Rehearsing inhabitation in Berlin's dramaturgical surrounds: A decade of city-making in the wake of ‘crisis’

Cities have long been stages where contradictory forces of accommodation and banishment, encounter and exclusion, arrival and expulsion unfold in tandem. Responding to the heightened political closures of this last decade, this article reimagines the city by attending to what has been and is being done in the interstices of the city in the face of seemingly insurmountable trouble. Focusing on Berlin, we examine the spatial practices through which urban dwellers make and remake the city beyond normative categories of home, work, and integration . Drawing on ethnographic engagements since 2017, we explore three typologies of shared space – the field, the stage, and the café – where migration politics and everyday life intersect. These sites reveal how ordinary practices of inhabitation constitute forms of rehearsal and prefigurative politics: experimental modes of city-making that resist the violence of bordering and discourse of othering from above, while organising other ways of living from below. In advancing a re-reading of Berlin as a palimpsest city – continually rewritten through ordinary gestures of those who inhabit it – we explore how the affective, material and dramaturgical practices can form a counter-archive of city-making and collective living.