Publisher description

The industrialization of the nineteenth-century European city facilitated developing conceptions of the model city, and allowed for large scale urban transformations. The urban discourse in the latter half of the nineteenth century was consequently dominated by a dialectic exchange between the ideal and the practical, a debate played out in the formation of the modern metropolis. Manifestoes and Transformations is the first work to deal with urban utopias and their relationship with actual urban interventions. Bringing together a carefully chosen, wide-ranging team of experts, the book provides a broad, contextual exploration of the ideas and urban practices which are the foundations of our conception of the contemporary city. As such, it is a valuable resource for students interested in the formation of the modernist city.

An examination of Berlin's turbulent history through the lens of its water and energy infrastructures. In Remaking Berlin, Timothy Moss takes a novel perspective on Berlin's turbulent twentieth-century history, examining it through the lens of its water and energy infrastructures. He shows that, through a century of changing regimes, geopolitical interventions, and socioeconomic volatility, Berlin's networked urban infrastructures have acted as medium and manifestation of municipal, national, and international politics and policies. Moss traces the coevolution of Berlin and its infrastructure systems from the creation of Greater Berlin in 1920 to remunicipalization of services in 2020, encompassing democratic, fascist, and socialist regimes.

Yucel Yanikdag explores how, during the First World War, Ottoman prisoners of war and military doctors discursively constructed their nation as a community, and at the same time attempted to exclude certain groups from that nation. Those excluded were not always from different ethnic or religious groups as you might expect. The educated officer prisoners excluded the uncivilised and illiterate peasants from their concept of the nation, while doctors used international socio-medicine to exclude all those "e; officers, enlisted men, civilians "e; they deemed to be hereditarily weak.

The capital of Germany and home to 3.5 million people, Berlin has one the most fascinating histories in all of Europe. At end of the nineteenth century it rapidly developed into a major urban center, and today it is a site where the scars of history sit alongside ultra-modern urban developments. It is a place where people have figured in an especially intimate relationship with the wider fabric of the city, in which bodily interaction has been an important aspect of day-to-day urban life. In this book, Stephen Barber offers an innovative history of the city, one that focuses on how the human body has shaped the city’s very streets. Spanning the twentieth century and moving up to today, Barber’s book offers a unique account of Berlin’s development. He explores previously neglected material from the city’s audio and visual archives to examine how people interacted with the city’s streets, buildings, squares, and public spaces. He recounts a history of riots, ruins, nightclubs, crowds, architectural experiments, citywide spectacles, film, art, and performances, showing how these human forces have affected the structure of the city. Through this innovative approach, Barber offers a new way to think about modern urban spaces as corporeal spaces, and how people exert a cumulative effect on cities over time.

Numerous historic power station buildings are impressive records of an era when Berlin was Europe's most important industrial city. The Berliner Elektrizitatswerke AG (Bewag) today has at its disposal a unique portfolio of treasured industrial architecture, the majority of which is meanwhile awaiting reutilisation. The book not only relates the story of Berlin's power station architecture, but also describes the enormous development potential that is connected with reutilising historic industrial architecture. With the example of an existing project's achievements, the creative possibilities are highlighted for reutilisation that preserves the building heritage and remains economically viable. In detail and with many illustrations, power stations now taken out of service are introduced and possibilities for their reuse are described. The book presents a comprehensive history of "Electropolis Berlin", from its beginnings, as well as insights for the future. Book jacket.

Metropolis Berlin: 1880-1940 reconstitutes the built environment of Berlin during the period of its classical modernity using over two hundred contemporary texts, virtually all of which are published in English translation for the first time. They are from the pens of those who created Berlin as one of the world’s great cities and those who observed this process: architects, city planners, sociologists, political theorists, historians, cultural critics, novelists, essayists, and journalists. Divided into nineteen sections, each prefaced by an introductory essay, the account unfolds chronologically, with the particular structural concerns of the moment addressed in sequence—be they department stores in 1900, housing in the 1920s, or parade grounds in 1940. Metropolis Berlin: 1880-1940 not only details the construction of Berlin, but explores homes and workplaces, public spaces, circulation, commerce, and leisure in the German metropolis as seen through the eyes of all social classes, from the humblest inhabitants of the city slums, to the great visionaries of the modern city, and the demented dictator resolved to remodel Berlin as Germania.