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In recent years gentrification in Berlin has become central to political debates and media reports covering urban development in the city. More than this,“gentrification” has become a matter of everyday-conversations and the gentrification “diagnosis” seems to be possible in different urban contexts. Nowadays, both in political and everyday conversations, more or less all inner-city neighborhoods are somehow placed into the framework of the gentrification debate: Prenzlauer Berg is portrayed as showcase for family gentrification, Mitte as one of the most obvious examples for touristification, Kreuzberg and Neukölln stand for the invasion of international creative pioneers, and Wedding is highlighted as the eternal candidate for the next urban hot spot. However, the fact that urban upgrading has become universal should not necessarily be interpreted as a simple expansion of gentrification in a wholesale way. As a matter of fact, the differences between the historical trajectories of gentrification in different neighborhoods is immense, and Berlin is rather a paradigmatic example for the manifold variations that urban upgrading can take (Lees et al. 2008: 129 ff.). In Berlin, various characteristic phases and many of the contemporary forms of gentrification can be examined. Thus, at first sight, Berlin seems to be a laboratory for all the variations of gentrifications one knows from the international literature: the boom of luxury housing estates could thus be interpreted as “new build gentrification”(Davidson and Lees 2005; Marquardt et al. 2012) or “super gentrification”(Lees 2003; Butler and Lees 2006); the displacement pressure resulting from the gap …