I have never been to Märkisches Viertel, the suburban satellite district constructed in postwar West Berlin that is the object of Laura Bowie's study. Still, Bowie's analysis of local ‘68ers’ intellectual debates that surrounded its conceptualization, construction, and use feels familiar. Indeed, she mentions Vällingby, my neighboring district in Stockholm, as the Swedish example of a similar urban form: an area of apartments and facilities built in concrete, isolated from the rest of the city due to Western, postmodern city planning that focused on an urban separation of functions. Many historical differences exist between Berlin and Stockholm, particularly in relation to the German city's difficult past. Still, Bowie's microhistory of the architectural student group Aktion 507 and its criticism of Märkisches Viertel through the exhibition Diagnose in 1968 touches upon issues that many European urban societies had to work through at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. How to make cities sociable and democratic after the Second World War's legacy of physical and moral destruction? And while much had been destroyed, how to tackle existing areas with old tenements in relation to groups of socio-economic vulnerability? Berlin, a “pressure-cooker” for revolution (9), serves as the ultimate case study to upbraid and analyze the various solutions proposed and discussed by city planners, architects, and intellectuals.
To do this, Bowie explores artistic responses within the ‘68 student protest movement to the “lived experience” of new urban spaces. Her material is fascinating and expansive: magazine articles and photographs, interviews and correspondence, autobiographies and memoirs, contemporary theoretical works, and especially catalogues and displays from Diagnose facilitate an intimate analysis of the students’ reconceptualization of the architectural profession as primarily social agents, and designers only secondarily. With suburban Märkisches Viertel as lens, Bowie portrays how the protagonists used this new form of urban space to, firstly, argue against the presumed relocation of social problems through authoritarian and capitalistic city planning, and secondly, try to empower the working class to take action for a better life. Chapter 2 stands out as a particularly poignant analysis of how city planners and members of Aktion 507 differently approached the conversion of a Berlin marked by war into a “humanized” city (68). City planners anticipated that the use of color in Märkisches Viertel would stimulate “city-dwellers’ emotional connection to their city” (63). By contrast, the student movement believed the color scheme an undemocratic practice. Inhabitants that were forcibly relocated from old tenements in the city center could neither chose colors nor decide whether they wanted to move into the flats or not. Throughout the book, most of the seventy-seven visual sources are not analyzed, or even explained as to their relevance, but in chapter 2 Bowie includes photographs of facades in Märkisches Viertel which aptly support her thesis that color and optic illusions became hot topics in debates on the role of the senses and emotions in architectural constructions for social improvement in postwar Berlin.
At the same time, Bowie's relaxed approach towards the established field of history of emotions brings some confusion to her argument. As can be read on the back of the book, Bowie is interested in “what [it would] have been like to live in the island of West Berlin during the 1960s.” She uses the lens of “lived experience” and argues that it is “mediated through emotion” (13). However, without thorough definitions, both concepts appear to be used ahistorically. Despite being an analytical tool often used to uncover everyday lives of marginalized and unprivileged groups, “lived experience” in this study seems to refer to an historically existing, and therefore traceable, idea that intellectuals considered when approaching the proletariat's relationship with the city. Potentially rich sources that would have ensured a study of the actual experience of working-class Berliners, such as the ‘68ers’ curation of interviews with and films of Märkisches Viertel's inhabitants, are not methodologically penetrated to provide a bottom-up analysis of the satellite district. Similarly, Bowie's claim that a study of emotions allows “primary material to speak directly” (5) advocates only for a study that pinpoints the existence of emotions rather than an interrogation of their nature and role in debates surrounding postmodern urban spaces. As a consequence, student protesters’ conclusions about the working class's sensations, perceptions, and experiences of urban space are mostly accepted without question. Chapters 5 and 8, however, show great potential. They focus on contemporary understandings of the links between architecture and the psyche, as well as the protesters’ largely failed attempts to instigate a revolutionary spirit among residents of Märkisches Viertel. They reveal two dimensions of emotions. Firstly, intellectuals in 1968 considered emotions to be universal, with architecture as an agent for releasing and healing them. Secondly, Bowie hints at the affective element that influenced and defined collaborations between ‘68ers and locals. Bowie does not tie together these two findings by, for example, investigating the relationship between the contemporary definition of emotions and the emotional scripts enforced by the student movement in Märkisches Viertel. But this is where she gets closest to what life in postwar West Berlin would have been like. Bowie portrays a Berlin with a scarred landscape that expanded with new types of spaces, which were believed by historical agents to have the power to instill a variety of emotions in the city's inhabitants.
The Streets Echoed with Chants enters a fresh field in the history of emotions in the built environment and/or urban space, which has seen some recent publications by, for example, Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi, Joseph ben Prestel, and Christian Parreno. Together they emphasize that architecture plays a vital role in shaping everyday multisensory experiences and managing society through emotions. Bowie hints at how emotions are promoted and subverted through and in urban space. She shows that the built environment in 1960s Berlin was infused with different emotional meanings, while planners and protesters alike believed it could offer solutions to sensory and affective dimensions of social problems supposedly experienced by the working class. Here, the author gives us much scope for further work, both in terms of Berlin and larger postwar Europe. How was the emotional potential of different types of urban spaces conceptualized by various historical agents, and what emotions, and subsequent buildings, were promoted or deflected? What emotions did city planners and intellectuals want to connect to European cities after the Second World War, and how were they affected by historical processes? Laura Bowie has left me wanting to know more, in the very best sense.
