The housing estate Märkisches Viertel in West Berlin (built 1963-1975) is Germany’s best known and most debated concrete utopia. A tower block estate for 30,000 people on the city’s northern periphery it was designed as a small city with shops, schools, shops, and leisure facilities. The Markisches Viertel was the flagship project of West Berlin’s ambitious urban renewal programme and designed by the architectural elite at the time (Oswald Mathias Ungers, Georg Heinrichs and others).

In the mid 1960s the press commended the neighbourhood as a “sign of hope for designers worldwide”. This reputation, however, rapidly changed from glory to shame over the course of only one year in the wake of the 1968 student rebellion. Now the same newspapers censured the Märkisches Viertel as “the bleakest product of concrete architecture,” “grey hell” and “prison camp”.

My talk will present the convoluted history of the Märkisches Viertel. I argue that architectural design had less influence than is commonly thought, and that social and political context played a much bigger role. I will also give an overview over at the further history of the Märkisches Viertel which currently faces significant challenges, but is far from being the ghetto of plight and misery in the way the 1970s media had depicted it.