‘Make City’ in Times of an ‘Absolute Present’?

As a contribution to a series of events on the time-agnostic concept of the ‘Absolute Present’ at the Berlin techno club ‘://about blank’ and the Leipzig ‘Institut für Zukunft’, we developed and carried out an explorative city walk around Ostkreuz in Berlin. On our tour, we wanted to explore the hypotheses of an ‘Absolute Present’ on the basis of current urban development practices. On the other hand, we wanted to use this opportunity to reflect on the narrative that emerged in recent years that Berlin is undergoing a paradigm shift towards ‘self-made’ urban development ‘from below’. This approach of bringing together two seemingly paradoxical debates from very different contexts and discussing them using a specific example seemed to us to be a suitable way of sharpening the focus both on the individual debates themselves and the concrete urban development around Ostkreuz. In this magazine article, we present the status of our discussions, illustrated by photographs by Anna Blattner, which were taken on site after the tour.