Digital cultural atlas · Berlin

About this project

Mapping Berlin’s Pulse is a digital gallery of cultural hubs across the city: clubs, street art walls, urban commons, and diasporic spaces. Instead of treating culture as a static collection of objects, the project asks where and how the city actually beats — where people gather, perform, remember, and invent everyday rituals.

Curatorial approach

The gallery is organised around four “pulses” rather than traditional museum categories:

  • Night Pulse · techno clubs and nocturnal infrastructures
  • Art Pulse · street art walls and hybrid creative spaces
  • Community Pulse · parks, markets, and urban commons
  • Diasporic Pulse · hubs shaped by migration and transnational life

Each hub sits at the intersection of a type (pulse) and a place (neighbourhood). The filters on the Hubs page invite visitors to trace different paths through the city: following nightlife across districts, or following one neighbourhood across different types of spaces.

Why a map and a single-page gallery?

The project uses two complementary interfaces:

  • An interactive map that locates each hub in the city’s geography, using OpenStreetMap and Leaflet.
  • A single, scrollable gallery page where all twelve hubs are held together on one surface, more like an atlas or index than separate museum rooms.

This structure is intentional. Rather than reproducing a classical gallery model with isolated “rooms” for each site, the one-page layout foregrounds connections and comparisons. Visitors are encouraged to scroll, filter, and jump between hubs, noticing how different places echo and contradict each other.

Digital affordances

The gallery makes use of several affordances of the web:

  • Interactivity · map pins link directly to detailed entries, and filters dynamically show/hide hubs based on type and neighbourhood.
  • Hyperlinks · each hub connects outwards to official websites, event pages, and visitor information, acknowledging that cultural experience extends beyond this site.
  • Responsiveness · the layout adapts to mobile screens, turning the gallery into a tool visitors could theoretically carry while moving through the city.

Scope and subjectivity

This is not a complete map of Berlin’s cultural life. It is a deliberately partial and subjective selection, shaped by the vantage point of one student living in the city for a limited period of time. The goal is not to be exhaustive, but to make visible a set of rhythms: spaces where sound, memory, migration, and everyday practices accumulate.

Future versions of the project could invite visitors to propose new hubs, annotate existing entries, or layer additional datasets (for example, accessibility, housing pressure, or historical timelines) onto the same map.

Credits

Concept, writing, and photographs by Akanksha Somani.
Built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and using Leaflet with OpenStreetMap tiles.