Der Spiegel this week looks at gentrification in fashionable central Berlin, along with the new "Slums of the 21st Century" emerging on the city's periphery. It's a story familiar to many cities, and the concentrated poverty and social problems found in the modernist 20th-century high rises echo the infamous banlieues of Paris and ill-fated public housing projects such as Cabrini-Green in Chicago. All examples are unique, however, and Berlin offers us the distinct context of a city reunified for more than two decades since the end of the Cold War in a country now struggling politically with its own questions of immigration and diversity. Thus, this particular story is noteworthy for the general absence of the vilified Turks, an ethnic minority so often identified by commentators at the center of social problems in today's Germany.
Like most articles in Der Spiegel, this one is well illustrated—particularly if you follow the link to the photo essay on "Berlin's Lost City Center". But to help set the stage, here are some interactive images from Google Maps.
Below: The Kosmos-Viertel compound of DDR-era high rises, a living monument to Communist planning and home to the "new slums" of the article occupied by families such as 14-year-old Kira's.
Below: The more centrally located neighborhood of Neukölln, from which families such as Kira's have been displaced by gentrification.
Below: The relative location of Kosmos-Viertel (yellow pin), Neukölln (blue pin), and Berlin's historic city center (red pin), along with the color-coded lines of Berlin's S-Bahn and U-Bahn railed transit system.
