Due to its dualistic history, Berlin has had to endure contradictions, conflicts, and ruptures more than any other city. A permanent collision of very different narratives, concepts, and projects has caused a continuous loss of energy and matter. The result of this entropy is the spatial deposition of all ideas and ideologies for this city, a heterogeneous palimpsest or multi-layered “textbook of events,” which is perceived as ugly and antiurban under classical aesthetic categories and therefore should be levelled out by urban policy and the building industry after the fall of the Berlin Wall. For the sociologist Ulrich Beck, by contrast, Berlin in the 90s was the city of a reflexive modernity par excellence. The openness and heterogeneity of these spaces offered both a differentiated confrontation with its history as well as a diverse social use and political manifestation. For Beck, acting reflexively modern meant continually exposing social contradictions, political conflicts, and historical ruptures and, in contrast to the “either-or” approach, adopting the attitude of the “as well as.” Read more