The Berlin Tenement and the City

The Berlin Tenement and the City describes the development of the Berlin tenement from 1860 to 1914, showing how it became both Berlin’s standard housing type and its principal urban component - the city’s ubiquitous typology. In contrast to earlier historical categorizations of the tenement as a ’rental barrack, ’ here it is described as an evolving typology that dynamically responded to the demands of the city and urban reform.

In this dynamic understanding of architecture, the tenement is the protagonist of the actual unfolding of the city, its growth and densification, as well as its spatial and social differentiation. Charting the evolution of the productive tenement into a morphology combining living and manufacturing and the rise of tenements increasingly differentiated according to class traces their contribution to the evolution and generalization of norms of housing and domesticity.

This book is essential reading for scholars, students, architects and urbanists interested in Berlin or the history of housing and the city.

Katharina Borsi is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Nottingham. She teaches design and architectural and urban history and theory. Her research focusses on the intersection between housing, domesticity, and urbanism. She is one of the editors of Housing and the City, a geographically dispersed history of the twentieth-century modern housing project and its social diagram. She has lectured and published extensively on the history and theory of housing and urbanism in Berlin and elsewhere.