The Rathausblock (town hall block) is an urban renewal area in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Resulting from long fights of urban activists/local civil society, a cooperation ‘model project’ between the city administration and non-profit civil society actors has been established, through creating bonds and alliances between the civil society and state actors.
It is currently developed as a model project into a diverse, inclusive and ecologically forward-looking urban quarter. This includes 100% affordable and needs-based housing, which also is supposed to enable projects for communal, intergenerational living for rent. The aim is also to preserve the site for commercial and cultural uses.
For more than ten years, Berlin people have been campaigning for a community-oriented use and development of the five-hectare so-called Dragonerareal at the intersection of Obentrautstraße and Mehringdamm in the Rathausblock in Berlin-Kreuzberg.
In the last years, with numerous actions and events, the Rathausblock Initiative has shown that they want to further develop our city, create affordable living and working space and social as well as cultural places and thereby think urban development beyond quite despondent ‘Realpolitik’.
For years the implementation of such a model project was prevented by the planned privatization of the federally owned property by the Bundesanstalt für Immobilienaufgaben (BImA). After the site had already been sold twice, thanks to the great perseverance of the local initiatives and the politicians who supported the Rathausblock Initatives in their work, in 2019 the site went to the state of Berlin and the sales processes could be reversed. This has opened the way for the development of a model urban development from below.
The Rathausblock initiative came together to create a concrete utopia with a model project - a utopia of the good life in the city. At the same time, they wanted to counter the critics who claim that the urban political movement is always only "against" - especially against new construction.
Looking for a common form and language for this work, they found it gradually in in the formula of self-management and communality, summarized in a joint publication that captures what they precisely imagine and want for the future of the Rathhausblock, including the proposed model procedures and instruments for an urban development from below. So on June 17, 2019, the Initiative signed a cooperation agreement with the Berlin Senate, the district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, the housing company WBM, the state-owned real estate company BIM (Berliner Immobilienmanagement) and the Forum Rathausblock.
Rathausblock infrastructures
This co-production developed physical and virtual and social infrastructures for the performative aspect of the site and the future housing project.
Community-driven programs
Here we will research how the local spatial infrastructures along with specific community-driven programs (workshops, tools sharing and new communication strategies) have created common good and spatial justice-oriented planning practice and how social cohesion and community-buidling might be produced during the process.
For more information on the initiative, please visit: