Lorenza Manfredi
In Berlin, the issue of land has recently regained prominence. While urban vacant lands (Brachen) of the 1990s enabled widespread autonomous and temporary appropriation practices, the growing competition for land has increasingly led to displacement or reconfiguration. Spreeraum Ost exemplifies these transformations, offering a lens to explore the evolving dynamics of self-organized urban spaces in the neoliberal city. This study examines three cases that developed strategies to (re)exist within a transformed urban environment. Through socio-spatial analysis, this research highlights the rising “singularity prestige”, which valorizes differences at the risk of co-optation within profit-driven logics. By claiming spaces as “their own,” these minority actors continue to develop survival strategies to maintain access to land in central areas, despite intensifying pressures. Their struggles underscore the importance of fostering an infrastructure of plurality, positioning themselves as a generative force in shaping urbanity. In practice, this not only promotes solidarity among grassroots initiatives but also legitimizes them within broader urban development strategies. It facilitates alternative forms of land ownership and spatial allocation, alongside the enactment of urban co-production, and opening new ways of coming to terms with vulnerabilities.