GERMANY:BERLINERS GO to the polls this weekend to vote on radical plans to transform a city centre district and privatise part of the city's river front.
Backers of the "Media Spree" plan want to build office blocks and penthouses near the Ostbahnhof train station, on the banks of the river Spree. This stretch of river once served as the Cold War division between East and West Berlin, packed with water mines to deter would-be escape attempts.
Today it is one of Berlin's most attractive, and last undeveloped, inner-city locations.
Wealthy investors say their plan is a practical chance to create an equivalent to the London Docklands, a shot in the arm that the economically weak German capital badly needs.
Critics have forced a vote on plans they call a symbolic sell-out of public space that will destroy a uniquely anarchic part of the city.
Franz Schulz, the local mayor, backs the "Media Spree" plan as a chance to reunite the former East Berlin neighbourhood of Friedrichshain with the alternative, left-wing neighbourhood of Kreuzberg. "The two halves still feel completely separate," he said. "The plan will also create much-needed jobs."
The protesters, a motley crew of punks, ageing hippies and pensioners calling themselves "Sink Media Spree", fear the area will become a second Potsdamer Platz, a site near the Brandenburg Gate that was privatised in the 1990s and redeveloped into a sterile neighbourhood of chain stores and multiplex cinemas.
Currently the waterfront sites are filled with ruined industrial buildings and three provisional but highly popular outdoor bars, where late-night parties run into the following afternoon.
Last week dozens of protesters took to rubber dinghies and forced a large cruise ship carrying potential investors to turn around from the site and head back into the city centre.
With tomorrow's vote, campaigners hope to at least limit the scale of the plan.
They want the height of any towers built restricted to 22 metres and shifted 50 metres back from the river's edge to give public access to the waterfront.