Cities offer us protection: once protection from a dangerous nature and marauding gangs who took what they wanted in the remote hamlet on their way from war to war. Today, the city offers us protection in anonymity when we want to escape the social control of manageable communities, and it helps us to be able to satisfy our needs immediately - everything is plentiful and the late-night shop is always open. Cities are built failing utopias; we can learn a lot by looking at them through the eyes of our tools.
Public spaces are mostly occupied and designed by men. At the same time, women are pushed back into private spaces and the
does everything to keep them there. Do the following homework as soon as you leave the exhibition: At different times count the men and women in the streets, cafés, subways etc. for 5 minutes. After you have finished counting, spend a few minutes observing who is taking what space or who is avoiding whom. Make a note of your results and complete this experiment a total of ten times. Discuss the results with two women and two men and analyze your findings.
The little house on a greenbelt, preferably in a suburb on the outskirts of town, is still a common dream as well as the reality of one third of all households in Germany - and rising. We don’t need to write more about the inferno of the current housing and urban planning crisis as more and more people are getting by without the accompanying greenbelt and instead replace it with an abiotic but easy to maintain rock garden. Meanwhile, the
stands somewhere in the pretty single family home where it gets dusted once a year.
"Houses belong to those who live in them." is a classic slogan of the squatter scene, but it also accurately describes the grievances of many cities: the flats don't belong to those who live in them, but mostly to profit-driven real estate companies, which are sometimes (but increasingly less) in public or cooperative hands. The tenants are thus excluded from any decision-making and the
can only measure the fact that ownership of flats confers exclusive decision-making rights and virtually no obligations to the landlords and no rights to anything to everyone else.
The 1.2 million cars in Berlin are driven on average about 30 minutes per day and for the remaining 23.5 hours they just hang around. Every time a car is parked in one of the over 2 million parking spots in the public space, a colorful
lights up. After all, they can use 19 % of the entire transportation surface free of charge! Cyclists can't even imagine such a large proportion, because they currently only have 3% of the traffic area at their disposal. Meanwhile, apartment seekers can only dream of renting a living space for 0 euros per square metre.
The average living space per person has more than doubled in the past 50 years. While one person lived on an average of 22.1 sqm in 1965, by 2017 the figure had risen to 46.5 sqm in Germany. The increasing amount of speculation with real estate is certainly the main reason for the continuously rising rental prices, but it is also the increasing demand for more individual space in housing situations. The demand for larger living quarters is therefore also the demand for
; we will continue to build larger houses and apartments for declining numbers of occupants.. Alternative forms of communal living and needs-oriented allocations of living space are not considered at all.
More than half of Berlin’s 1.5 million apartments were destroyed during the Second World War. What remained was 75 million cubic meters of rubble, enough for 22 rubble mountains. The Teufelsberg [devil’s mountain] is one of them, and was for a long time the highest elevation in Berlin. The Arkenberge replaced it in 2015, because even without war as a cause, huge amounts of rubble accumulate annually as
reduced the economic life of buildings to about 50 years. Therefore, there is no reason to allow for the technological life of the buildings to be much longer. On the contrary, the average lifespan of buildings are often less than 10 years.
Urban sprawl in cities is becoming increasingly widespread, leaving many people disoriented and impoverished, forced to the edge of the metropolitan area. Practically speaking, it is already taking place; free seating in public spaces is being dismantled only to be replaced by the paid seating of private cafés. The
cut up established infrastructures and, at the same time, ensured a perverse order of cleanliness: all of the rich, beautiful, good, creative, committed, white and German segment of the population on one side, and everyone else on the other.
In the early 2000s, the militant group (mg) used the terms gentrification and precarization in its confessional letters for terrorist arson attacks. Through a simple Internet search, the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office of Germany finds out that Dr. Andrej Holm, an urban sociologist at Humboldt Universität Berlin, also uses these terms. As a result, in September 2006, the Federal Prosecutor opened preliminary proceedings against Andrej Holm. For several months he was shadowed; his phone calls were tapped; e-mails were read; and finally in July 2007 he was arrested by a SWAT squad and detained in custody for three weeks. In October 2007 the arrest warrant was lifted and in July 2010 the investigation was discontinued due to a lack of sufficient suspicion. Gentrification and precarization are common terms today and are taken for granted by everyone: The
has done a good job here at a high individual price and made global phenomena describable with these terms.
Glyphosat wird im Kombinationspräparat "Roundup" großflächig in der Landwirtschaft zur Unkrautvernichtung auf dem Acker eingesetzt. Wie Glyphosat auf die Organismen von Menschen und Tieren wirkt, ist nicht genau geklärt. Die Internationale Agentur für Krebsforschung klassifizierte den Stoff 2015 als "wahrscheinlich krebserregend für den Menschen". Seitdem wird gestritten über die Zulassung von Glyphosat in der Landwirtschaft, beide Seiten präsentieren Studien und Meta-Studien, die die Schädlichkeit bzw. Unschädlichkeit belegen sollen. Wissenschaftliche Objektivität und Eindeutigkeit verschwinden zusehends und jede_r hört den
everything.
The densely populated cities as we know them today have been around for 150 years. Characterized by stone, concrete and glass, the paved streets become a hotplate in summer. Ventilation is rarely successful because most rooms do not have windows opening in two directions and often windows cannot be opened at all. Luckily there are air conditioners! Cheerfully humming away, they pump the heat from inside to outside, the energy they consume also turns into heat, and so the urban hotplate continues to warm up. Each time someone turns their air conditioner up a notch,
has gone one step further.
Housing offers some protection from the sun, wind, cold, rain and wildlife. Some flats also offer other amenities such as convenient access to transit, high-speed internet and running water. In terms of water supply alone, we will have to accept that the
will be tightened for everyone, because it is through the construction, operation and maintenance of a 7,816 km long water supply network with 69,300 hydrants that we are able to meet the basic water demand for all people living in Berlin.