ABSTRACT
The rebuilding of Berlin after World War II and subsequent shifts in housing policy present a rare panoramic perspective for the consideration of housing issues and conceptions of the city over the following half-century. Seventy percent of Berlin’s built environment had been destroyed by the time the war ended, much of that in residential neighborhoods. The division of the city in 1949 sidelined early city-wide reconstruction planning; as a result, to study housing policy, design, and construction in postwar Berlin offers the opportunity to consider how two divergent social systems’ underlying conceptions were manifested in practice through built form.
