Operationalizing the open city concept: A case study of Berlin

Abstract

Framed by a utopian rhetoric, the Open City emerges as a potential guiding principle to the contradictory tendencies and calamities of cities. As an elusive concept with a panoply of context-bound interpretations, the Open City is an open-ended project that manifests through different situations across the city. The article aims to explore different attributes of the Open City, in the context of Berlin, based on a thorough literature review and operationalizes the concept using a systematized approach. Results revealed that openness in Berlin followed a center-periphery pattern, where areas that fostered a high degree of openness were mostly found in inner-city neighborhoods while a lower potential of openness prevailed along the edges. By analyzing the conditions of openness in relation to the built environment, we sought to contribute toward a better understanding of the Open City concept and provide an approach for analyzing openness that can be adapted to different geographic contexts.