In the midcentury industrial boom it was left to an emerging private real estate market to respond to the enormous demand for housing. The Berlin tenement’s typical form evolved out of private builders’ attempts to profit from that demand. They developed new designs suited to traditional Berlin houses (including barracks), the emerging pattern of streets and blocks, and a minimal set of municipal regulations governing sanitation and fire protection. The city’s planners have often been blamed for encouraging the spread of Mietskasernen, but in fact they neither foresaw nor knew how to control
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