ABSTRACT
The International Building Exhibit (IBA) operated in a way that became typical for the new tenement city. It was led and financed by welfare state institutions—the municipality of West Berlin and the West German government—and originally geared towards improving municipal service for the existing residents. The genesis of new tenement from the spirit of urban renewal thus created as many myths as it destroyed. The policy change during the 1970s laid the groundwork for a transformation of the city centres that was less significant in the economic context at the time, but much more in the post-industrial economy that came to bloom two decades later. The principles of the IBA inspired the post-reunification reconstruction in Berlin, the 1976 Glasgow Eastern Area Regeneration (GEAR), the city's self-reinvention a decade later, and the Norrebro controversies of the 1970s the turn-of-the-millennium "recovery" of Copenhagen.
