Berlin, Moscow, Warsaw: a century of sibling rivalry expressed in urban form

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The troubled, historical relationship between Russia, Poland and Germany is revealed in their struggles for dominance over borderland territories. Berlin, Moscow and Warsaw boast scars left by dynastic wars and cultural skirmishes between these nations before 1914. The final Partition of Poland (1795), making Warsaw the third largest city in the Russian empire, and its destruction in 1944–5, epitomise their deadly rivalry. WWI was a watershed: Imperialism and the belle époque in architecture were replaced by socialism and modernism; the urban working class demanded security against a system founded on the ‘callous cash nexus’. This socialist phase was, like its predecessor, memorialised in monuments and statues, buildings, architecture and urban design. The fall of the Berlin Wall symbolised the opening of the era of choice, quintessentially expressed in the Mallification of public spaces. The concomitant of choice is risk, whose antidote may not be sought in class-based actions but in pre-socialist, nationalist narratives.