Low-budget Berlin: Towards an understanding of low-budget urbanity as assemblage

Studies of the interrelations between the austerity measures of local authorities and those of the central state usually take politics and antagonistic political constellations as their starting point. The concept proposed in this paper, ‘low-budget urbanity’, pursues a different approach where the guiding concept is assemblage. It enables a perspective where the focus is on specific sociomaterial formations that articulate urban economic crises and their potentialities ‘from within’. This multidimensional aspect of urbanity is then discussed taking Berlin as an example. The assemblage of ‘urban imagineering’ as provided in Berlin will come to exemplify how a historically specific form of culturally meaningful low-budget urbanity transpired between 2003 and 2008.