Social movement and the failure of car-friendly city projects: East and West Berlin (1970s and 1980s)

Abstract

The second half of the twentieth century was marked by predominantly car-friendly urban planning, provoking also resistance. This article will analyse the urban social movement against the car-friendly city, using the case of Berlin. The main aim is to define how modern urban societies on both sides of the Iron Curtain competed over their urban mobility infrastructures. The analysis will focus on two case studies: for West Berlin, the citizens’ initiative “Westtangente” formed against urban highways, as well as the broader protest movement against the marginalisation of non-automobile forms of mobility, will be analysed; For East Berlin, a socialist type of car-friendly urban planning failed to realise a number of major motorways that would have passed through a Jewish cemetery, together with the emergence of a small protest movement that formed under the umbrella of the Protestant Church.