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With his saying “Berlin—poor, but sexy!,” former Governing Mayor Klaus Wowereit framed the motto for a decade of transition in which the German capital became a Mecca for artists, media industries, and creative people from all over the world. Building on a longstanding tradition of tolerating diversity and as a centre of high culture and bohemians, the city developed a new cultural-political identity from a deep transformation crisis after German unification and the extensive loss of its industrial base. In conjunction with a blossoming of temporary uses in a wide variety of vacant properties, often abandoned production, infrastructure, or storage areas, an intense creative scene unfolded. Since the 2010s, this scene has been massively threatened by displacement due to the changed real estate market situation. Over the years, the city has tried to counteract this situation through cultural policy initiatives and niche projects for bottom-up initiatives, with limited success. Against the backdrop of accelerated development of former brownfield sites and funding cuts in urban cultural policy, the question currently arises as to what place subculture can occupy in urban policy in the future. Based on official documents, books, scholarly articles, project websites, newspaper articles, and own observations, this article attempts to evaluate the respective policies in the city over time, to place them in the context of approaches to a more land-security-oriented policy, and to make clear what role the re-used spaces and buildings from the industrial age play in this.

Recently, Germany has seen a series of inner-city projects that tend to reconstruct pre-war buildings or ensembles lost in the Second World War after demolishing earlier attempts to redefine the place in which they had been located with the means of modernist architecture. While those modernist buildings are often seen as “eyesores” by ordinary citizens advocating their demolition, the newer reconstructionist projects are criticized heavily by architects and planners not only because they often bring along revisionist political attitudes but also lack a profound examination of the achievements of their predecessors and do without the creative possibilities new designs may offer. The article discusses the trend in its historical context starting in the early 1980s and flourishing after the German reunification by presenting four major types of reconstructionism and related case studies, and debates that accompany them. This allows an interpretation of the current trend and places it in the wider German debates about post-modern planning and urban design. It shows that beyond the most prominent examples of reconstructionism such as the reconstructed Frauenkirche church in Dresden and the Palace in the center of Berlin, there are certain parameters that loosely determine the trend. The article ends with recommendations for the ongoing debates on future reconstructions of bombed cities.

High-rise buildings were a frequent design element in modernist urban planning and architecture. However, both the criticisms modernism faced and the negative experiences with large housing estates dating from that period led to post-modern designs that built strongly on traditional pre-modernist urban form. Despite the role of high-rise buildings in office areas, many brownfield and greenfield housing developments from the 1980s to the 2000s reflected this trend and abandoned high-rise buildings almost completely in Central Europe. Only recently, a renaissance of high-rise buildings as design elements for housing projects can be noted. The article traces this development by analyzing major design projects in Germany and offering explanations for this trend linked to major socio-cultural transformations and urban design innovations. It looks at the role of architects, urban designers, and other stakeholders in promoting hybrid urban design models and presents major strategies by cities under development pressure that try to manage their evolving skyline. Case studies deal with the five largest German cities of Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, and Frankfurt am Main.

The transformation of industrial heritage buildings into cultural clusters has emerged as a prominent topic of academic research in urban planning, urban studies, heritage conservation, and architecture. Cultural clusters, defined as geographically concentrated cultural activities and organisations, have become a key instrument in urban regeneration, fostering economic growth and cultural development. Despite the benefits that cultural clusters offer in terms of fostering cultural activity, they often prove to be short-lived due to various external factors, including urban regeneration pressures, shifts in policy, and changes in zoning regulations. This thematic issue presents seven case studies that offer insights into the current state of cultural clusters, their transient nature, and the conditions necessary to guarantee their long-term sustainability in industrial heritage sites. The research is particularly relevant in light of the mounting pressure on urban land, where industrial heritage sites are frequently repurposed for residential, commercial, or industrial purposes.

Amid rapid urban regeneration over the past decade, industrial heritage conservation in China has garnered increasing attention, focusing more on the reuse of listed buildings than on conflicts in the inscription process. This article examines the conflicts and dilemmas between urban redevelopment and industrial heritage conservation during the inscription process in China, through five case studies in Guangzhou. It aims to provide both an understanding of conflicts and institutional challenges posed by land banking, and insights into stakeholder dynamics, the role of media and NGOs, and the implementation of cultural heritage assessments. Grounded in the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, the empirical studies reveal that institutional conflicts, particularly resistance from land development centers and former factory owners, often stem from financial motivations. This resistance can lead to the premature demolition of potential heritage sites but also drive institutional innovations. Guangzhou’s introduction of the Wenping assessment system integrates industrial heritage identification with land banking and urban regeneration planning, aiming to protect heritage from hasty demolitions. Media coverage and NGO advocacy have been instrumental in heritage-making and prompting policy responses. The adaptive reuse of industrial heritage sites into creative industrial parks faces challenges from their temporary nature and land banking pressures, underscoring the need for policies ensuring stable and enduring reuse. Ambiguous responsibilities and fragmented management systems further impede effective heritage conservation.

Today’s urban design of new quarters in the fringes of German metropolises shows a renaissance of the garage building as a cluster for car parking. In contrast to the past, parking garages are planned as multifunctional “mobility hubs.” Planners enrich them with new mobility and sharing options and incorporate sports or social infrastructure facilities on the roof and the ground floor, thus contributing to vibrant neighborhoods. In contrast to the internationally renowned example of Nordhavn (Copenhagen), we observe a decentralization in the mainstreaming of the approach: Mobility hubs are to become constitutive parts of small subcenters. In this respect, they can be seen as a common leitmotiv for urban design in Germany’s metropolises. The hubs form a new model of local mobility, guaranteeing a certain flow of pedestrians and freeing the adjacent streets of car traffic. Integrated into a system of alternative modes of transportation and nearby mass transit, those infrastructural and mobility clusters might contribute to a change in mobility habits and ultimately reduce car dependence. If their underlying mobility policies can be implemented and if they are ultimately more successful than traditional parking garages or even create an incentive not to use private cars at all remains open to further investigation. For this purpose, the article will trace the emergence of mobility hubs in the discourse and practice of urban design with a particular focus on major new developments at the periphery of German cities. It analyzes urban design competitions and the formal planning and implementation following them.

Recently, there have been calls to decenter theories of the urban to theorize the rural as a formative force. While recognizing that the urban remains structurally dominant, scholars point towards the interconnectedness of the urban and the rural under present capitalist transformation processes. We proposed to study recent urban–rural entanglements through the heuristic of rurban assemblages. We focused on rural groups and how they negotiate their integration and disintegration into the urban cosmos while remaining embedded within their rural context through the lens of land. This article adds to the debate on the contradictory meanings and uses of land in the context of land dispossession and commodification for urban and industrial development. The work specifically paid attention to the reshaping of subject–land relations and analyzed how implicit or explicit references to the city and the countryside permeate the construction of values and uses of land among the old and new social groups in the metropolitan region of Bengaluru, South India.

This book reviews the transformation of the Pearl River Delta mega-urban region of China, analyzing the maturing socio-economic, political and spatial structures after early waves of economic globalization, political transformation and rapid urbanization.

In 2021, 56% of the global population lived in cities, and by 2050 the ratio of urban-to-rural population is expected to reach 67% [...]