Inclusion and Segregation in Berlin, the “Social City”

Abstract

The idea of the German city as an inclusive “Social City” (soziale Stadt)—that is, a city that actively seeks to solve social problems through a wide range of policies—has had a considerable influence on the “spatial image” and “urban meaning” of cities in Germany, both during the twentieth and now the twenty-first century.¹ The concept of the “Social City” was shaped to a great degree by its delineation as a contrast to the American city, the regulatory model of which was based mostly on market mechanisms and community self-help models, and gained the reputation of an “unsocial” counter-concept to the German version. With regard to Berlin, certain socio-technical strategies designed to ensure a balanced mix of the social classes in urban space can already be discerned in the urban development plans that were drafted as early as the mid-nineteenth century to manage the growth explosion of the belated industrial metropolis. When the Social Democrats became the city’s governing party at the beginning of the Weimar Republic, the goal of making the metropolis into a balanced social space gained a political significance that it has retained to this day. Since the early 1990s, and in response to intensifying socio-spatial polarization and segregation processes, the normative model of the “Social City” has once again become one of the key elements of government programs and urban intervention strategies in reunified Berlin.