A Growing Solution: The Purposes of Berlin’s Parks
In the beginning, planned green spaces appeared in the form of vegetable gardens and pastures—albeit open ones—for domesticated animals. I couldn’t tell you when this happened, but my history teachers through the years seem to agree that this was what allowed people to settle into semi-permanent communities and begin accumulating object wealth…two things they continue to do today. To proceed with a brief history of the role of planned green spaces in settled areas, gardens went on to develop in different forms depending on their purpose. They became calm places for meditation, open places for entertaining, curated places for communicating social status, or private places for conversations.
The first kind of park was likely a memorial park, in the form of a cemetery. Public parks in the 19th century were developed by governments and aristocrats looking to develop the culture of the middle and lower class. In the United States, tycoons and millionaires like DuPont and Rockefeller developed parks to boost their public reputation and contribute to their (hoped-for) immortality. Later, their families would find that expansive properties strained their budgets, and those places would become parks as well, though usually carefully landscaped ones visitors must pay to visit. Visitors may or may not also pay to enter Nature parks or “preserves.” These were not planned or cultivated spaces like other parks; they really were (and are) preserved places. They are, however, set aside as planned green spaces to be protected and visited. These untended spaces are something of an anomaly, but they are quite popular in Berlin and are a topic I will return to later.
More recently, ‘city parks’ and ‘urban gardens’ have become quite popular. Recognition of the value of incorporating trees, foliage, and open space into city planning is one reason that these spaces appeared in early cities. Increasingly, however, the idea of the community garden as a place to develop relationships and agriculture education within a community has become very trendy. In New York, some “urban farmers” bring the vegetables they grown in their community gardens to the farmers’ markets to sell. Others partner up with schools to teach children about sustainable small-space farming. Frequently these gardens spring up on neglected lots, usually thanks to the initiative of a couple people or neighborhood organization. They recycle and revitalize what would otherwise be considered “dead space” so that it becomes useful for the community. And this is one of the philosophies I have found most exploring the green spaces in Berlin.
For numerous historical reasons, Berlin is a city with a lot of space. It has the gardens and hunting grounds associated with old capital cities, the tracts of land cleared by governments for projects that weren’t realized, the areas cleared by war destruction, and the areas that used to be occupied by the dividing wall. Also important is Berlin’s status as a city-state. This allowed it to expand, particularly in the 1920s, to include the small cities and towns surrounding it. The result has been that there is a lot of room for people to spread out across, and that the places between these sites develop later as annexed spaces. Finally, as with many other cities, the development of roadways and rail lines has cut through otherwise usable spaces and turned them into “dead spaces” that are really too small to be used as anything other than parks.
Examples of each of the afore mentioned types of planned green spaces exist in Berlin, and they all receive high visitor traffic. Our group’s analysis of how these spaces illustrate the city’s relationship with nature focused on a few specific sites, and here I will do the same.
The most striking example, in my opinion, of a memorial park in Berlin is the Soviet Memorial at Treptower Park that we visited as a class. Of course, there are many other such memorial parks around the city, and one may even be able to argue to include the south-east Tiergarten on that list. The problem these kinds of places raise in Berlin is that of the whole city as a memorial. Most if not all of the city could be memorialized, if one was rigorous about doing so, and this puts Berliners in a difficult situation. By memorializing everything, they would drain the life from their city, making it a testament to past ages without room to grow. At the same time, they must memorialize some things, and some things have memorialized themselves. As an example of the former, to not mark any of the places where the wall was would be considered an attempt to avoid that piece of history. As a result, places like Mauer Park have to be developed for PR reasons. As an example of the latter, things that memorialize themselves, this is where buildings designed by the Prussian, Nazi, or Soviet leaders to stand as testaments of their greatness outlast the regimes. They are too historically significant, and frequently too expensive, to destroy; however, what can be done with Schinkel’s monument to the victories of Frederick William III, with the site currently known as the “Topography of Terror,” or with Speer’s gigantic Tempelhof airport? Since making active decisions about these sites would require the city government to indirectly make a statement about which pieces of the city’s history they feel are most important, they have a tendency to take the passive route: declare these places to be parks.
I say that this is a passive route for the government to take because most of the places they set aside in this manner become preserves rather than curated parks. Sure, Berlin still has acculturation-focused parks, such as the Gardens of the World, Britzer Park, or the Botanical Gardens. These are the places people go to experience aesthetically pleasing landscape architecture, similar to the parks left by US tycoons, and they are carefully designed and maintained. Otherwise, most of the city’s gardens and parks are minimally landscaped. Trees that sprouted from post-war rubble still stand by Libeskind’s Jewish Museum annex and the Topography of Terror site. The hilltop of Görlitzer Park and shores of Wannsee are only maintained in that the walking paths are kept free of vegetation.
As this has happened in the historic sites that are left to the jurisdiction of the city government, so has it happened to the spaces between the old town centers. Berlin has several large Volksparks that belonged to towns that were annexed. Now they are neighborhood parks, with petting zoos and soccer fields but also with large areas that have been left to grow naturally. Much of the Sans Souci Park in Potsdam is naturally forested, and Grunewald has also been mostly left to Mother Nature. Even the area around the Spandau citadel, complete with industrial contamination of the stream and the major road running towards the center o f Berlin nearby, is a designated “nature preserve” and left mostly as wooded land.
Interestingly, the parks and gardens that are cared for and cultivated are usually those left, intentionally or unintentionally, at the hands of the people. Cemeteries, for instance, frequently have open-top family grave plots in which people plant small trees, perennials, or sometimes even annuals. Kleine Gärten communities can usually be found in the places between housing complexes and transportation routes. These are areas that would otherwise become neglected and that the city does not want to spend resources on. Instead, families and individuals take responsibility for them, building outdoor kitchens and tending herb gardens and planting rows of tulips. Since these are privately cared for, the garden plots themselves are not open to the public. That said, the ally-ways between the plots are open for the public to wander through, and so it happens that people revitalize a space abandoned by urban planning and by the city government.
All this leads up to the two places that I found to be the most interesting: Prinzessinnengärten off Moritzplatz and Südgelände Park off Priesterweg. Both were previously marginal areas, and they are two very different case studies in ways the city government recognized the efforts of the city people towards reclaiming and revitalizing wasted space.
Prinzessinnengärten, the Moritzplatz site in Kreuzberg, used to be just another intersection, and one marginalized by the presence of the Berlin wall at that. Their website explains that it was a “wasteland for over half a century.” Then in 2009, Robert Shaw and Marco Clausen decided that the place had potential. Robert wanted to recreate the kind of urban garden he had seen in Cuba. He noticed that people gathered in the gardens there, not just to grow food but also to visit with and learn from each other. The gardens were community centers, where people met and intercultural exchange happened. He wanted to see such a garden in Kreuzberg, so the two men put together the non-profit Nomadisch Grün and began to lease the site. They didn’t know much about gardening when they started, but they knew they wanted three things: to build a community, to create a place of learning, and to keep the garden sustainable. That means planting tomatoes in burlap sacks and creating rain-collection units out of modified milk cartons.
When I visited, the whole site was busy. Even though their open season has not yet officially begun, there were volunteers in the garden, flyers for a seminar on cooking potatoes, and a very diverse crowd gathered around the bar/café listening to two local musicians. Later in the evening another group gathered to put on a short play that was half in Spanish. I would say that Robert and Marco are achieving their goals and have transformed their space with the help of the community.
At the very different Südgelände site, remnants of its days as Tempelhof marshalling yard. As a result of the division of the city, the site closed in 1952 and was left alone until 1980, when it was proposed to re-build and re-open the marshalling yard. A group of neighbors banded together in protest, and in 1995 the land was transferred from Deutsches Bahn to the city of Berlin. In 1996 it was designated a Nature Park, and in 2000 it was opened to visitors. The motto of the park seems to be “Die Kunst ist der nachste Nachbar der Wildnis," and the affirmations of this philosophy can be found throughout the park…though only in certain areas. On the southern side of the park, one finds relics that have been aged by nature and re-purposed by artists. This is really how I was expecting most of the site to be. Instead, the middle of the park boasts a sculpture garden, a large building that is currently an artists’ workshop, the old water tower, a carefully preserved steam engine, and directions to the southern trails. These northern trails have a completely different feel from the southern ones. They fan out through the nature preserve area, and so visitors stay on raised paths that are reminiscent of rail lines. Sculptures and information boards appear periodically along the path, but the sculptures looked to be all from the same studio (“Odious” they’re called) and inspired by, if not commissioned for, their particular locations.
The evolution of both these places suggests a new idea about the purpose of a park. My research introduced me to the word Landescerschonerung, referring to the German idea that the economic and cultural use of land contributes to its beauty. The idea is old, but I would say that changing ideas about what is worthwhile economically and culturally are partially responsible for the variety of designated green spaces in Berlin’s landscape, particularly the variety of parks and gardens. Economically, both clearing off land and developing it are expensive endeavors…especially in the current ‘crisis’ and in the ever-rebuilding city of Berlin. Culturally, there is always contention about how to treat places of historical importance. Another cultural condition is that currently studies announcing an increase in urbanization have been greeted with efforts to create stronger communities in cities and educate these communities about how to live sustainably. The hope is to avoid regressing to the industrial-age city even though the urban populations are again growing in size. These factors together are what result in spaces such as Prinzessinnengärten and Südgelände.
To illustrate, the Prinzessinnengärten is run by a non-profit; however, this past season their rent was raised to a point where they almost could not afford to keep leasing their space. The Berlin government supported them by stepping in and giving them funds so that they could stay. What has happened is that, as the city fretted over what to do with some of the more historically burdened sites, the people of the city moved to revitalize these sites themselves. Recognizing that supporting these efforts would be good PR, a way to repurpose otherwise wasted space, and a comparatively cheap way to outsource the work of the actual transformation, the government has handed these projects over to the interested communities. The communities then establish multi-purpose spaces that meet their needs, and for the most part everyone wins. Sometimes it feels as if this is a cop-out for the city: the easiest thing is to declare an overgrown area to be a nature preserve and post a few signs around it to say so.
I do wonder if there will ever be a day when the demand for land reaches a point where the development of the city parks becomes a topic of discussion. Considering, however, the amount of pride that Berliners take in their identity as a green city and the success of all of the parks I visited—meaning the use they receive from the local communities—I would say that such discussions would not lead to any serious changes in land-use patterns in Berlin. The system they have, though barely a system by some definitions, works for them. I wonder if it would work in other cities, but not many cities have enough open spaces to even consider things like an airport park. Here is yet another characteristic that makes Berlin a special and somewhat strange city. And an increasingly green one.
Resources:
Lamb, Zachary. “Sudgelande Nature Park.” 2008. Backlands_Post-Industrial Urban Wildlands in Berlin. 7 May 2011. <http://architecture.mit.edu/class/nature/student_projects/2007/zlamb/urban-nature/sudgelande/sudgehistory.html>
“Natur-Park Suedgelaende, Berlin.” 2008. Gardenvisit.com. 7 May 2011. <http://www.gardenvisit.com/garden/sudgelande_nature_park>
“Nomadisch Grün (Nomadic Green) – Prinzessinnengärten.” 2011. Kitchen Gardeners. 7 May 2011. <http://kitchengardeners.org/partners/nomadisch-grun-nomadic-green-prinzessinnengarten>
“Prinzessinnengärten Urbane Landwirtschaft.” 2011. Prinzessinnengärten. 7 May 2011. <http://prinzessinnengarten.net/about/>
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