Dhe year 2020 was a turning point for the German capital. For the first time since the turn of the millennium, Berlin experienced a loss of migration. What sounds like good news for enemies of Berlin is bad news for the ideology that has dominated urban planning for about 30 years: urbanism, or as it is called in its American homeland: new urbanism.
In its German version – most effectively represented by the former Berlin Senate Building Director Hans Stimmann, but also by many political parties, above all the Greens, urbanism wants to densify the city, especially the big city: more people, more houses, more jobs, more traffic in the same space.
The hatred of Urbanists applies to the green suburbs and the relaxed housing estates of the modern age and post-war housing construction. German urbanists want to live heroically, love crowds and stone facades, traffic noise and urban canyons.
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And the Anglo-Saxon New Urbanists actually wanted to revive the idyll of the American and English small town. In this country the following applies among urban planners: the city center is in, the suburb is outside the door.
In fact, big city life has many prejudices. It’s stimulating: there are theaters and museums, cinemas and cafés, countless shops and a dense transport network. It’s social: It’s easy to meet friends and acquaintances, ideally in the neighborhood. It makes ecological sense: when you don’t commute to work and don’t need a car to go shopping or the Children to school you produce less CO2, maybe you can do without a car altogether.
In addition, denser cities mean less sealed landscapes. All civilizing services in the city are associated with less energy consumption, from garbage collection to emergency medical services, from power supply to wastewater management.
The problem of the brave new urban world
The only problem with this brave new urban world: Most Germans don’t want to live like that. Berlin is not the only example. In Munich, for example, the population of the inner city districts is only growing because young people move there because of the universities and other educational institutions.
Within the region, people like to move to areas further away from the city. The communities around the have a high population density Starnberger See and the other large lakes, which like to look rural and pristine, but in reality have long been Munich’s dormitory cities.
There is a clear trend across Germany: The population is moving from rural areas to a few large cities, known as “swarm cities”: Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main, Leipzig, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart etc .; and a not insignificant part of the population is drawn from the swarm cities to the surrounding areas: to the suburbs and dormitories.
Back to the country – because there is no other way
Hardly anyone can afford to move to the big cities. Families in particular often inevitably have to choose a property in the bacon belts of the metropolises. The corona crisis could also intensify the trend.
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There are solid economic reasons for this. The job exchange “StepStone” recently analyzed the salaries and cost of living in major German cities and compared them with the surrounding districts. The result for Hamburg, for example: The average gross salary in the year is 59,111 euros and is thus above the German average of 58,785.
the Cost of living However, they are also well above average: rent, of course, but also leisure activities and even groceries. The average earner has a total of 341 euros a month at their disposal: ten euros a day. What use are the many restaurants, cafés, cinemas and theaters? Berliners and Munich residents are left with only 250 euros.
In the Stade district, on the other hand – 57 kilometers down the Elbe from the Landungsbrücken – people earn ten percent less, but they still have 584 euros – 243 euros more than the city dwellers. In Lübeck you also earn less than in Hamburg, but at the end of the month you have almost twice as much available at around 700 euros per month.
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There are also other factors. Students and other young people enjoy big city life, including dealers in the parks, beggars on the train, noise at night. If they have a strenuous job, family and especially children, they think more in the direction of the house and garden, clean air and good schools.
Theoretically, you may think urban, ecological and multicultural, in practice you are happy in the evenings to hear the birds chirping in the newly planted apple trees and the quality of the local area Gymnasiums. To calm your conscience, you buy an electric car and screw solar panels onto the roof: “Our landlord in Frankfurt would never have done that.”
And the city dwellers themselves are resisting the consolidation: The “Stuttgart 21” project, which aims to win an entire inner-city district by putting the main station underground, almost failed because of the Swabian “angry citizens”. The plan to build apartments on part of the disused inner-city Tempelhof Airport was sunk by the Berliners – amid loud lamentations about high rents – in a referendum.
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Climate protection and urban pollution – – – – –
The situation is similar in other urbanization projects, which is why the Berlin architect Hans Kollhoff railed in the “Tagesspiegel” against the “paralyzing monument protection”, the “sound, heat and fire protection” and “the many areas blocked by aspirations” in the big cities.
Kollhoff himself, who considers the Stalinallee in Berlin to be “the only example of German urban architecture and architecture” that “does not need to fear comparison with the major European and American cities”, left the Walter-Benjamin-Platz in Berlin designed by him with one anti-Semitic verse by the fascist poet Ezra Pound decorate.
Stimmann, on the other hand, describes himself as a “muddled 68er” with “basic Marxist ideas”. But the wrong ideas from the day before yesterday, whether right or left, are not the correct guidelines for tomorrow.
Back to the suburbs!
What is needed is a theory and practice of building for families in the suburbs. These areas, despised by the architects and neglected by the planners, and not the hip inner cities, are Germany’s places of the future. It is not enough to designate building land, parcel it out and sell it to families who build a prefabricated house on it. So you just sprawl the landscape.
The suburb needs careful planning even more than the city: transport connections, schools, shopping; social mix; Space- and energy-saving, child- and nature-friendly, and yes, identity-creating, beautiful building.
Germany was a pioneer here more than a century ago – with garden cities like Hellerau near Dresden or Staaken near Berlin, with the real estate entrepreneur and suburban developer Johann Anton Wilhelm von Carstenn and settlement architects such as Mebes and Emmerich. The pernicious influence of urban architectural fashion has set us back decades. Let’s not stare at the city centers, let’s design the suburbs and small towns!
