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Repurposing Infrastructure: Working with the Material Past

Izabela Paszko looks into the hidden history of infrastructures from National Socialist times and their continued use.

History of certain places often reveals itself unexpectedly. Symbols on façades, unusual road patterns, and abandoned buildings quietly reflect past violence and disruption that often go unnoticed. Many structures built under the National Socialist regime still function today, while the circumstances of their construction remain obscured.

Die Geschichte bestimmter Orte offenbart sich oft unerwartet. Symbole an Fassaden, ungewöhnliche Straßenführungen und verlassene Gebäude spiegeln still vergangene Gewalt und Umbrüche wider, die häufig unbemerkt bleiben. Viele Bauwerke aus der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus erfüllen noch heute ihren Zweck, während ihre Entstehungsumstände im Verborgenen bleiben.


Some years ago, I experienced an electricity shortage in my rented flat in the southern part of Munich. As the failure met me in the middle of my laundry, I had to move my soaking wet clothes to the shared laundry room in the cellar of the building. Despite having lived in this building for three years, I had never been in this room before. After successful handling the “laundry situation,” I curiously looked around. The interior was old, raw and rather practical then decorative. On the wall there was only one frame. Not with relaxing landscape, though. The yellowed from age document appeared to be a list of rules that users of the laundry room must obey (“Verordnung über die Einrichtung und den Betrieb von Mangelstuben und Waschküchen”). It did not surprise me – after living in Germany for some years, I was used to rules and instructions that regulated everyday life. I quickly skimmed through a page-long text and the date under the whole text struck me. “München, den 4. September 1937.“ I had many questions and so far no answers. Who had lived in this building at that time and since when? Who built it? And, last but not least, why wasn’t this document in a museum?

List of rules for the laundry room users, photos taken by the author, 2025.

These questions came to me as I wasn’t expecting to find myself, and definitely not living, in a building with very likely NS past. My neighbourhood area, located remotely from the historic city centre is one of the youngest of Munich’s districts, so the history doesn’t haunt t continuously he residents as it happens in centrally located Maxvorstadt or Schwabing. If the building was constructed after the war, the presence of the housekeeping rules from the 1930s could be explained by transfer of the “neutral” and yet still applicable document to the new postwar reality. The presence of the housekeeping rules and circumstances made me reflect on the fate of the “Nazi contaminated” buildings and infrastructural sites such as roads or pump stations in categories of double standards and utilitarian approach. Yet, this approach was not uniform across all kinds of Nazi structures.

In the postwar period, many buildings with a „brown past” were demolished or repurposed. This was the fate of rally grounds in Nuremberg and “temples of honour” in Munich, the latter were also left abandoned, deemed for forestation. The transformation of monumental structures was more difficult, but not impossible, as examples from Berlin like the Detlev Rohwedder House that housed the Third Reich’s Ministry of Aviation show. In this and many similar cases, the initial function has remained the same. Since 1999, the building once being a domain of Hermann Goering, currently is a seat of the German Finance Ministry. However, there are also examples of rather radical processes of repurposing. A case from Weimar continues to provoke debate: here a monumental “Gauforum” from the 1930s was transformed in 2005 into an “Atrium” shopping mall.

Aerial view of Detlev Rohwedder House, Wilhelmstraße, Berlin (formerly known as Reichsluftfahrtministerium, Haus der Ministerien, Treuhandanstalt), source: Hans G. Oberlack, Wikimedia Commons.

Yet, as the repurposing of empty buildings entails filling them not only with new décor, but foremost with new meanings, the infrastructural places retain their functional value, which in most cases does not involve an ideological agenda. The airfields from the First World War served their role in the next one and in postwar times under changing political systems. The airfield in Cheb, Czechia, serviced planes during both wars and today still functions as recreational airfield.

Under the NS regime, development of the transport infrastructure became a priority task as it was bonded with national politics, expansive economic plans and military manoeuvres. Thousands of kilometres of roads, railways and bridges were built by forced laborers. However, despite their gloomy origins, the transportation networks were not dismantled after the war. Their continuity relies foremost on their importance and perseverance. As material scientist Deb Chachra claims, infrastructural systems are repaired and rebuilt, but very rarely completely ripped out and constructed from scratch.1 Infrastructures are highly political constructions that represent power and dominance.2 In the case infrastructures are (re)built, developed and used in totalitarian, oppressive periods of rule – unless they were destroyed during military manoeuvres – they thrive under the new political system and accumulate new meanings and functions over time.

As a researcher, I am genuinely intrigued by such places, their transformations and “long history”. In my new project, I want to examine the postwar roles and implications of infrastructural sites in Poland, Czechia and Germany that carry a burden of totalitarian origin. Yet, in many cases the gloomy beginnings remain less known to collective memory due to the lack of “guardians of memory” and witnesses who would advocate for preservation both memory and physical remains. Over the past decades, infrastructural sites have obtained new meanings that overlay and create a fascinating assemblage of politics, micro histories and personal experiences. This is the case of motorway A4 (precisely its part in Lower Silesia), whose history presents artist Agata Ciastoń in her photographic documentary essay. This motorway was part of the “Reichsautobahn” project and was executed through tremendous work of forced labourer’s and prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps. Following Chachra’s claim, this strategic infrastructure remained in place and the major repairs occurred only in the last decade of the 20th century. Despite its utilitarian and rather neutral character, the motorway acquired some “stamps of time,” such as a Soviet inscription of one of the motorway’s pillars saying: Водрузим над Берлином знамя победы  (“We will raise the banner of victory over Berlin”) – a remnant from the end of war and the approaching Red Army.

Highway A4 Wrocław-Legnica. Russian inscription from 1945. Photo by Robert Niedźwiecki, 2010, source: Wikimedia Commons.

Another example from the same motorway are petrol stations from 1937 (designed by Friedrich Tamms). They are in constant use, yet with modern adjustments. Since 2012 they remain under conservatory protection as a historical monument. The overlapping of histories and meanings and research potential hidden behind infrastructural sites was also noticed by Ciastoń:

It seems to me that the A4 still exists somewhere in between the powerful propaganda project of the “Reichsautobahn,” Jean Baudrillard’s trance-like “freeway,” and the tamed – former and now little-used – “our motorway,” recalled with nostalgia, as it is called by the residents of the towns scattered along its route.3

Highway A4 near Katowice in 1974, source: Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe.

Many infrastructural sites carry a difficult history while being embedded in entirely new contexts. Yet in most cases, they are not “spectacular.” We pass them every day, sometimes even use them, without pausing to think about their stories. They blend into the routines of daily life, quietly present rather than demanding attention.

Although people often try to forget or intentionally erase the physical reminders of painful or uncomfortable histories, these places are stubborn. They linger in the landscape, refusing to disappear completely, as if the past itself is not quite ready to let go. Often, the reasons are practical rather than symbolic: continued use, economic necessity, or the sheer cost of dismantling what already exists. As a result, history lingers in concrete, asphalt, and grass growing where it was never meant to grow.

My research is driven by an interest in these overlooked sites and the contemporary conditions that allow them to persist. By looking closely at such spaces, I hope to open up questions about memory, environmental history, and social history and about how the past quietly shapes the landscapes we continue to inhabit today.


1 Chachra, Deb. How infrastructure works: inside the systems that shape our world. Penguin, London 2023, 7.

2 Larkin, Brian, Promising forms: The political aesthetics of infrastructure. In N. Anand, A. Gupta, & H. Appel (Eds.), The Promise of Infrastructure (pp. 175–202). Durham, Duke University Press 2018.

3 Ciastoń, Agata. Na środkowym pasie latem trawa była wysoka, Wydawnictwo Warstwy, Wrocław 2024, 230.


Photo: private.

Izabela Paszko is a cultural anthropologist and social historian specializing in the social history of Poland under the Nazi occupation. Currently she works as a researcher (postdoc) at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, where she investigates the structural factors shaping history exhibitions related to the Second World War and the Holocaust. In February 2026 she was a Value of the Past Fellow at Herder Institute in Marburg.


Title picture: Emergency exit of an air-raid shelter from World War II with the inscription Mannesmann-Luftschutz, Munich Ludwigstraße. Photo taken by the author, 2025.

Heritage Protection as Progressive Urbanism? Defending the Legacies of the Welfare State

John Pendlebury considers the progressive potential of the heritage of social housing.

Twentieth century workers’ and welfare state housing, often demonised, has increasingly been valorised as heritage. Does this have wider political relevance and potential in a time of housing crisis?

Die oftmals verunglimpften Arbeiter- und Sozialwohnungen des 20. Jahrhunderts erfahren eine zunehmende Wertschätzung als Kulturerbe. In Anbetracht der gegenwärtigen Wohnungskrise stellt sich die Frage, ob dies eine größere politische Relevanz und ein größeres Potenzial birgt.


Berlin Heritage

There are three World Heritage Sites in Berlin – can you guess what they are? You might expect to discover that, first, Museum Island and, second, the Palaces of Potsdam and Berlin are included on the list. But you might be more surprised by the third site – Berlin Modernism Housing Estates, six housing estates constructed between 1910 and 1933, principally from the period of the Weimar Republic. They are claimed to testify to innovative housing policies in a period when the city of Berlin was particularly progressive socially, politically and culturally. Together they “contributed to improving housing and living conditions for people with low incomes through novel approaches to town planning, architecture and garden design” also providing “exceptional examples of new urban and architectural typologies”, which “exercised considerable influence on the development of housing around the world” (Berlin Modernism Housing Estates, UNESCO).

A housing block in Siemensstadt by Hugo Häring, one of the estates forming the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates World Heritage Site.

Housing Crisis

The heritage of social housing seems particularly important in a moment when the availability of affordable, decent housing is a crisis issue in many countries. Writing from a British perspective, twentieth century social housing before 1979 – and the election of the Thatcher government which heralded a radical break from post-war consensus politics – speaks to a period when there was a widely held political aspiration to provide decent and better housing for all. Whilst the results were mixed, the best examples, now often given heritage status, show a scale of ambition, generosity and social priority that is difficult to imagine in the contemporary world. In England the ‘Post-war listing’ programme has positioned state heritage protection as an unlikely advocate and defender of the diminishing material and symbolic legacy of the architecture of the welfare state from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The legacies of this period are very different between different countries, but in many cases examples of such buildings are being formally protected as heritage. This opens-up important issues of how this period of planning history is framed, understood and valued within contemporary society. For example, do we consider material legacies of this period as important purely in terms of design, or is the social intent of the period of equal importance in our appreciation of such environments today?

The potential consequences of heritage protection for social housing – and its potential to contribute to more progressive urban outcomes – was the focus of my Leibniz Value of the Past Fellowship in June 2025 based at ZZF in Potsdam. The aim was to begin to extend the work we have undertaken in England (While and Pendlebury, 2025) to the German context, in the expectation that the different political context of both the creation of welfare state architecture and its subsequent political positioning will show elements of transnational overlap but also significant difference. Of particular interest in the case of Germany are the different histories – and trajectories – between the east and west of the country. And my first task, focusing on Berlin, was to try and understand something of the history and heritage status of the social housing in the city.

More Berlin Housing Heritage

Whilst Berlin’s history of innovation in social housing came to an abrupt stop under National Socialism, it returned with force in both Berlins in the 1950s. In West Berlin, this was exemplified by an international competition for the Hansa Quarter. The International Building Exhibition (INTERBAU) includes social housing blocks by eminent German architects, including the returning Walter Gropius as well as international figures such as Arne Jacobsen, Alvar Aalto and Oscar Niemeyer, although perhaps the most famous consequence of the exhibition was built elsewhere – the Le Corbusier reworking of the Unite d’Habitation. The counterpoint in the east, with an equal level of ambition but very different architectural approach, was the monumental series of blocks aligned along Stalinallee (now Karl Marx Allee), influenced by socialist urbanism and classicism. The combined innovation of new social housing methods and typologies from east and west has led to unsuccessful attempts to be included on Germany’s tentative list of future World Heritage Sites.

After the construction of the Berlin Wall, the large-scale construction of social housing continued in new forms in both territories until the Wall’s fall. In part this took the form of large-scale peripheral estates. In the west these were pushed out to the south (Gropiusstadt) the west (Falkenhagener Feld) and most monumentally to the north (Märkisches Viertel). In the east the later peripheral estates were grouped around the areas of Marzahn, Hellersdorf and Hohenschönhausen. Although not yet generally defined as heritage, a few buildings in these estates have been given monument status. Alongside the construction of peripheral estates there were also redevelopment efforts of social housing in the inner city. The best known of these is the International Building Exhibition (IBA) which ran in West Berlin during the 1980s, using the concepts of “careful urban renewal” and “critical reconstruction.” International celebrity architects on this occasion included Rob Krier, Charles Moore and Aldo Rossi, representing a distinct postmodern turn. Not surprisingly, some of these works now have heritage status.

Although German reunification and in the case of Berlin the “stitching back together” of a divided city is to be celebrated, reunification also led to the cessation of significant social housing building programmes in Berlin, albeit a decade later than with the conservative, neo-liberal political turn in the UK. The reasons for this are not simple, but initially housing demand was low, accompanied by high costs for reconnecting a city systematically severed for 45 years which led to the sell off of assets, including housing. Whilst in Berlin the provision of affordable housing today is perhaps less of a crisis issue than in many British cities, and London specifically, that there is a problem is clear. Despite its innovative and generous history of housing provision and a history of renting and protection for renters, Berlin has not been immune from global neo-liberal forces driving the commodification of housing. Do the protected legacies of earlier eras have any role to play in resisting these changes?

Heritage protection as progressive urbanism?

Historic building conservation is normally perceived as something conservative, rather than as a site of resistance in the city. However, preserved fragments of social housing stand as material testimony to periods when providing decent housing for all was a widely held political and social priority. Furthermore, protecting buildings for heritage purposes potentially challenges market hegemony, disrupting normal processes of capital accumulation. This may be part of the reason, along with a lingering antagonism to the material legacies of the welfare state (“concrete monstrosities”), why the government in England has distinctly cooled on extending protection to more postwar social housing in recent years. Robin Hood Gardens by Alison and Peter Smithson is the most well-known casualty, making way for a high-density area regeneration programme. Furthermore, some of the estates in London that do have protection through listing have been fully gentrified through radical tenure changes. But in our article (While and Pendlebury, 2025), we argue there may be tactical possibilities for resistance, a basis for community engagement, and a more local and bespoke approach to regeneration.

The last block of Robin Hood Gardens in 2024, awaiting demolition.

And in Berlin?

It is difficult to resist the juggernaut of neo-liberal housing policies that in many countries have made our houses commodities rather than homes. However, my preliminary impression of Berlin in comparison to England is of a generous and independent approach to heritage listing, of an inspirational history of innovation and provision of social housing, of a tradition of renting and protecting renters’ rights and, importantly, of a history of civic mobilisation and resistance that cumulatively make me feel optimistic of the progressive potential of Berlin’s rich history of social housing in providing some resistance to these global forces.


John Pendlebury is Professor of Urban Conservation, Centre for Heritage, Newcastle University, UK. In June 2025 he was a Leibniz Value of the Past Fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF).


Title picture: A block by Wilhelm Büning in the White City Estate, one of the estates forming the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates World Heritage Site.

All pictures in this contribution: John Pendlebury.