The official goal in the 1990s became the “critical reconstruction” of the inner city. This program began in Friedrichstadt, the old commercial center, whose eighteenth-century grid of wide streets and rectangular blocks established the pattern later extended to the nineteenth-century districts. Much of that grid has been obliterated by megaprojects on both sides of the Wall (the southern Friedrichstadt belonged to West Berlin). Berlin’s planners in the 1990s have partly restored the grid as a first step toward restoration of Berlin’s traditional urban form.
