Talk II

De- und Re-classification of the Modern City - Production of Ideology and the Attack of the Middle Classes (Simone Hain)

Within the last decade Berlin proved to be a special showcase of the overall and global cultural clash between the "Modern" an the "Postmodern" - which can be understood as different ways of dealing with social problems and to draw lines of order by mapping a City. Be it in architectural detail or in huge town planning layouts, one can in depth analyze a process which Alain Touraine described as ongoing compensation of men as political and social beings by men as pure privates. My slideshow will demonstrate how - after a short phase of preparing Berlin's city for global players - a kind of "pressure group" of the middle class community took planning power to exclude all kinds of so called non-urban population: Poor immigrants as well as jobless desparados as well as trade unionists as well as women with feminist approach. The paper will shortly introduce to urban history of Berlin, too.