The Dimensions of No-Man’s Land. Overcoming the Division After the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

by Andrea Leuschke

Chairperson of the Supervisory Committee
Professor David Streatfield

Department of Landscape Architecture
2002

This thesis is an exploration of spaces once occupied by the Berlin Wall. The Wall separated East and West Berlin for 28 years and was a symbol of the German division and the conflict between the communist and the western world. To guide my critical analysis of these spaces, I studied theories regarding polarized and divided cities throughout the world, urban planning in Berlin, the significance of memory in our lives, and the history of the Berlin Wall. The criteria of the Wall strip, as we find it today, is based on criteria I developed form the implications of these theories for the appropriate treatment of the Wall strip. Further data was collected through a survey of the Wall strip that I did in Winter 2002. The design critique is concerned with the Wall strip as an entity and three sites that were chosen to illustrate different aspects of the issues. The three case studies are Potsdamer Platz, the Wall Park, and the landscape preserves in the Luebars area. The focus of the evaluation is on the role of urban planning in the creation of spaces and how these capture peoples memories and foster coalescence of the East and West German cultures.