From 1963 onwards it was constructed as a prestige project of West Berlin’s ambitious urban renewal programme and commended as a “sign of hope for designers worldwide”. Its designers (Oswald Mathias Ungers, Georg Heinrichs and others) belonged to the architectural elite of the time. The reputation of the project rapidly changed from glory to shame over the course of only one year in 1968, sparked by a student exhibit at TU Berlin. The impact of this rather small exhibit can be explained by the increasing international criticism against top-down planning and monotonous modernist neighborhoods (Jane Jacobs etc.). From the mid 1970s the storm waned. Currently the Märkisches Viertel faces significant challenges, but the neighbourhood is far from being the ghetto of plight and misery in the way the 1970s media had depicted it. I argue that design has less of an impact than is commonly thought, and that social and political context played a much bigger role in the reputation of the Märkisches Viertel.