Berlin Passages, Cultural Mapping and Transdisciplinary Explorations in Urban Space

Book excerpt: Observations in Berlin since the 1920s and especially since the 1980s can be interpreted as a sort of hothouse for future social developments. How will the people of the future live, work and learn? Inspired by Benjamin's work "The Arcades Project", Joachim Broecher has, since 2015, undertaken fieldwork into the diverse urban spaces and cultural scenes in the metropolis of Berlin. For documentation and analytic pervasiveness, he uses a rather free method, situated between cultural mapping, a field diary and poetry. This volume brings together a selection of two dozen texts and places them in a transdisciplinary theoretical context that aims to break down and overcome the confines of current academic disciplines, paradigms, and institutional constructs. The selected texts themselves, however, are very practical, vivid and sometimes radical. The introduction poses the question: How can we explore new territory if we do not attempt something new? There can of course be no direct 1:1 application in pedagogy, society and culture of concepts at times painted here in soft watercolor, at times defined in stark pen strokes. Things are too complex, too subtle, too stubborn for this. But ultimately, herein also lies their allure.