · Queer Berlin—Schöneberg Tour · Virtual 2020 CSD Parade · Regenbogenkiez Nachtbürgermeister —Nightmayor Tiny House This led me to think about conflict negotiation as heritage. I was struck by the pilot project – borrowed from other cities, mostly in the Netherlands – of instituting a Nachtbürgermeister, a Nightmayor. The Nachtbürgermeister, and the Tiny House adapted to Information Point are to be found in one of the nightlife hotspots of the Regenbogenkiez. Active certain nights of the week, the activity of the Nachtbürgermeister is allegedly that of mediating amongst conflicting interests of residents, visitors, tourists and other interested parties. The physical presence of the Nachtbürgermeister at the designated tiny house built by the Tempelhof-Schöneberg Bezirkamt is complemented by the mobile presence of the Nachtlichte, volunteers dressed in white that provide support whilst roaming across the areas of the thriving Schöneberg’s nightlife.
The more I read about it, the more I became fascinated with the question of how the presence of a hybrid formal-informal place designated for conflict negotiation affects the urban space.
Admittedly, upon an initial explorative and desk-research recognition, the capacity of Schöneberg to harmoniously integrate different identities and backgrounds in the district sounded all-too-perfect. Therefore, I started wondering what could stir up the urban fabric, something that could make frictions visible, and engage the neighbourhood outside the educated guesses of people crossing back and forth the gates of academic jargon with relative ease.
A well-meaning agent provocateur – if somewhat of a contradiction in terms – and not a mere excuse to play devil’s advocate in what feels a genuinely welcoming and inclusive urban space. These reflections led me to re-load the metaphor of gender as kaleidoscope into the prototype of a Cards-oskope deck.
The prototype cards are meant as a provocation, to make ripples on the water on the surface of a seemingly idyllic neighbourhood and elicit cityscapes of empathy through conversations that challenge our positionality, gender identity and experience and awareness of diversity. They could ask prospective participants to navigate the intersectionality of the neighbourhood’s identity and its related dynamics of spatial inclusion, exclusion, and expression.
What counts as a minority, in a place which is regarded as one of the most inclusive districts in Berlin?
The Cards-oskope deck could be a tool to encourage the recognition of conflict negotiation amongst the different identities of the Regenbogenkiez as part of Schöneberg’s Heritage.
The questions are meant to elicit cityscapes of empathy by asking participants to navigate the intersectionality of the neighbourhood’s identity and its relate dynamics of spatial inclusion, exclusion and expression.

On 19 September 2020 we started a new URLab dedicated to investigate the neighbourhood of Schöneberg in Berlin. The laboratory is part of Collaborative Atlases for Heritage and the Commons, a training program on participative methods funded by the EU Erasmus+ project OpenCCCP. The overall objective of the training is to test the concept of collaborative atlases as tools for "heritage making". The first module of the training program proposes the Urban Reconnaissance methodology for setting an initial taxonomy of the observed phenomena and draw a baseline of our initial state of understanding of the spatial context investigated. As a matter of fact we chose to develop the training program on a neighbourhood of Berlin which is relatively new also to us the trainers, sharing the experience of discovering the complexity of elements that define its identity and heritage with the trainees.

The group of 14 participants includes people with various provenience - not only German but Slovakian, Italian, British, Canadian - with backgrounds in such diverse fields as urbanism, visual anthropology, art, history, engineering, etc.

After introducing the purposes and method of the lab, we created teams of two, combining the participants with better knowledge of Berlin with the newcomers. Then we distributed envelopes containing a secret missions for each team. Each mission was inspired by a different exercise of urban reconnaissance, while their random allocation had the purpose to pull the participants out of the "comfort zone" of their typical interests and foci.

Here the list of initial assignments:

Mission 1: Timeline.

Draft a timeline of events and transformations that affected form and identity of the area. Include historical events, major constructions, celebrative artefacts, laws. Consider who is at the origin of these transformation and how they are remembered.

 Mission 2: Borders

Identify administrative, morphological and psychological edges that define the neighbourhood as such, and check for other subdivisions, vicinities, and local identities that compose it.

Mission 3: Conflicts

Explore the neighbourhood looking for signs of conflicts and map the different forms in which they manifest: diverging interests, economic competition, social antagonism, counter-narratives, vandalism, clashing uses etc. Check which past conflicts left traces in the urban space and what appear as current controversies now.

Mission 4: Names

Investigate names given to places and streets or recorded in monuments: how when and by whom were they assigned? Which memories and culture they represent, how are they related with present life and culture? How names are related with colonial practices and / or post-colonial thinking?

Mission 5: Culture

Map forms of cultural expression or identities you find in the area: are there institutions, monuments, practices? Compare dominant / official culture vs subcultural expressions and minority or ethnic cultural practices. Are there material artefacts or intangible practices and languages? Reflect on their specific attachment to / relation with the local territory.

Mission 6: Playground

Investigate the neighbourhood as a pedagogic field, a place for learning and growing. Which are the spaces, structures and learning practices that are available to or appropriated by children and youth? How are these specialised or segregated rather than integrated in urban (public) spaces? What kind of imprint and learnings they transmit to the users?

Mission 7: Gender and diversity

Roam the neighbourhood investigating how the aspects of gender and diversity are inscribed the the urban space. Can you find evidently gendered spaces? Are there spaces or structures dedicated to particular social categories? Can you find traces of issues with diversity and social inclusion? Is there a feeling of tolerance and safety towards sensitive categories (LGBT, migrants, minorities?)

Mission 8: Commons

Map common goods and resources that are managed as such in the neighbourhood. Reflect on the difference with public spaces and privately owned spaces available for public use.

After that participants went out exploring the neighbourhood for their mission and came back to the office for the final wrap up of the day, exchanging and discussing the first impressions on Schoeneberg. For the next meeting the assignment was to further develop their observation in a personal project. The participant were set free to continue focusing strictly on the "mission" assigned, or to move forward to a specific theme they are interested to develop connected with the general objectives of the laboratory.

On Friday the 25th we started with a round of presentations about the findings made by the participants during the week.

First Arthur and Francesco presented their interpretation of the Hauptstrasse as a timeline connecting in spatial form the major events defining the transformation of this area. They decided to focus on the Hauptstraße - from U-Bahnhof Innsbrucker Platz to U-Bahnhof Kleistpark - in order to create a timeline of events that influence the street as we know it today.

(...to be continued...)

Discovering Mexico City from scratch, the first element to emerge evidently is the theme of water, (or its absence / disappearance). Mexico City is built on a lake’s bed, which the growth of the metropolis has progressively dried, and almost every aspect of its development, management and conflicts is connected with issues of water.

Our first full-immersion in the theme come through a walk of 22 km. that we did together with the Mexico-based Dutch artist and journalist Feike De Jong. The itinerary followed the former shore of the Texcoco lake at the time when the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán was in fact an island in the middle of the lake. This experience was in fact a perfect mix of the exercise Liquid City with Threshold City and City of Memory, walking along an urban edge than now is confined only in a labile remembrance. The challenging march juxtaposed the suggestive memory of a past natural environment with the actual reality of a congested, noisy and polluted territory covered by tarmac and concrete, where is hardly possible to imagine how these places could appear in pre hispanic times. The memory of waters is ephemerally preserved in some toponyms, namely the Calzadas which qualify former waterways finally covered or filled up during last century.

After that, we went to visit the Chapultepec Park, which includes the Water Garden Museum with the Tlaloc fountain (Atzec divinity of water) and the extraordinary mural by Diego Rivera called "El agua: origen de la vida”, which is set at the initial pit of the Sistema Lerma - Cutzamale, and aqueduct built in 1909 to serve the city. Here we could experience different declinations of water as part of aesthetic, cultural and religious aspects of urban life.

As stated in the exercise Narrated City, “the city is a work of fact and fiction”. In this sense, the city constitutes a narrative, which is constantly told and re-told, revisited, interpreted, quoted and translated both through verbal and non-verbal means.

The work of the Mexican film collective called Los Ingrávidos provides good examples of the city as a narrative. Los Ingrávidos often work with archival film footage and archival sounds that they intervene and interweave with other original filmed material and audio, thus creating rich collages. Their aim is to propose new narratives that question and subvert official discourses about the many violent events that have taken and are taking place all over Mexico: from the myriad femicides, to the disappearance of 43 students in 2014, to the increasing number of deaths due to the drug cartels fighting each other, and to the violently repressed student movement on October 2nd 1968.

I chose this particular short film, entitled Olympia, by Los Ingrávidos because it reconstructs the narrative of the 1968 Olympic Games, the first and only Olympics to ever be hosted in Mexico City. The film employs archival images of the Olympic Stadium, the Olympic Village, the Sports Palace building and of the actual opening ceremony of these Games. These images are edited so that they are seen as through a pinhole, and they are accompanied by English subtitles that construct an apparently unrelated narrative. The subtitles describe, first, the situation of some prisoners about which we do not know anything else except how they were treated; and second, the subtitles describe the scene of a family eating at a table.

The contrast between the subtitles and the images that this film constructs offers a critical commentary on the Olympic Games inauguration event. The film reminds us that this opening ceremony occurred just a few days after a large student mobilization was violently repressed by the Mexican government, resulting in many deaths and the imprisonment of students.

Just as this film exemplifies the city as a narrative, it also shows the city as an event, as a construction made of ordinary moments, which are interrupted and marked by extraordinary incidents. In this sense, the city is as much a story as it is a calendar.

Olympia from Los ingrávidos on Vimeo.

City of Situations . That should be enough to describe Mexico City. As a stranger and newcomer to this fabulous city, I constantly find myself being amazed by its complexity, diversity, and its urban character. Mexico City is unique. In the attempt of staying true to the essence of the exercise I did not make a plan to conduct it. Instead, I decided to continue with my everyday routine and get surprised by the eventfulness of the city. So I did, and as I got off work I had the opportunity to attend the screening of a documentary called “Abuelo Banda” at a local bar. Sidenote on the venue: its architecture takes you on a trip to the 19th century while you are drinking “pulque” or beers and there is a guy playing the sax on the ground floor while we are watching a film on the rock scene in Mexico City on the 70s and 80s.
What I tried to express with the images above are three different moments of the film in which I found “situations” that by just watching them tell you the story of the place. The close-knit community of Neza, its resilient capacity after the earthquake and how they manage to organize the biggest “fiesta” for their people and just enjoy life. The way women help each other to make this celebration the year’s best, and the excitement of all the participants makes you want to experience it. “Neza belongs to all of us, and we belong to Neza” they said.
Media is a powerful tool to take us to places and territories we are not familiar with, it is vital to understand its socio-spatial dynamics and how people connect with each other and with the urban space.
When it comes to Mexico City what I find most exciting is the individual expressions of identity that can be found in every single street, and that collectively build the identity of the city. The non-formal food stalls, people running around to make their way to the metro, the noise, the altars, the self-built, the chaos, to mention a few, tells you the story of a fascinating city that keeps evolving. More importantly, they are testament to the people that work their hardest every day to make a better way of living.

City of Culture

Magdalena Contreras is one of the township of the Mexico City who have “urban towns” each town have a solid organization; composed by the neighbors, they elect their celebration commission who will organize the main event: the patronal feast. During this great party, people attend religious mass and the trail with the saint on the streets of the town, later they invite the neighbors to a communal dinner where traditional dishes are prepared and some alcohol is given. At night, people attend small concert where bands in most cases “cumbia/salsa or ranchera” plays for the people. In this case i present photos of the San Francisco party, we see the trail and a very partícular actor in every celebration: the “chinelo”.

City of Culture / City of Signs / Welfare City

Para poder hablar de lo urbano en la CDMX hay que retomar la idea de que la ciudad no solo es la zona central, y que el norte no es la única zona urbana existente, pues los límites de la ciudad han pasado a ser borrados, dejando como resultado una interconexión cada vez mayor entre comunidades que lleva consigo la urbanización hasta los lugares más lejanos como lo es Xochimilco, alcaldía que al igual que todas las que forman parte de la gran urbe mexicana, tiene una gran cantidad de simbolismos inmersos que a pesar de la transculturación y aculturación existente, se mantienen como un referente de identidad y significación de suma importancia.

San Gregorio Atlapulco es nuestro caso a tratar, uno de los pueblos originarios del Valle de México que con el transcurso del tiempo, se adentra más a la cotidianidad urbana, de aquella ciudad neoliberal que busca la mercantilización para progresar, y que ha llevado a la integración de la comunidad a la vida rutinaria de la ciudad, a la asimilación de un paisaje nuevo en el que el gris de las construcciones y el negro del pavimento, toman importancia en lo espacial, para convertir a aquel pueblo en una extensión más de la ciudad, en el que espacios como los campos, las tierras comunales y los sitios religiosos parecen ya no tener cabida; sin embargo Atlapulco mantiene como consecuencia de la urbanización (que trae consigo un proceso de trans y aculturación por diversos motivos) una resistencia cultural al cambio en la que los signos obtienen una mayor importancia al momento de ser parte de la urbe, pues hechos como el que tres cruces estén en la cima de un cerro de una población de más de 54 mil habitantes en una posición de vigilancia, demuestra que la religiosidad es un elemento imborrable y que por otro lado genera una identidad colectiva, al mantener la idea de que Atlapulco no es una zona ni conurbada o urbanizada, sino que es un pueblo originario y que como tal, también mantendrá lo más intactos posible sus zonas de cultivo tradicional como lo son las chinampas, los ejidos y el cerro pues son parte del aspecto sociocultural que une a los atlapulquenses.

Los referentes culturales se mantienen a lo largo y ancho de esta población, siendo en su mayoría signos que se hallan inmersos en la mancha urbana, fungiendo como objetos y sujetos creadores de colectividad, de diferenciación y de reivindicación de lo tradicional a pesar de las tendencias urbanizadoras que en muchos casos han llevado a la desecación de lagos y canales, al olvido de las tradiciones y creación de sociedades de consumo que se convierten en lo que Marc Augé llamaría No-Lugar, esa entidad urbana carente de vida cultural que no sea basada en lo monetario, pero en nombre de la civilización con el fin de progresar como se hubiera pensado en la modernidad occidental, esto para llevar a la humanidad a una nueva era en la que ni la cultura ni la sociedad se considera sino que solo se enfatiza en lo económico, pues es lo único que puede llevar al humano a una mejora en su vida; es claro que esta idealización del progreso solo ha traído conflictos por el querer adentrar sistemas económicos y urbanos que no encajan en las sociedades de implantación, pero que también ha traído beneficios que van desde los nuevos conocimientos para la urbanización con consideraciones sociales, las mejoras y aumento de oportunidades laborales y por supuesto la revalorización de la identidad mediante el uso de representaciones materiales.

Quizás sea momento de replantearnos la concepción de la ciudad como progreso, para recordar que existe un arcoíris lleno de vida y color, que trae consigo la belleza y esencia del ser humano y que se conoce como cultura, esto para voltear a nuestro interior y considerarnos parte de una sociedad que inmersa o no en la urbe, mantiene símbolos que enriquecen nuestra categoría de humanidad y que es menester comprender si se quiere un desarrollo pleno de la ciudad a lo largo del mundo.