STRAAT STRAßE
Text often comes first. As the introduction to our joint project: ‘Mapping the Neustraße/Nieuwstraat’, for example, the text you are reading now offers a preface. In actuality, however, it came last. It is only meant to invite you to consider the actual outcome of the work cultural studies researcher Eline Schmeets, and cartopologist Marlies Vermeulen did in the Neustraße/Nieuwstraat between the 8th and the 28th of February 2021.
After the removal of the ‘last wall of Europe’ and a period of redevelopment, the Neustraße/Nieuwstraat, a two-kilometer-long border street, was reopened in 1995 as a European or ‘shared’ street. As a physical representation or approximation of a utopia—a ‘borderless’ border street—it holds the potential to both represent and at the same time invert or distort other border streets by calling their reality into question. A space like this has multiple layers of meaning and relationships to other places – mor