Mind the Gap

KITO NEDO In your latest book Berlin-Testament (2013), a critical account of Berlin’s town planning over recent decades, you call the former Tempelhof Airport ‘the hole in the city’. The city authorities have long planned to develop the site, while a citizens’ initiative continues to fight for it to be kept as an open space and park. Are you for or against developing the site?

DIETER HOFFMANN-AXTHELM It would be ridiculous not to develop it. From an economic standpoint, keeping it as a leisure zone is impossible to sustain. It cannot be turned into an official park, that’s far too expensive. And it’s impossible to police. Four square kilometres is simply too much space. From the outset – this has been going on for 15 years now – I argued in favour of subdividing the land and undertaking the necessary developments. The airport building, too, needs to be opened up at some point so it can be connected to the city. Then we can start thinking about what to do with the site in ten, 20, 30 years.

KN To what extent is the discussion of Tempelhof Airport symptomatic for Berlin as a whole?

DHA The city has amazing reserves of land. The problem we need to discuss here is the difference between cultural aspiration and down-to-earth town planning: What can a city afford? What does it need for its health? Where do we need to build?

KN So town planners and urban romantics don’t speak the same language?

DHA Artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers and so on see the city as an adventure playground. They like the battered and broken places, the ruins, the buildings that can’t keep the wind out – places that still look as they did in the aftermath of the last World War. That’s where they like to install their trendy clubs. This leisure scene has its justification in moderation but with 3.5 million inhabitants, these ‘urban romantics’ as you call them make up just a tiny percentage of the city’s population. We need to look at whether this situation is at the expense of the majority who have to pay for the romance of ruins with rising rents and transport costs.

KN In Berlin-Testament, you talk about the need for renunciation in the name of urban economics. Who needs to start renouncing what?

DHA In terms of urban economics, we can’t afford to waste space. Take Mollstrasse for example, just beyond Alexanderplatz. It looks exactly the same as it did in 1990. Huge spaces reserved for traffic that must be maintained and repaired. But if you go and look, a small wave of cars comes along and then the road is absolutely empty for two minutes. You could play volleyball in that time. It’s ridiculous. A city with a built/unbuilt ratio of 40/60 has a struc­tural deficit. But this is hard to communicate in cultural terms because we have a population that is basically de-urbanized.

KN Berlin is a village?

DHA A third of the population has been replaced since 1990. Many people have come here from small towns in former West Germany. They want the Berlin hype but they don’t know how to deal with the density of a normal city. These people should really live in Paris for a year to help them understand what living in a city means.

KN So Berlin’s large French popu­lation are all refugees from Paris?

DHA Exactly. What there’s too much of in Paris, there’s too little of here. We need to find a happy medium. In Berlin, whenever a tree is felled or an open space is built upon, there’s immediately a citizen’s action group. That’s crazy. In terms of urban economics, it’s fatal.

KN Why is gentrification good?

DHA Gentrification is a strange concept. It was introduced from America, where such processes really do match the clichés. In Berlin, that’s not the case because of certain legal conditions. Gentrification is a term used as a battle cry by those who were the first to gentrify but who were then pushed out by the next wave. Like in the district of Mitte: those who denounce gentrification are people who occupied and settled the district in 1990 – artists, immigrants from Kreuzberg and elsewhere. Once they had given the area a boost, they were driven out by chain stores and people with piles of money. That’s the normal run of things; it’s part of city life. The waves keep rolling. A certain amount of upgrading is necessary.

KN And the rising rents?

DHA For many years both halves of Berlin have enjoyed fantastic rental prices. That couldn’t go on forever. Only now are we entering a phase where rents are becoming speculative, where landlords are saying: if the pressure is there and people are prepared to pay, then we’ll take what we can get. If inner city expansion had started in good time (by which I mean the large-scale allocation of land for building) this could have been avoided. Abstention from inner city expansion: that is the legacy of Klaus Wowereit’s time as mayor of Berlin. Rents will continue to rise, there will be more shortfalls, and it will not be possible to alleviate the situation in time.

KN What about the so-called ‘building groups’? In recent years, private individuals have been grouping together to build apartment houses as owner-occupiers – for example on Ritterstrasse in Kreuzberg.

DHA Yes, small-scale inner-city development, by owner/occupiers – that’s something we need. But these groups are also viewed as gentrifiers. The good thing about them, though, is that they don’t build speculatively – they don’t drive up rents, because what they want is their own apartment. If the same house were built by a private property developer then rents would increase year after year, as the location became more attractive.

KN But don’t the building groups contribute to an indirect upgrading of their surroundings and rising rents for their neighbours?

DHA That’s true, yes. But you have to look where this is happening. On Ritterstrasse, for example, this upgrade is called for. The area is in the doldrums: it dates from the 1950s, from the time of the initial postwar reconstruction. Stirring things up a bit could be quite beneficial.

KN The lack of inner-city expan­sion in the Wowereit era you mentioned – how might this be remedied?

DHA Not by more architectural competitions, that’s for sure. Since 1990 building development has been based almost exclusively on architecture competitions. Meaning that architects were asked to draw pictures. In terms of town planning and how people live and move within a built environment, architects are ignorant. They have no idea of this effect when they come up with a proposal.

KN This is evident in the planned reconstruction of the Hohenzollern Palace, the Stadtschloss. First came the image. And the Berliners were told: here, this is what you’ll get.

DHA Yes, ready-to-use, completed by a certain date, and so forth. As a result of this illusion – the ready-to-use city – the public is always chasing after an image. That’s something I notice in the requests I receive from the media. All they ever ask me is: do you like the look of this skyscraper? Is it tall enough? Whereas the really important question is how we can arrive at a third city, a city that makes East and West Berlin grow together from a centre which the East German state left behind – one that returns to the density that Berlin enjoyed in the 800 years prior to WWII. That would be a genuine compromise.
Translated by Nicholas Grindell

Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm is a town planner and author who lives in Berlin. He co-wrote Planwerk Innenstadt (1999), the planning framework for long-term development of Berlin’s historical centre. His book _Berlin-Testament (Verlag Dorothea Rohn) was published at the end of 2013._