The Kreuzberg Office. An Anti-Authoritarian Urban Experiment and Its Orthodox Marxist Critique

This article traces the emergence, activity and legacy of the “Office for Urban Rehabilitation and Social Work,” an anti-authoritarian space opened in Kreuzberg in 1969 by a group of architecture students to prevent tenants’ eviction and buildings’ demolition. By investigating its production of papers, newspapers and architectural projects, the article illustrates the Office’s theoretical and practical contributions to the debate in the late 1960s and early 1970s around architectural preservation, urban transformation and citizens’ participation. It then analyses the contribution of a group of the Office’s activists who later critically reflected on its limitations and contradictions from an orthodox Marxist perspective.