Two Towers, Plus One: The Ends of Utopia

Abstract

Even as we descend through the thin cloud cover over Berlin-Tegel, I can feel the physical sensation of a jolt as shop-soiled metaphors turn themselves inside out. For so many years, discussing London’s edge-lands, describing forms of municipal blight, end-game estates, tower block plantations, orbital motorways, the lazy reflex has been to refer this battleground topography, and the mindset responsible for it, to East Germany. A pus-yellow newsreel of the imagination. A dystopian myth: Germany, Year Zero. City of ruins folding into impermeable layers of dark history.