Psychogeography Archives - Page 2 Of 2

The New, slightly improved Berlin Bergmannkiez

June 25, 2021 by SeanPatrick

Bergmannkiez is a tight little area of Berlin. It is situated in Kreuzberg. It edges along Mehringdamm, and goes off at a tangent towards Südstern by connection of Bergmannstrasse, veers off to Geneissenaustrasse, then up hill towards Columbia Damm.

Over the years, it has become more popular due to restaurants and cafes opening up. Coffee shops galore, places to have a good breakfast, and clothes shops, not to mention the well situated supermarkets that give locals a choice of where to buy groceries. You could live here, and spend most of your social life revolving around Bergmannkiez without having to go anywhere else in Berlin.

Unfortunately, the little shops of yesteryear have been driven out by those who can afford to pay the high rents on commercial property along Bergmannstrasse. It used to be a place for antique shops full of interesting knick-knacks. Those were the days when second hand was just that, second hand, sold for a few pennies without alluding towards the object being some high value vintage product that is only a euro cheaper than brand new.

It’s taken at least five years of discussion and argument to come to any conclusions about what the Berlin, Bergmannkiez should look like. It appears, that now, as we go into the post-Covid era of Berlin politics and business, a plan has been laid, and initiated. Sort of.

Bergmannstrasse has been closed down to motor traffic that used it as a shortcut from Mehringdamm to Geneissenaustrasse, or Südstern. One way traffic can now drive from Mehringdamm to the corner of Nostitzstrasse and only turn left or right, but not continue on to make a shortcut worth their while. The last few days has seen considerably less of the usual car drivers who race along Bergmannstrasse trying to beat the clock as they make their way to Geneissenaustrasse.

The plan is set, loosely. That’s what the flyers said. It looks like it’ll take some time to take shape, but the first work of laying bicycle lanes along Bergmannstrasse is underway. Bike lanes three metres wide either side of the road. Delivery traffic can enter and drop off loads between 6 am and 11 am in the mornings, locals can park as long the parking spaces last – I think there’s a plan to ban parking along the stretch of Bergmannstrasse between Nostitz Strasse and Zossener Strasse. But don’t forget, it’s a plan, but not really. Things will change.

The whole plan, initiated this week, Monday the 21st of June 2021, should be finalized by the autumn of 2022.

But we will see. It’ll develop as it goes along. In this modern business world of the 21st century, city planning is not what it once was. Big business, middle sized businesses that band together, are always keeping their eagle eyes open for loop holes to exploit. If they see that the development of the Bergmannkiez could turn into a business opportunity, such as opening a large fitness centre, a new supermarket, a chain of restaurants, or anything that business thinks it can declare a benefit to the locals, they’ll want to get their grubby mits on the plans. They will become involved in meetings, and create changes to how money is invested in further developments. Then they become a voice about who gets a chunk of tax payers money to develop their business idea.

I’ve heard say that big department stores won’t stand a chance in opening up anywhere around the Bergmannkiez, I believe that. The usual suspects involved in worldwide fast food have already been turned down, rejected and kept at bay due to their style not being in line with the feeling of what the Bergmannkiez is all about.

On the other hand, it’s modern business and planning. That means that they shift and move the goal posts, or simply kick them down, as often as needed, to allow the team with the big money to get what they want.

Property developers from afar have had their finger in pie of Bergmannkiez for years. Paint the exterior of a building, maintain the interior entrance ways, new rosettes, spruce up the steps of a staircase and call it a luxury block of flats.

Most desirable neighbourhoods in Berlin, have an atmosphere that everybody recognises. The ambient, the buzz of the neighbourhood comes from the fact that most residents were artists, creative people, originally. It took years of simple living, cafés and restaurants opened by local people, to achieve a feeling of a neighbourhood that gelled together. The people felt safe. Living in a kiez, a neighbourhood, that makes you feel safe is the first thing, then a place to enjoy.

The simple things of life, not major retail outlets, but small shops catering for the locals. Book shops, grocery shops, fresh food, clothes made by local designers and tailors who keep up with the times, but don’t lose the feeling of style and quality.

A park just up the street, Viktoria Park. The local graveyard is popular as a place to wander around and enjoy a break from traffic. You can see squirrels and mice, foxes and lovers in the graveyard. There a few half-wits who ride bicycles through the graveyard in the Bergmannstrasse. Somebody needs to explain to them the difference between a park, and a place that is for peace and solitude, rest, and respect for people visiting the graves of relatives.

Much of the work being done on the Bergmannstrasse right now is about making it easier for bicycles to pass through without being endangered by motor traffic or pedestrians. Berlin Senate has pushed a pro-bike rider policy that has intensified over the years. I find it very one sided, pedestrians and their safety is never a part of the discussion. This creates a feeling of, “we can ride anywhere we like.”, among cyclists.

Bikes over cars, good. But cyclists before people, not good. It’s totally irresponsible of the Berlin Senate to ignore the safety of people walking along the street. Why do pedestrians have to watch out that they won’t be hit by a fast moving vehicle on the pathway?

Street Photography Topics

Take a Walk into Your Own Neighbourhood

Walk into Your Neighbourhood

January 16, 2021 by SeanPatrick

“The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.”
-Robert Doisneau

Walk into the Unexpected City

When we stop and think about it, our own neighbourhood, the local manor, the small side streets and the local square that we tend to take for granted, is more foreign to us than we’d admit.

Many people hardly know anything about their own neighbourhood. There is always this opportunity outside your own front door to go and find out what exists just around the corner.

Many of spend more time walking to the local supermarket and back, than actually exploring our neighbourhood.

As time goes by a lot can change in a neighbourhood. A city is nothing without its people. It’s the people who create changes that occur constantly. When you think about how many people move in and out of your local area every year.

In my on city around 20,000 people move into the city each year. The figures go up and down, but the influence of new faces, and people bringing new ideas into a city is important to the life-blood of a community.

People move to cities, find work, and find it easier to communicate with others and make new friends than they did when they lived in a small town. There’s always something in a city that offers each individual a gateway into their own lifestyle. The deeper we get, the more meaningful our lives become.

It’s this constant search for meaningfulness that drives people to explore their environment. And right now, during this Lockdown with Corona-19 virus, people are looking for new ways to make daily life more bearable.

Many of us still have the opportunity to go for a walk – as far as we wish.

A walking psychogeographer discovers newness on the streets that couldn’t have been observed a day earlier. Psychogeography is simply a way to wander through the streets like a flaneur. A person who enjoys being out and about for the sake of it.

It’s not without good reason that people follow this practice. They discover things that they didn’t know existed in their own neighbourhoods, and farther afield in the city.

The backdrop of a normally busy city, it’s famous monuments, buildings and streets that hardly change, stand and mark time so long as their history is still relevant. Yet, it’s surrounded by contemporary people and ideas. Shops, cafes, clubs and bars, children’s playgrounds and parks – all mostly built and designed from the 18th century onwards as society expanded and people needed more facilities. Workers migrated less and less, so a city really came into its own with development that had permanent residents in mind.

In Berlin, Brandenburg Gate, built in 1781 -1784, commissioned by Friederick Wilhelm II, and named the “Friedenstor” – “Peace Gate”. It has retained its meaning throughout history, and is often lit up with special laser lighting to honour another city or country that Germany supports. It’s always a symbol of peace and unity. The Brandenburg Gate has been the backdrop of many a tourist photo, and photographers, each day, attempt a new angle on it in the hope that they will create a unique vision of one of Berlin’s greatest monuments.

Its meaningfulness comes from the way people perceive it as an important object of attention.

Others walk through its portals and wander off along Unter den Linden towards Friedrich Strasse, the main shopping boulevard of Berlin-Mitte. The smart architecture and shops offer a glut of window shopping, book browsing, and cafes galore where you can sit and people-watch as you drink coffee and munch on a piece of chocolate cake.

It’s monuments like these famous streets and structures that were the beginning of modern cities. Things began to expand as people began to live in one place.

Each time I’m wandering along these streets, I see other people inspecting the walls, the buildings and using their smartphones to get fresh information on what they are looking at.

The mobile phone as a portal to information may sound like a neat hack that saves time. But time is not everything. The stop and start of scrolling, looking, reading and skimming words, takes the emotions off into another small universe far away from the streets. The feeling is often lost.

Lost Nights in the City of Fun

Some people prefer the night. They’ve discovered that the night offers them exactly what they are looking for, meaningful reasons to meet similar minded people, the places that are designed for night-hawks who sleep during the day, and become active only after dark.

Clubs and bars where the feeling of debauchery is mutual. Drink and get drunk, dance, and if you like, take your clothes off and experience a sort of freedom that the socially inhibited frown on. A place to strut your stuff and raise a little sand, cause moral outrage, if you like. Berlin has always been a city that loves a wild party.

Night and day offer differences that cut a fine line in the lives of many Berliners. Even now, in these Coronavirus Times, the clubs are locked down, but there have been so many impromptu parties. Late night “raves” in parks. Full metal jacket with speakers rammed up against the trees, crowds bathed in adrenalin like the only thing to do in life is to party come rain, high water, or sickness. And then run away when the Polizei get the dogs out. This isn’t living, nor is it neighbourly. Neighbourly, is an essential mentality when living in a city. Otherwise, we end up stressing each other out all day.

Walking like a psychogeographer is doing your own thing. There are no rules, and nobody can really explain what you have to do – except walk and enjoy the view.

You can even not call yourself a psychogeographical walker and just say you like going for long strolls and looking at things.

In Paris during the 1950s, Guy Debord arranged random walks in the sense of what he called psychogeography. He allowed several people to walk together so long as they had reached the same level of awareness necessary to not achieve anything particular throughout the walk.

His ideas were based on the philosophies based around the radical group, Letterist International. Basically, they wanted to avoid being dictated to by the environment and discover the city for themselves. Remember, architecture can influence our feelings and thoughts about where we live. Walking around, randomly encountering whatever turned up at the next plaza or street corner, led to conversations about their feelings and emotional response to the city.

These walks were known as “dérives”. The idea was to swiftly make your way through the streets, and when finished, discuss how it all made you feel.

The main philosophy behind psychogeography was to discover the streets, the city in your own way, and reinvent how you perceived it. A good idea, and a positive use of group projects.

We don’t have to go so far as Guy Debord with the swift walks and discussions, but other people are doing something similar these days; a study on Smartphones and the technology of artificial intelligence has allowed interested parties to gather facts and figures regarding where we all go, walk, and how often we stay away from home. The list can be broken down into details that are frighteningly personal.

We know it as geotracking. Geotracking is being used on Smartphones as a standard application, it’s also used to locate where in the world a customer is sitting, and what they are looking at.

Take geotracking one step further, and you have something called “geofencing”.

So, you think that your mobile phone has tracked you to the supermarket and back, the bank, the park, and then logged your visit that you make once a week across the city. You know this happened when Google asks you to write a review on the park that you visited, yesterday.

Imagine if your smartphone logged exactly where you were, and how you felt. The idea of geofencing is to discover not only locations, but the feeling levels of the person visiting a certain location.

It wants to know if you are anxious, happy, joyful, sad, or any number of human emotion responses.

When we venture off into the city and tell our spouse, friends, and so on, that we are going out for a while, we walk away into another world. Maybe, a world that, for some, is very private. Remember the night clubs, debauchery, drinking till dawn and dancing in sweaty nakedness with an absolute stranger? That gets geotracked, and in future it may be geofenced.

Geofencing is an experiment to not only track movements of smartphone carriers, but to also monitor their reactions in certain locations. The objective is for the application to act like an alarm. If you begin to wander into a zone that has similar architecture, people, or activities that have made you anxious in the past, the smartphone app will warn you and guide you away from a zone that has been designated as a conflict for you.

Jim van Os of Maastricht University has been conducting studies with volunteers to monitor stress levels when entering different locations in the city.

Combine this with brain imaging techniques and the on the spot questionnaire that Jim van Os uses in his studies, and it could be one day be useful to help people suffering from various types of depression, or mental illness that is exasperated by high stress locations.

Train stations, shopping centres and various hot spots of stress can be avoided with the knowledge already stored and combined with your own anxiety indicators.

The whole idea is obviously questionable and probably only useful in a positive way to people needing such information. But as a general smartphone, built in application, it’s going to be another step in the invasion of our privacy to explore the world, perceive it according to our own world view – and accept things when we make mistakes such as walk down road full of construction sites, or discover for the first time that train stations and noisy locations turn us on.

Find the Unexpected

I love to go out walking for miles, and miles. I tend to go, and think on the way about which general direction I’ll take. This way I can discover new streets and old buildings where once something interesting took place. There are always brass plaques on old red brick walls, and good books to read about the city you live in.

More from Berlin Notes Street Photography

What your Shoes and Socks say about You – a fun read

My Medium Pages

The Magic City of Berlin

January 5, 2021 by SeanPatrick

Berlin is a city that people visit for a weekend, a week maybe, a friend told them to come and stay a few days — ‘it’s such an interesting city, you’ve got to experience it.’ So, you feel the pull of the offer, and go.

planungakademie Berlin photo by Sean P. Durham, Berlin, 2021 Copyright

At first, just like any city, Berlin is full of strange faces and smells, the traffic sounds like most city noise, the streets full of tempting offers, doorways that lead into dark passages and cellars, and the next corner with its posted signs suggesting that you walk this way, or that way to discover a new experience, can make you feel as if a good weekend stay is ahead of you. But when your friend, who you came to visit, takes you by the hand and leads you away from the shops, and into the real Berlin city, you may just, if lucky, begin to feel the magic of a city that holds secrets and temptations that have been the cause of some many a nomad to stop become a villager, to settle and give up wandering through the world.

A visit to the hot spots of town where you can drink, dance, and meet all sorts in one night, becomes an introduction to a city that clearly offers everything to any taste.

To see the malls and the boulevards of Berlin that connect the present with the past. The old streets that haven’t changed and the new streets that make you gawp, clubs, bars, and curious locations that grew organically into an open market, or meeting place, or both.

Even the “big sights”, those well known streets like Unter den Linden, take on a deeper meaning when you know who built them, and why they exist.

Unter den Linden in Berlin

A simple bridle path that once allowed the 16th century Elector, John George of Brandenburg, to ride into the Tiergarten and go on the hunt. Then developed into a major boulevard that has been shaped and formed to serve the needs of the people. Built by families of stone masons, brick layers, and engineers and architects, all visionary in their deeds, and finished with blistered hands and, for sure, loss of life.

Honours to and Along Unter den Linden

The history of Unter den Linden is plain to see and research. In the 1850s a statute of Frederick II of Prussia was erected in honour of all that he had achieved for the city, and Germany. Johann Strauss III wrote, “Unter den Linden, op. 30” — a waltz, what else from the master of Waltz and Polka.

To awaken the curiosity that makes city dwelling meaningful. The magic of a city only works when its residents believe in the magic. The creative forces of its residents comes into play when community exists. When the friend who you are visiting takes you by the hand and leads you through the city streets, you are being led into labyrinths that only a resident knows. Places of the heart that have magic, something human, soul imprints that were left there by the magic of human life.

At Pariser Platz, in front of Brandenburg Gate, and slightly left when looking from the west, stands the grand hotel known as “The Adlon”. Full of the type of history that creates legends, Cold War spies used this hotel as a meeting place, occasionally, but preferred the lesser know cafe Adler tucked into a side street. Nazi officers enjoying nights of booze and debauch within the walls of the Adlon during the war years.

Berlin is famous for its decadent Twenties, clubs where “everything goes!” was invented, people threw inhibition to the floor and let not only their hair down, but also shirts, blouses, and all the rest could easily be cast to the bench on a wild night out — it would cause a cheer or two, but not offence.

Infamous Entrances at Hotel Adlon, and the Exhibitionist

During the 1920s, a famous young actress had the habit of visiting the hotel Adlon; when she arrived, it was with style.

Fur coat wrapped around her, cigarette in a long black holder perched on her hand. She would stroll through the main entrance and head for the bar. Close by, the evening guests sat at tables, but at the sight of this infamous lady of Berlin, they would stop their conversations and wait for her to complete her act. The waiter and concierge knew her, and her antics, they would also wait until the correct moment came for them to take action, and end her short visit.

A saucer glass of champagne, a wink and a nod at a few of the guests, she would ensure that all eyes were on her, and when they were, she drained her champagne glass in one gulp. Her long fur coat would slip to the floor and crumple at her heeled feet. With a well practised stage turn she would face the onlookers as their darting and gleeful eyes took in the sight of her perfectly formed body, naked but for shoes and an expensive fur coat that lay at her feet.

The concierge would then pick up her coat and place it across her shoulders, escort her politely to the main doors and send her on her way, with no word of reprimand or “don’t come back.”, she would always return and thrill guests with this example of Berlin decadence.

All combined and spread through the streets of a large city, the graffitied walls, the messages left as marks and dashes across bricks and mortar are like the sigils of passing souls, their forces vibrate with the feeling of something important rising. You connect, you don’t know how, but something happened on those walks. Your guide, your friend, took you into those streets past the twisted trees with boots hanging from their branches, the garden walls where stone ornaments of small birds converse with the figures of small people. Clay formed into symbols that you read, but can not speak out loud.

A mystery forms, and you are hooked, you must begin to unravel the thoughts that pile up inside. But you can’t, not yet. It’s too much to understand in one day.

The magic city is seeping into your soul, and you are responding by delving into its secrets.

Your guide and friend takes you farther along the path. You see more, and begin to understand how to look past the lines of noisy steel, the soulless cries of maskless complainers, you feel the connections that a city creates between residents.

To be a Berliner must be a good thing, to speak those words, ich bin Berliner, is earned, if said with truth.

The truth is in the living, the searching, the understanding of all those marks, and symbols, the sigils and graffiti on the walls that each resident leaves behind for others to interpret as another part of the magic between people.