The centres of our cities, as Roland Barthes has written half a century ago, were characterized by “Fullness”. In them the values of the civilization – organizing and summarizing and collecting the money with the banks, the goods with the purchase of homes, the spirituality of the churches. “In the center means that the social ‘truth’ meeting, is called to the great Abundance of the ‘reality’ part.” The reality of cities to their edges, the periphery, to the urban density frayed and the topography of the surrounding area is mixed but.
in addition to architects and urban planners have always sought again the writer of these between places, Peter Handke, for example, the no one Bay, some of his stories in the “” on the edge of Paris, locates, or Marcel Beyer, whose narrator finds himself from the center of Dresden in a housing estate, where, in addition to glass containers, upholstered furniture discarded under the open sky.
Where reindeer the course of the river crossed
The example of Berlin has now accepted the English non-fiction book author and writer Paul Scraton of this urban peripheral zones. It is a pleasure to be in Berlin-Buch to read anything from the pulse of the times and the trend-conscious residents of this city, but for the life of your edges – of the-road villages in the North, the inhabitants of the large housing estate of Gropiusstadt, from dacha gardens with bathtubs and slaughtered motorcycles. In ten chapters, the author reported traveling back from his days, beginning on a day in January on the waterfront of lake Tegel about Ahrensfelde, Köpenick, Wannsee and Spandau up to the starting point.
Since the nineteenth century, the railway and later the S – and U-Bahn opened in the outskirts of Berlin, the city was extended continuously, and formerly independent municipalities in taken. Scraton hits today on residential complexes which are not listed on Google Maps. Its inhabitants have erected in the gardens, with Trampoline and swings, and you can tell that you live in the centre of the city must appear to be marginal and that, conversely, the centre and the periphery residents.
A tribute to the Go
Also, it seems that the time pass away at the edges, more if Scraton, for example, describes the suburb of gardens, on the river Tegeler Fliess, and to remember that for eleven thousand years twice a year the reindeer crossed the river. In the popular travel guides, these places do not occur. Scraton, it is possible to generate attention for these perceived spaces. In Marzahn, he deciphered the silent dialogue, the two Graffiti artists on a water pipeline along the river Wuhle with each other have led, in Lichtenrade his way around a cone-shaped hill, from where Otto Lilienthal made his first flight attempts made.
In Tegel pushes Scraton a forest, the hem of a discarded Boeing 707, those fifty years ago, from the Palestinian popular front hijacked plane, which is today left on the edge of the Airfield itself. Among his companions, animals in the city, a Fox that crosses in hohenschönhausen his way, flocks of choughs, sheep, chickens and a red kite circling lonely on the former zone border again and again.
