Various bright yellow geometric shapes are spread across a city map on the cover of this “MV Plan-Dokumentation”, a publication by the West Berlin Senate on the Märkisches Viertel.
True to the motto “building on greenfield sites”, the Märkisches Viertel was built in the north of West Berlin from 1963. However, this part of Berlin was not completely uninhabited even before then. A closer look at the cover reveals that in the 1950s and 1960s, the area was characterized by allotment gardens, residential arbors and emergency shelters, which the Senate had demolished.
Published in 1972, this plan documentation appeared two years before the end of the more than ten-year construction period of one of Berlin’s most notorious large-scale housing estates. Even before its completion, the district was criticized by architects and urban planners. Resistance quickly formed among tenants, many of whom came from old districts in the center of Berlin, against the excessive rent and lack of infrastructure. The first squatted building in West Berlin was a vacant factory building in the Märkisches Viertel. The youth center imagined by the squatters was thwarted by the eviction on the same day. In 2004, the district gained renewed fame throughout Germany with the song “Mein Block” by rapper Sido, who described his everyday life in the “MV” with, among other things, “High buildings, thick air, a few trees // People on drugs, dreams shatter here”.
