Gentrification, it’s all well and good in principle: improving areas with renewal and rebuilding. But it can also have a pretty dark side with increased property values, and the displacement of lower income families and businesses.

Gentrification stands still for no man. Alternative lifestyles are swept aside, interesting and distinctive areas are suddenly everywhere, and the capacity for cultural production is massively reduced.

Take Berlin. Berlin is an extraordinary place. Most people understand its Cold War history as a divided city, with capitalist west and communist east facing each other off over a wall. But less familiar are the underground and alternative scenes which have characterised the city over decades, centuries even.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 people from east and west felt the relief of being freed from political oppression and cultural and social separation. Young people in Berlin had never known anything different than this divide, and the new unified state felt great. People wanted to celebrate this freedom together; they wanted to party.

The fall of the wall also opened up a whole array of large official buildings, including former industrial and military spaces, which were left redundant and ready to be reclaimed by the city. These buildings were typically dark, solid and functional spaces, standing for an authority which no longer existed.

The newly united city was the perfect playground for party goers with the wealth of abandoned buildings up for grabs and ready to be put to good use. This was the landscape from which techno emerged in Berlin. The city now started beating to a different rhythm. New clubs and party venues sprung up all over, changing the landscape and reunifying communities.

See more at: https://theconversation.com/why-berlin-needs-techno-to-avoid-becoming-just-another-city-55534