The Märkisches Viertel in West Berlin is a tower block estate that was built 1963—1974 for 30,000 in-habitants. It was the most conspicuous result of the West German welfare state’s short-lived love-match between architecture and social policy, and at the same time the most debated. This article will show how this showcase development became a symbolic battleground for a struggle over the values of the modern city. It will also show that these debates had surprisingly little to do with the actual buildings, but much more to do with the urban situation and the criticism of top-down planning, and most of all to long-lasting local cultural dispositions.