Miles, NC;
(2016)
Die Himmel über Berlin: Constructing and Resisting Citizenship through Occupations of the Divided City's Aerial Space.
Opticon1826
pp. 1-17.
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Abstract
Guy Debord, among others, has shown that the physical and psychological landscapes of a city are interconnected. How we see and see from urban locations influences our overall sense of the city and, as Dennis Cosgrove has acknowledged, also our sense of civic identity. Combining history, theory, and criticism, this article considers the importance of Berlin's aerial space leading up to and during the division period of 1945-1989, exploring how ways of seeing and seeing from it aided and resisted identity formation among newly defined East and West German citizens. Adapting the vertical-geopolitical concept of aerial space, and using the power theory of John Allen and the work of scholars such as Michel de Certeau and Yi Fu Tuan, the article argues that spatial perspective informs political identity, and that aerial space not only tells a city's story, but also writes it.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Die Himmel über Berlin: Constructing and Resisting Citizenship through Occupations of the Divided City's Aerial Space |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Keywords: | Berlin, aerial space, architecture, urban planning, cognitive map, psychogeography, citizenship, Wim Wenders |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1530042 |
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