ABSTRACT

Between 1949 and 1989, the city of Berlin and its surrounding districts were separated from each other. The Wall completely interrupted earlier economic and commuter relations between 1961 and 1989; in fact, it isolated West Berlin completely. In 1990, the developments characteristic of urban development in the Western world also started in the Berlin-Brandenburg region: deindustrialisation, suburbanisation and decentralisation. Soon after unification, joint efforts by the political authorities of the city and the surrounding state of Brandenburg started to control regional development and prevent the destruction of the landscape by urban sprawl. The main focus of this chapter is on the organisational arrangement of joint planning in a region embracing areas belonging to different states. This is an exceptional experiment in Germany, caused by the failure of the referendum on the unification of the city-state of Berlin and the state of Brandenburg.