ABSTRACT
Any Berlin visitor taking the short stroll through the lively Wrangelstrasse in the heart of Kreuzberg will associate it with the quintessential Berlin street. Lined with five-storey-high tenement buildings, the formerly infamous Mietskasernen (rental barracks) from the last two decades of the 19th century features a particular Kreuzberger Mischung, a functional mixture of residential with shops and small workshops at ground level facing the street, and smaller production places in the courtyards and part of the upper floors of the back buildings. Housing and urban regeneration approach encountered increasing opposition from the late 1960s onwards, which ultimately led to a dramatic change in West Berlin’s planning culture. The competition brief was asking contributors to ‘develop new approaches and aims for the reinvigoration of the neighbourhoods north and south of the former Gorlitzer Bahnhof in Berlin-Kreuzberg as well as pick up on existing perspectives in order to develop exemplary strategies for the affected population’.
