Berlin Urban Design

This book presents a history of Berlin’s urban design from a European perspective. It is aimed at professionals and students interested in urban design, urban planning and urban design history, but is also a good primer for any visitor to the city. Numerous plans, drawings and photos, including exceptional aerial photography, illustrate Berlin’s key urban developments, which have shaped one of Europe’s most attractive, liveable and yet contested cities.

Berlin has become a model for European urban design. The reasons lie in the nature of its compact pre-First World War urban districts; in the development of suburban housing estates during the 1920s; in the refurbishment and careful renewal from the 1970s onwards of its compact 19th century districts; and in the critical reconstruction of its urban form since the 1980s. But Berlin was not always seen as a model. The unflattering title of “the world’s largest tenement city” – a rather undeserved epithet – served for decades as a bogeyman, as did the large scale social housing estates in both East and West that have been much criticised since the 1970s. Despite this, the city has largely avoided the suburban sprawl that plagues cities worldwide.

Harald Bodenschatz, born in Munich in 1946, a sociologist and urban planner, is a full Professor of Sociology of Architecture and Urban Planning at the Technical University of Berlin. He has published numerous books dealing with urban redevelopment, suburban development, history of town planning and urban design in Berlin and elsewhere.