With: Industriesalon Schöneweide

At the end of the 19th century, Schöneweide was the “Chicago of the Spree” – the epitome of the modern industrial city. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), more than 25,000 people worked there in nationally-owned plants. After the fall of the wall, however, the liquidation of the “powerhouse of the GDR“ began. Production nose-dived, and industrial sites were sold off. Investors found it difficult to find a use for these industrial cathedrals. In 2006, the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft (University for Technology and Economy) was established in parts of an old cable-manufacturing plant. It was hoped that the new campus would provide impetus for development – making the sites one of Berlin’s ten Zukunftsorte (Places of the Future), profiled on drawing connections between the disciplines of economics, science and research. This tour through the industrial city of Schöneweide draws attention to the tensions between the maintenance of the now disused urban industrial culture, and the owners’ expectation to extract profit from the site. Schöneweide is a textbook example of the challenges that architects, urban planners and economic planners must face in the process of creating a resilient future city.