Berlin, Paris and the topography of the metropoles 1937-1945. Town planning cultures between compulsion and transfer

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Markus Tubbesing
• Subject Area: City Planning, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning ; Architecture, Building and Construction History, Construction Research, Sustainable Building Technology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548523249

This project aims to reconstruct the complex Franco-German interactions in the field of urban planning and development in the years before and during the Second World War. The focus of this interweaving historical narrative lies in the theoretical and practical exchange between occupiers and occupied in the field of urban planning, particularly for the metropoles of Paris and Berlin. This interdisciplinary work will mobilize various sources: graphic material from projects and written archives. Archivists and museum curators will be involved to broaden the research corpus. Digital humanities will play an important role in the incrementation of the results, which will be presented both in a bilingual publication and in an online atlas. This institutional and material history is capable of tracing the chains of decisions and topographical transformations in the two capital cities. It is based on the notion of a 'planning culture' (Planungskultur) that was established at the turn of the 20th century, with a scientific ambition deployed by the administrative spheres and project practitioners, in a rich international dialogue. We assume that these exchanges between experts were not interrupted between France and Germany during the war, but rather where redistributed; that the imminence and onset of the conflict in fact constituted a moment of acceleration in metropolitan thinking and the rationalization of legal and technical planning frameworks in both countries. We will examine the implementation of programs dedicated to military logistics and passive defense to determine whether they had an influence on the master plans that had previously been decided, the PARP (development plan for the Paris region) and the Berlin master plan of the Generalbauinspektor für die Reichshauptstadt (GBI). Occupied Paris will be compared with two other French cities of different status, Marseille and Lille, the former in the free zone until the end of 1942, the latter in the annexed zone, in order to clarify the scope for initiative left to local administrations vis-à-vis the German authorities. Two other capitals, Bucharest and Lisbon, will offer a European counterpoint on the transfer of expertise. The theory of reception will be mobilized for this purpose, based on the premise that a cultural transfer cannot be accomplished without an injunction from the receiving environment. The phenomenon of transfer thus escapes the unilateral schema of the dominant exerting its constraint on the dominated. Compared to the existing historiography, the expected additional value of the research is to deepen our knowledge of the PARP and the GBI plan; to open up new thematic areas that have not yet been explored; and above all to cross-reference French and German archives on the same subject, in order to go beyond the problems that have hitherto been posed within a national framework and on the basis of unilingual material.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France
• Partner Organisation: Agence Nationale de la Recherche / The French National Research Agency
• Co-Investigators: Professor Dr. Harald Bodenschatz; Dr.-Ing. Carmen Maria Enss; Professorin Dr. Heike Neuroth; Dr. Hans-Dieter Nägelke
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. René Borruey; Professorin Dr. Corinne Jaquand; Professor Dr. Olivier Ratouis