Placemaking is changing Space
by Stefanie B?rkle
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Fall of the Wall and New Spaces
“Greetings from Hanoi,” like other projects of mine in recent years, examined the traces of migration in city space and the way those traces shaped the quality of life for entire urban areas. Migration is usually thought of as the movement of people through space, but it is also the movement of spaces. Many such “migrated spaces” can be found in Berlin. One might even say that the German capital, far from being some static entity, is a multiplicity of dynamic spaces, whose speed of movement and transformation has accelerated since reunification.
Home | Migrated Space | City 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.
Sometimes the spaces immigrant groups bring with them change less than the spaces of Berlin or those they leave behind. This is because some migrants need to preserve their memories of home to help secure their sense of identity. Often, however, these memories are idealizations that ignore more recent societal transformations.
