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The paper analyses the West-Berlin pathway to the “car-friendly city” in the context of the Cold War. It starts by retracing some long term continuities since the 1920s and gives special attention to the institutional settings and power struggles within the municipal authorities. The prospective character of the planning for the “Stadtautobahn” since 1945 which was far ahead of the real motorisation of the time is explained by the strong political and ideological intention to demonstrate the superiority of the Western life style. The Berlin case is reflected in the context of projects for ring-roads in other European cities.

This editorial introduces the subject matter of the thematic issue, which includes a diverse collection of contributions from authors in various disciplines including, history, architecture, planning, sociology and geography. Within the context of mediatisation processes—and the increased use of ever-expanding I&C technologies—communication has undergone profound changes. As such, this thematic issue will discuss how far (digital) media tools and their social uses in urban design and planning have impacted the visualisation of urban imaginations and how urban futures are thereby communicatively produced. Referring to an approach originating from the media and communication sciences, the authors begin with an outline of the core concepts of mediatisation and digitalisation. They suggest how the term ‘visualisation’ can be conceived and, against this background, based upon the sociological approach of communicative constructivism, a proposal is offered, which diverges from traditional methods of conceptualising visualisations: Instead, it highlights the need for a greater consideration towards the active role of creators (e.g., planners) and recipients (e.g., stakeholders) as well as the distinctive techniques of communication involved (e.g., a specific digital planning tools). The authors in this issue illustrate how communicative construction, particularly the visual construction of urban futures, can be understood, depending upon the kind of social actors as well as the means of communication involved. The editorial concludes with a summary of the main arguments and core results presented.

This article argues that socialist cities were fundamentally shaped by both “modern” and “traditional” concepts of urbanism, showing major shifts throughout time and remarkable differences from one city to another. After an examination of the planners’ debates in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, the three East German cities of Eisenhuttenstadt, Schwedt, and Berlin Marzahn are analyzed to show common features as well as the different pathways of urban development. Special attention is given to the relationship between inner-urban transformation and “extensive urbanism,” and to the question of socialist environmental problems and lifestyles. It is claimed that the socialist pathway of urban development differed considerably from the process of suburbanization in the Western countries and can be interpreted as an attempt to realize “socialist utopias” by forming socialist men, socialist families, and socialist neighborhoods with the help of urbanism.

La recherche sur les villes industrielles en Allemagne federale et en RDA reunit les centres d’interet de l’histoire des villes et de l’urbanisation, de l’histoire du temps present et de la geographie. La comparaison Est-Ouest du developpement des villes industrielles apres 1945 offre une perspective generale sur l’histoire croisee des societes europeennes. A cote d’importantes differences, des paralleles se dessinent entre les deux societes allemandes. Toutes deux suivirent le modele de developpement fordiste d’une modernite faconnee au niveau sociopolitique. L’entree dans la crise de l’emploi en Republique federale eut des les annees 1970 un impact sur le developpement urbain, alors qu’en RDA, ou les anciennes structures furent conservees pour des raisons politiques, il fallut attendre la reunification de 1990 pour voir l’Est touche, et cette fois de plein fouet, par ces evolutions.

Christoph Bernhardt A social model in an industrial environment The New Towns in the German Democratic Republic In the former Eastern Block nations, New Towns were designed as practical laboratories in the day to day building of the socialist nation. Their history remains that of large complexes of standardized buildings that momentarily satisfied the strong demand for housing and comfort close to major industries. In the German Democratic Republic, the popular enthusiasm for this model of a fully equipped city coexisted with criticism of its uniformity., Dans les ex-pays de l'Est, les villes nouvelles ont été conçues comme des laboratoires quotidiens de l'édification socialiste. Leur histoire reste celle de grands ensembles standardisés qui ont momentanément satisfait une forte demande de logement et de confort à proximité de la grande industrie. En République Démocratique Allemande, l'engouement populaire pour ce modèle de ville équipée a coexisté avec la critique de son uniformisation., Bernhardt Christoph. Laboratoires de l'État-providence industriel. Les villes nouvelles en RDA. In: Les Annales de la recherche urbaine, N°98, 2005. Les visages de la ville nouvelle. pp. 127-135.

We define a novel retrieval algorithm for variable bit rate video streams called GCDL that reads the video data from the disk as constant size data blocks. We formulate for GCDL a deterministic admission control criterion and evaluate its performance. Compared to existing retrieval algorithms, GCDL decreases the buffer requirement and start up latency while admitting the same number of clients.

Multimedia streams such as audio and video impose tight temporal constraints due to their continuous nature. Often, different multimedia streams must be presented in a synchronized way. We introduce a scheme for the continuous and synchronous delivery of distributed stored multimedia streams across a communications network. We propose a protocol for the synchronized playback, compute the buffer requirement, and describe the experimental results of our implementation. The scheme is very general and does not require bounded jitter or synchronized clocks and is able to cope with clock drifts and server drop outs.