They asked what I’d like to see on my three-hour expedition, which costs 250 euros (but can get pricier with add-ons like a chauffeur). I asked for their most representative lineup, expecting a rarefied twirl through Berlin’s exclusive blue-chip gallery scene. Imagine, then, my surprise when my guide, Nele, asked me to meet her at Kottbusser Tor, the Kreuzberg U-Bahn station best known for its resident addicts and drunks (and the syringe dispensary built into its foundation). I know this, because for the last seven years I’ve lived right around the corner.

Nele, a pixieish blonde in a minimalist cobalt dress and matching mascara, took me to the top of Zentrum Kreuzberg, a mammoth tower block complex built in the ’70s as part of an ambitious social modernization project. To make way for the structure, the developers, in cooperation with the city government, razed full blocks of 19th-century apartments, evicting the tenants. Residents rose up in protest and occupied many of the yet-undemolished buildings, giving birth to the Kreuzberg squatter scene of the ’70s and ’80s. Meanwhile, the Zentrum project languished. Construction costs mounted, and what was supposed to be a shining model of futuristic urban planning became a crime- and drug-addled emblem of social decay.

Nele walked me through the Zentrum’s narrow corridors and rundown modernist alleyways, explaining how the new management company has taken measures to revitalize the complex — locking the doors at night, for instance, and painting the walls pink, the color least welcoming to graffiti. We turned a corner to see several teenagers freebasing behind a stairwell. Zentrum Kreuzberg is a mainstay of the Niche lineup, its seedy strangeness apparently a plum attraction for well-heeled visitors to Berlin. “An authentic Berlin experience,” it seems, can begin to resemble slum tourism.

After a visit to the studio of a local artist, Sarah Schoenfeld, who makes digital prints on shaman cloaks and melts down drugs to use as paint, we walked to König Galerie, an interdisciplinary gallery housed in an impressive ’60s-era Brutalist-style Catholic church called St. Agnes. We were shown around by the director Gregor Hose, who was friendly and knowledgeable enough, but who could have spoken more quietly as we stood behind a frustrated cluster of people trying to watch a video installation by Ragnar Kjartansson and the band The National. The gallery’s namesake himself, Johann König, was there, but private tour or not, no introduction was imminent.