Placemaking in Migration and the Fall of the Wall
A Project by Stefanie B?rkle
New Spaces: The Fall of the Wall
“Greetings from Hanoi” and other projects in the last years have shown that migration inscribes its marks into urban space, changing our quality of life as a result. The movement of people in space, migration is also the movement of spaces, of which Berlin contains many. Indeed, Berlin itself, far from being static, is constituted by a multitude of changing spaces, whose movements have only intensified since the fall of the Wall.
Home | Migrated Space
The rural and urban spaces that migrants bring with them naturally latch onto Berlin’s changing urban textures. Accordingly, the questions raised in Berlin are not just about migrant assimilation and integration; they also concern the changes in how Germans understand their city’s culture under these once “foreign” influences.
The spaces of our city and those of the migrants’ native places may have changed more than the spaces of immigrant groups who draw much of their identity from preserved images of their native homes. But these preserved images are idealized in multiple ways, and often cease to reflect the current state of their native countries, something migrants tend to overlook.
Transcultures
Other groups stand out on account of their transcultural interconnectedness. Their attachment to Germany plays only a subordinate role in their lives. They are actors moving successfully in global networks outside the bounds of a single cultural space. In this project we focus on the already existing spatial understanding and experience of these migrants, most of whom are second generation. In doing so, we investigate the spaces that migrants have created along with the way their perception of urban space compares with that of Germans. Who has made room for whom since the fall of the wall?
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