ABSTRACT
‘Tempelhofer Feld’ is the name for an almost 400 hectare terrain of the former airport Berlin Tempelhof, centrally located inside Berlin’s railway ring. The airport operations were stopped in October 2008; since May 2010, the airfield has been open to the public. The Tempelhofer Feld is a specific space, concerning its texture, quality, usage, and materiality. But it is also a specific space concerning its discursive representation in the public sphere. There has been a big and ongoing debate for a long time about the future of the terrain. That dispute became very lively after the closure of the airport, particularly during the 18 months when the huge free space was hermetically locked. In these debates—and this is already one of the particularities of the Tempelhofer Feld—some fundamental points and questions were brought into the discussion: questions about the future of the urban, about making the space public, about the conditions of the political, and about the production of space. In this chapter I would like to approach this specific space in order to explore its singularity. My thesis is that the peculiarity of the Tempelhofer Feld has something to do with its emptiness. The huge location is almost empty, without buildings (just with some small barracks), without streets and cars, without noteworthy topography, even nearly without trees. This state as an empty space is the result of a complex history which I am going to report next. And this emptiness is, too, a link to some theoretical concepts of the urban and the space. My aim is to connect both things in my report.
