Neukölln Berlin: Multicultural Hub and Creative Frontline

Neukölln is the neighbourhood that most accurately captures Berlin's current cultural and social moment — a densely populated district of Turkish, Arab, Roma and increasingly international creative communities that has been simultaneously celebrated as Europe's most exciting creative neighbourhood and criticised as the site of gentrification forces that are displacing the working-class communities whose presence made it interesting in the first place. The tension between these two narratives animates every café opening, every gallery show and every rent-increase negotiation in a neighbourhood that is genuinely contested in ways that Berlin's more settled gentrified districts are not.

The Hermannstraße and Sonnenallee corridors sustain the neighbourhood's Arabic and Turkish commercial culture with bakeries producing the finest flatbreads in Germany, shisha cafés operating around the clock, halal butchers, Lebanese pastry shops and the wholesale fruit and vegetable markets that supply the neighbourhood's food businesses with ingredients at prices that sustain cooking at the affordable end of Berlin's restaurant ecosystem. The Sonnenallee's Arabic restaurant concentration — particularly the Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian restaurants that have grown as refugee communities have established themselves in the neighbourhood — constitutes one of the finest and most authentic Middle Eastern food scenes outside the Levant itself.

The Richardkiez in northern Neukölln is where the neighbourhood's creative reinvention is most legible — a cluster of artist studios, gallery project spaces, natural wine bars and independent coffee shops in Gründerzeit apartment buildings whose relatively low rents have sustained a creative community that is being steadily compressed as the neighbourhood's desirability drives prices upward. The annual 48 Hours Neukölln arts festival, which opens over 200 studios, galleries and project spaces to visitors for a single weekend each year, is one of the finest introductions to Berlin's working creative community available in any city, and the neighbourhood's position adjacent to Tempelhof Field — the former airport runway converted into a 355-hectare public park — provides a democratic outdoor space of extraordinary scale for this densely settled part of the city.