Berlin is the site of new regional and cultural interactions in a reconfigured post-industrial and post-socialist Europe. The subject of intense scrutiny in the 1990s and early 2000s, Berlin is due for renewed scholarly attention. Today, Berlin is one of the prime sites of urban cultural and spatial innovation in Europe, where hybrid forms of urban development are generating new types and processes of urban formation. The Berlin Portal is concerned with the transitional processes and conditions of urbanization in Berlin and the broader cultural and environmental significance of those changes.
Directed by Eve Blau, co-principal investigator of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, the Berlin Portal is composed of a core team of Harvard professors and advanced graduate students from the Graduate School of Design and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. We are working together with Berlin-based scholars and practitioners, on collaborative projects that focus on five strategic research themes:
- the interdependence of formal and informal planning practices;
- nature and agriculture in the city;
- the urban imprint of cross-border mobility and migration;
- infrastructure and urban organizational systems; and
- innovation in the post-industrial and post-socialist city.
Combining the research methods from the humanities, social sciences, and the design disciplines, these various projects incorporate new visual and digital methods for the study of urban environments, while also productively combining teaching tools from a variety of academic disciplines.