Urban plans project order by abstracting urban reality. The dynamics of history, politics, economy, and culture are frozen and reduced to surface traces of streets, buildings, landscapes, and place names. Despite their thematic reductivism and all they are unable to represent, the precision and beauty of maps reassures us that we know enough to continue building in the face of constant uncertainty. Recalling Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s map of the Campus Martius (1762) and his map of Rome created with Giambattista Nolli (1748), these maps of Berlin exist at the intersection of reality and uncertainty – portraying cities that could have been or others that might yet be. The source material is a series of technical documents titled Die Stadtebauliche Entwicklung Berlins von 1650 bis heute (The Urban Development of Berlin from 1650 to today). The series was created by the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development and Environmental Protection in 1986, shortly before the city’s reunification.
