My presentation will discuss the question how the activities of Berlin’s construction groups contributed to the urban commons—that is, to which extent they contributed to the creation of urban resources beyond the state and the market.

These construction groups—small associations of middle-class investors who built flatted multi-storey buildings for owner occupation—exemplify the contradictions of non-commercial goals in a capitalist housing economy. On the one hand construction group members resisted top-down governance and the commodification of collective life. On the other hand, they were comparatively privileged individuals with a high level of education and ample financial resources.

As will be shown in the following, Berlin’s construction groups contributed to the “urban commons” by promoting an idea of the city as a place of heterogeneous culture, intellectual inspiration and personal freedom. They also created architectural spaces for neighbourly encounters and non-traditional work-life arrangements. Their ideas reflected an early-twentieth-century concept of the metropolis as a productive clash of differences and creative innovation, as well as leftist community ideals rooted in the post-1968 alternative scene.

Their contributions to the urban commons were nonetheless limited. Construction groups only made up a tiny fraction of Berlin’s population of the time, and their activities were largely confined to the window of opportunities around the year 2000, when the local real estate market was comparatively relaxed. They neither challenged hegemonic structures nor the system of capitalist housing provision. And they produced fewer common resources than in previous decades had been generated through public spending and welfare state intervention. But they contributed to a diversity of urban culture that the real estate market would not have been able to produce.