Philip Broadbent

The book Broadbent edited with Sabine Hake starts from an observation: the wall fell in 1989, but the division kept working in the way each half remembered, built and represented itself. Forty-four years of separation are not undone by a demolition, and reunified Berlin had to decide, building by building, what to keep from each side.

That is the volume's urban interest. It gathers work on architecture, film, literature and memory to show how a political border produces two distinct urban cultures, with different model districts, different monuments and a different idea of what a street should be. Karl-Marx-Allee and the Hansaviertel, built at almost the same time a few kilometres apart, are two opposite answers to the same question about how to live in a modern city.

Broadbent is a specialist in Germanic studies and twentieth-century German culture, with work on postwar literature and film. His main contribution to urban studies is this collective volume, which brought together historians, architects and film scholars to treat Berlin as a unique case of a double city.

The book's usefulness goes beyond Berlin. It is a practical manual on what happens to a city when a geopolitical decision cuts it in two, something Nicosia, Jerusalem, Belfast and Mostar have also lived through, and on how hard it then is to sew back together what was separated, because infrastructure, services and memories do not reunify at the same pace.