Berlin faces backlash against urban gentrification

"How long is now," the giant mural on the side of the Kunsthaus Tacheles in Berlin's Mitte district asks. The answer, it appears, is not very long at all. The former department store, turned prison and then squat and alternative culture Centre, appears to be on the verge of shutting down.

When its occupants have been pushed out and the building pulled down, another Berlin landmark of the post-Wall era will have gone. All that will be left behind on Oranienburger Strasse, once at the heart of East Berlin's counter-cultural scene, will be the C/O photography gallery, a block down from Tacheles. And its days are also numbered.

Tacheles and C/O may be the highest-profile symbols of the battle to define the shape of the new Berlin, but they are not the only ones, nor are they the most important. It is the urban poor who have suffered most from the gentrification of the old neighbourhoods in the city's east, and their resistance to the changes has been anything but passive.

Instead, wealthy newcomers to districts like the now fashionable Prenzlauer Berg have been treated to an often weekly ritual of car torching, a practice that peaked a year ago. Police and criminology experts have yet to identify the culprits, alternately settling on members of the radical "autonomous" movement or largely non-ideological young people simply angered by the visibility of the new wealth in once poor districts.