Paul Sullivan on the battle for one of the city’s last great 90s-era cultural hubs…
No-one could have predicted, back in 1867 when the railway repair yard now known as RAW Gelände was built, that its future would involve being bombed to smithereens by Allied air raids, operated by a socialist state for several decades, and then transformed into a scruffy-but-beloved complex of run-down and restored buildings committed to culture and nightlife.
In continuous grassroots development since 1994, the historical space is today home to over 80 independently run socio-cultural projects, including a huge indoor skate hall and an overground WW2 bunker cleverly transformed into a climbing wall, several excellent bars, live music venues and clubs, music rehearsal studios, cafés and beer gardens, a swimming pool (inside Maaya) and art spaces dedicated to street art (Urban Spree) and creative digital explorations (B-Dome). Then there’s the hugely popular Sunday flea market, a annual Christmas market and other community projects and pop-ups…
A large part of RAW’s appeal is the way its crumbling, dilapidated buildings—just about discernible beneath the thick layers of political street art, graffiti tags, posters and stickers—represents a form of time travel. Not back to the nineteenth century, but to the 1990s and early naughties, when the post-reunification city was stumbling into a future that was uncertain but full of possibility.
For those of us that came later, it has remained one of the great examples of how at least one European metropolis managed to escape the incontrovertible logic of neoliberalism and evolve—albeit shakily and controversially—between the opposing poles of commercial redevelopment and ungentrified culture. But the tensions that have been playing out more or less invisibly in the background have recently erupted—and it might mean the end of RAW as we know it.
A Brief History
The RAW Gelände was originally named the Königlich Preußische Eisenbahnwerkstatt Berlin II (Royal Prussian Railway Workshop) and was built to maintain the city’s fast-expanding rail network, which formed the heart of Prussia’s—and from 1872, a united Germany’s—industrial transformation.
What started as a fairly modest workshop quickly developed into a large-scale operation, maintaining locomotives, passenger and freight cars, and refrigerated cars. It wasn’t long before the yard employed 600 workers, which doubled with the opening of the city’s Stadtbahn in the 1880s. The name RAW—an acronym for the snappy Reichsbahnausbesserungswerk (Imperial Railway Repair Works)—came with the transformation of Prussia’s state railways in 1920 and their absorption into the Imperial Railways (Reichseisenbahn).
During the Nazi era, 2,000 forced laborers were employed on the RAW site. World War Two destroyed eighty percent of the factory’s buildings; only the buildings along Revaler Straße, including the perimeter wall, withstood the bombings, as did the robust overground bunker now known as “Der Kegel” (The Cone) climbing wall.
Post-war Soviet forces oversaw the reconstruction of the factory, and it served the same purpose for the more limited East German rail network. In 1967, it was renamed “RAW Franz Stenzer” in honour of a Bavarian communist who had been elected to the German parliament in 1932 and was murdered by the Nazis, at Dachau, in 1933. A memorial to Stenzer can be found amidst the foliage in front of Building 20, alongside a matching one commemorating former communist party leader Ernst Thälmann.
Post-Reunification Dynamics
Following the fall of the Wall, the RAW site became the property of Deutsche Bahn. But the company had no use for the bombed-out complex, and by 1994 it was closed down permanently. In 2001, it was transferred to Vivico Real Estate GmbH, a DB company founded to organise the sale of disused railway properties who then sold it on—aside from a section used by Spanish rail company Talgo—to RED Development Berlin GmbH in 2007. This was the first time in the site’s area that it became private property.
Since there were no immediate plans for development, a grassroots organisation named RAW-tempel e.V was founded, with the support of the Berlin-Friedrichshain district office, to create “a free space for socio-cultural use…”. RAW-tempel was granted a three-year interim use permit in 1999, and signed a ten-year lease agreement in 2002, all of which led to the establishment of community projects and venues such as Der Kegel, Skatehalle Berlin and Club Cassiopeia, as well as a children’s circus, a music school, theater groups, an environmental group and more.
After some internal disputes, RED ended up with a 16,000 square meter section on the eastern edge (where Neue Heimat, a well-known and popular street food market, established itself for a while), which they sold onto to the International Campus (IC) Immobilien Group in 2015. IC planned to build student housing there but were overruled by district planners as well as local residents, who wished to protect the site’s existing cultural projects.
In 2015, the Göttingen-based real estate company Kurth bought the larger 52,000-square-meter section to the west—the part that extends to Warschauer Straße and contains most of the venues and projects. Although RAW-tempel e.V. filed for insolvency in 2015, a new association called RAW Kultur L was founded in 2018 with similar aims: to represent local tenants as well as what is now known as the “Sociocultural L” (SKL), the site’s key cultural, entertainment and gastronomic spaces.
Commerce vs Culture
Plans for the commercial development of RAW go as far back as 2001, when an entity called the Workstation_Ideenaufruf initiative launched an urban planning process. This resulted in the first planning resolution for the site, including a zoning plan procedure, which was completed in 2004. But due to Vivico’s withdrawal and the sale of the site, the results were not implemented.
In 2018, the district organized three participatory workshops for all relevant parties that approached the topic again. It was decided that no apartments should be created and the focus should be placed on offices and other commercial developments instead. In 2019, a development plan was agreed that guaranteed the continued presence of the so-called SKL. A promising start was made with the inauguration of the House of Music, for which the former wheel-turning workshop was extensively renovated and turned into band rehearsal rooms and offices for international music-related companies and Musicboard Berlin.
Even more encouraging was the following statement on the Future of Raw website: “As R.A.W. continues developing, it will maintain this emphasis on coexistence and knitting together. R.A.W. is a place in which history and the future cross paths. A place for the young and old. A place for diverse individuals and groups.”
Despite those words, a curiously non-corresponding architectural image of the developer’s masterplan seemed to feature very little of the current complex. Instead, it showcased large commercial blocks and a high-rise tower that mirrored the notorious Amazon Tower on the other side of the Warschauer Brücke, and which has been followed by a slew of similarly bland office developments.
Yet nothing much changed on the actual RAW Gelände aside from a touring Van Gogh exhibition (which ends this August), the opening of B-Dome—a space for digital art—and a relaunch of the old Haubentaucher venue as the Afro-Caribbean themed Maaya. Then 2026 arrived and the afore-mentioned tensions not only resurfaced but began to finally explode.,
The Fight Begins
The current fight seems to date back to January of this year, when Kurth issued cease and desist orders for several of RAW’s venues. According to an rbb report, this was related to fire safety concerns, but the relevant business owners have contradicted this claim and presented evidence for sufficient fire protection. Some venues continued with temporary permits or simply without leases while talks continued.
In 2025 a new citizens’ movement had already emerged under the motto Raw Retten (“Save RAW”), to oppose the building plans shown on the website, which by then had been formally presented to the district. A prime mover behind the movement is local architect and urban planner Carsten Joost, whose Office for Alternative Urban Development is a local powerhouse for campaigning against unnecessarily commercial developments in the city.
Joost has been involved with the Raw Gelände since the late 1990s and has long been critical of Kurth’s development plans. On his website, he points out that their portion of the site is already worth around ten times more than when they bought it, hence just by increasing rents—which has allegedly been happening to many venues this year—they are not only covering costs but generating a profit. “ According to estimates and tenant surveys conducted by the planning agency, annual rental income now amounts to approximately €2 million,” he writes. “This equates to a return of around 7% on the purchase price. Contrary to what has always been claimed, there is no pressure to sell the properties.”
His own case studies for the site show that halving Kurth’s planned construction and building volume would be advantageous for them, since “the cost risk decreases, the cultural space can develop further, and there is greater acceptance, which is also good for rental prospects.” He and Raw Retten also point to similar Berlin developments such as Holzmarkt and Uferhallen where demolitions and high-rise buildings have been avoided and compromises have been successfully achieved between all parties.
But the negotiations between RAW, Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg politicians and the developers recently collapsed, resulting in Club Cassiopeia—on which several other SKL projects are dependent—being given two weeks to leave by the owners around mid-June. A large rave-themed demonstration was organised on the 19th June and a petition is being shared by the many supporters of the complex, but the worry is that the investors are attempting to terminate all previous zoning plans and want to demolish the site to build residential units, much like the current commercial building spree around the Ostbahnhof.
In the meantime, local Green Party building councillor Florian Schmidt is trying to lure the investor back to the negotiating table and RAW obviously want to keep the previously promised proviso of a 30-year lease at affordable rents agreement in exchange for any new construction projects. But what will actually happen still remains to be seen.
You can sign the current petition to save RAW here
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