Thursday, May 7, 2009

Homeless in Berlin


It was almost ten at night when the train chugged into Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof from Poznan. The dingy Polish train seemed out of place in the glistening recently opened train station. I’d spent the day in Poznan and was returning back to Germany with seven hours to kill until I caught my suspiciously cheep discount train to the Czech Republic. Berlin seemed like a mirage compared to the sleepy Poznan. As the train pulls into the city you are confronted with flashing lights and office towers greeting your arrival. The station itself was one of the most impressive pieces of architecture I’d ever seen and appears to be more a modern cathedral of transportation than a train station. 


I was not quite sure how to spend my few hours in Berlin and felt a bit sad I skipped out on much of it to visit Poland. I decided to head east and work my way back west, where I would pick up my bags from luggage storage and head to the train station once again. I started in Alexander Platz, the heart of the former East Berlin. Today the area is completely remade with a large shopping mall and some office towers. The square made me feel a bit uncomfortable as its large expanse was shadowy in the dark. 


Walking down the street you could see the steady stream of party goers heading for a night out. Compared to subdued Rome where I was studying at the time, Berlin came as a bit of a shock. Teenagers piled into the S-Bahn (all the other public transport was closed because of a strike), while drinking bottles of vodka and beer.

 

By the time I was out of Alexander Platz area it was past midnight and the crowds of party goers had diminished a bit. I headed toward Peter Eisenmen’s Holocaust memorial. I’d past by it during the day on my from the station but was curious to see what the space would look like at night. The memorial is a large plaza with a grid of concrete blocks at varying heights with the elevations increasing as you enter the middle. At night the site was shadowy, with lights only adding a sense of murkiness to the site. Though it was cool to see at night, central Berlin was nearly abandoned at this time at night and walking blindly through the memorial spooked me out, especially after I realized I was not the only one there. 


After my possibly averted mugging, I ended up walking toward the heart of the newly rebuilt Berlin, Potsdamer Platz. Potsdamer Platz is a whole neighborhood of Berlin built where once the Berlin Wall ran. Today the area seems like the corporate future city, with different area’s named after the companies that sponsored them, including a DaimlerChrysler Quarter and Sony Center. 


By then it was one in the morning and I was a loss at what to do. The rhythm of the city was dying down and I had no where to go. The temperature had fallen well below freezing and I began to feel like a homeless person looking for shelter. I found shelter in some Deutschbank/Daimler/Sony mall in Potsdamer Platz. I emailed some friends from a computer terminal, by then it was 3am, and decided to slowly make it back to my hostel. 

By the time I had gotten back on the S-Bahn the partygoers were returning home. It was a weird sight to see destruction and illness on such a massive level. People were screaming, throwing up and passing out all over the train and station. I got off and went to my hostel to pick up my bags. 


By the time I got back on the train the rhythm was different as the people looked more like the first round of people heading to work. This group had the tired faces of early risers. One woman clearly had a questionable profession as she switched out of her jeans and sweater into a tight mini skirt and tube top on the train. She put the last finishing touches of her makeup before running out. 


My night in Berlin was a surreal experience. Cities really transform at night into other places, living parallel lives as we sleep. It kind of reminds me of that old Volkswagen commercial (link below) where the guy goes for a night drive. Berlin surprised me in a way. It had that same teutonic seriousness you see in other German speaking places but in it all there is that melancholy that is almost Slavic. Looking at all the faces on the S-Bahn, it seemed that the people of Berlin haven’t changed as fast as their city. That night in the train station I wrote in an email, “Berlin is like the a city thats arrived in the future, and with that arrival, its population is slightly peeved about the destination”



Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Old Gibellina


I'm inaugurating this blog with one of the strangest communities I have ever visited, Gibellina.
Gibellina is really the name of two cities in North Central Sicily, about an hour from the Sicilian capital of Palermo. My trip started with a visit to old Gibellina in February, 2008. Gibellina is a hard place to find with almost no signs pointing you toward the lone twisting mountain road that ascends up from the valley floor. After a twenty minute ride the road suddenly ends to reveal a strange sight, a series of concrete blocks that seem to create the outline of a life size map. These blocks are all that remains of Gibellina, a city destroyed by a horrific earthquake in 1968.

Gibellina was a poor mountain village, challenged by its medival location on a steep mountain slope and difficult to reach from nearly anywhere. The tight, dense village clung to the steep slopes of a mountain at a particularly windy location. Gibellina was surelly a harsh place to live however few could predict the events that unraveled on January 25th 1968.

The earthquake left little standing of Gibellina. The survivors of the disaster were moved to temporary trailers (a la FEMA) a few miles away. The concrete platforms for the trailers can still be seen as you drive toward old Gibellina. The village itself was deamed unsafe for habitation and residents were not allowed to move back. To commerate the disaster the towns layout was incapsulated in concrete, forever removing any chance of reconstructing the original community. The concrete Gibellina art piece today stands earily abandonded on the windswept mountain top, seemingly forgotten.

The Gibellina memorial, made by Tuscan artist Antonio Burri, is a strange way to mark and remember space. Place has strong emotional conotations for a resident and Burri's dramatic statement at Gibellina erases nearly all context and meaning from the sight. All that is left to remember are the meandering paths of the villages streets, but even they, slowly decaying in the chipped concrete, will one day be forgotten. For locals Gibellina is a place that produces mixed feelings. It appears to be almost a high handed act by the central government that diverted money from reconstruction and created a memorial disconnected from anyones actually memory.

The residents, after over decade of living in a temporary trailer park, were finally moved to New Gibellina, a city envisioned as a architectural and urban planning vanguard. Gibellina Nuovo was built with high aspirations but like Burri's work was of dubious success. The strange city of Gibellina Nuova will probably be the subject of later posts.





Welcome!!

I'm starting this blog to share my thoughts on the urban spaces I've experienced throughout my life. I hope that this blog is more than just a travel blog, but a forum for looking at the different ways we inhabit the city. Every city is in the end a distinct way of organizing ourselves into limited space. How we do so depends on where we are.

In the next few weeks I will be leaving for China. I hope to start this blog by looking at the places I visit in China. I want to also include my experiences there. China is one of the fastest urbanizing places in the world and its cities are exciting, ever changing cosmopolitan centers.

In later posts I will look at other places I've lived in and visited including my travels across Europe while I was living in Italy. I want to examine also places closer to home in North America. For anyone reading this, I hope you all enjoy and please leave any comments.

Andy