Jean-Paul Deridder: Stadt der Kinder, Berlin: City of Transcience

The empty lot, where for years, the Stadt der Kinder (City of Children)—an adventure playground on Alte Schönhauser Strasse in Berlin—had its home, was not just an empty space like so many others. It was a place for creative, temporary use; a grand experiment with anonymous architecture, architecture without architects. This construction site did not adhere to any sort of plan, but rather to an organic, anarchic impulse to play and create.

In 2005, the adventure playground was moved, and once again, there is an empty lot where it used to be. Belgian photographer Jean-Paul Deridder (*1963) began taking black-and-white photos of the “makeshift city between all of the renovated buildings” in 1998, capturing images of the young architects’ imaginative structures and sculptures—symbols of free play and the free appropriation of public space.