Furthermore, a large number of apartments in the Marzahn community were reserved for party members, the police, and border control officers. This differs from Harbour Landing where there are no restrictions on to who can and can not live in the community. Lastly the style of housing between Harbour Landing and Marzahn is vastly different. Harbour landing mainly consists of individual houses and town houses with only a few number of condominiums and apartments. The Marzahn community was almost entirely apartment buildings. To go even further, all of the apartments were the same design whereas the living spaces in Harbour Landing are all different.
Source: Eli Rubin. "Concrete Utopia: Everyday Life and Socialism in Berlin-Marzahn” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Supplement 7, 2011: East German Material Culture and the Power of Memory, 29-45.
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Marzahn compared to Harbour Landing
The Design of the Berlin Marzahn is quite different in comparison to the Harbour Landing area of Regina. One of them main reasons is that the Marzhan was built under a different context than Harbour Landing. Marzahn was constructed under the Soviet Regime which has different ideologies than the democratic society in which harbour landing lyes. Communism values were heavily enforced in the Marzahn community. For example, The Ministry for Security State had a guidebook for the buildings which provided blueprints, short cuts and best locations for camera to their agents to spy on individuals (Rubin, 2011). There was only one guidebook for all of buildings because they were all build with the same floor plan (Rubin, 2011) . Despite this, Marzahn was a highly sought after housing area because of the pressing living situation east Berliners faced at the time. Unlike Harbour Landing, a person had to be approved by the government to live in Marzahn. Individuals that were under suspect by the government, or had committed a crime of almost any type were not considered to live in Marzahn (Rubin, 2011).
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2 comments:
I like the way you explain the restrictions imposed upon living in Berlin Marzahn in contrast with the lack of restrictions in Harbour Landing! I believe this is an important note since such a regulation proves that the East Berlin government was controlling who was living in this area.
I thought I would focus more on the controlling/social aspects of Marzahn because the physical differences are far more easier to spot. For instance, just by looking at Marzahn you can see it has a communist style whereas you can not physically see that the people living in the buildings had a very restricting lifestyle.
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