Stimmanns Stadtlektüren

Hans Stimmann, born in 1941, shaped Berlin’s architectural and urban development fortunes like no other during three legislative periods and 15 years in office from 1991 to 2006. To this day, the former Senate Building Director and State Secretary for Urban Development is able to influence public debate. This is mainly due to his memorable speeches and committed journalism.

With “Stimmann’s City Readings – Texts, Lectures and Interviews: 2012 to 2022,” a collection of his contributions in various media is published on his 81st birthday. There are urban explorations, critiques, observations, but also polemics from Berlin, Lübeck or Kaliningrad.
The analyses of urban planning and architectural development before and after the turn of the millennium are not an end in themselves, however, but are always linked with a sometimes combative criticism of the failures of politics or administration of yesterday and today. In doing so, he does not shy away from finding his earlier “being right at all costs” questionable or at least worthy of reconsideration today.

However, Stimmann sticks to his basic urban ideas, which he came up with as a “child of the International Building Exhibition” (Stimmann). These include the model of the European city with its preferred stone facades, as well as a principled rejection of the utopias of a reinvention of the city. He vehemently advocates the historic city centers, because they are places of memory and cultural power, and pleads for an urban development consisting of individual parcels of land that give each city citizen a home and a place.