Putting Berlin Back Together

By Katharine Burgess, AICP

Imagine 8,000 balloons hovering over a 9.3-mile stretch of land — the former Berlin Wall. Conceived by brothers Christopher and Marc Bauder, the Lichtgrenze (or "Light Border") installation was erected last November to commemorate the concrete barrier that divided the city from 1961 to 1989 and to celebrate the transformation of the urban fabric around it in the 25 years since.

The solemn line of balloons stretched past established memorials to the wall, like the one at Bernauer Strasse; gleaming new districts, such as Potsdamer Platz; and quiet green spaces seemingly reclaimed by nature, such as Nordbahnhof Park. As with the wall, some stretches aligned with natural or previously established boundaries, such as the Spree River or the edge of the Tiergarten city park. Other portions jagged through now-cohesive neighborhoods, leaving a city newcomer disoriented about which side was once East or West.

Visitors to the Lichtgrenze could see how the city has been transformed. Entire new districts have risen in the former "no-man's land" between the wall and the parallel "hinter wall," while some historic neighborhoods have subtly reconnected, using the space between former East and West for parks or small-scale infill.

The new districts have been chronicled in the international media. Less well documented is the reunited city's overall approach to land-use planning and reconstruction, which has taken years to unfold.

Before the fall

The cover of West Berlin's last Flächennutzungsplan (Land Use Plan, or FNP) before reunification shows West Berlin demarcated with land-use categories. It also shows adjacent East Berlin, which is marked only with its historic building footprints. The West German planning system used FNPs to guide development, alongside citywide landscape plans and individual area development plans for smaller districts. Planners wrote a new FNP every 20 to 30 years, or whenever a major geographical or strategic issue called for it, according to Almut Jirku, a landscape planner who has worked for the Berlin Senate, the city's governing body, since 1992.

The 1988 FNP, completed just 15 months before the fall of the wall, replaced a 1965 plan, which catered to the "car-friendly city" ideology, Jirku says. Shifting the planning approach toward urban redevelopment, the 1988 FNP depicted a small city with a clear center and full transect of land-use typologies. The Kerngebiet, or city core, stood on the busy Kurfürstendamm, southwest of the main city park (Tiergarten), while a western edge of forests and lakes provided residents with a bit of "countryside," as the West German border was several hours away. Meanwhile, sites next to the East Berlin border and Berlin Wall included a range of urban edge uses, from light commercial to parks to housing.

The FNP acknowledges the division of the city and the land-use implications, at one point stating that "the division of Berlin has set different conditions for the development of both city halves: while East Berlin is still linked with the surrounding region and can be developed beyond the city boundary, the western part of the City must plan with limited land resources."

Policies for a reunited city

A little over a year after the FNP was finished, Berlin's urban structure changed dramatically. After November 9, 1989, citizens could again travel freely between the two sides of the city. Celebrations erupted in the streets, with so-called "woodpeckers" chiseling down the wall.

On either side of the soon-destroyed barrier stood two halves of one historic city, with divergent economies, ideological leanings, and built environments. West Berlin had become a hotbed of modernist and postmodernist architecture and planning, particularly due to the International Building Exhibition held from 1979 to 1987. East Berlin had maintained much of its historic fabric, but many buildings had fallen into disrepair.

As a single entity, the city lacked a central train station or government quarter and suddenly had three centers: the center of West Berlin at Kurfürstendamm, the center of East Berlin at Alexanderplatz, and the historic center of Berlin, Friedrichstadt. The latter was part of East Berlin before the wall came down.

"The wall came down when no one in West Berlin expected it anymore," said Manfred Kühne in an interview. Kühne, now head of the Berlin Senate's City Buildings & Projects Division, worked for the city of West Berlin at the time the wall fell. "We had ambition and well-developed strategies to establish West Berlin as a city in its own right forever. And we were prepared to adapt the system for the eastern part of the city and for the whole former GDR," he said, referring to the German Democratic Republic or East Germany.

After a short period of uncertainty, the German Reunification Treaty of 1990 saw East and West Germany reunite into the German Republic. The Bundestag's 1991 Capital City Resolution (or Agreement) then made Berlin's role as a capital city clear, by relocating the West German Parliament and the majority of governmental facilities from Bonn to Berlin. East German Länder (states) adopted the West German planning system, and partnered with West German counterparts to receive training on land-use planning methodologies such as FNPs, notes Jirku.

To reunify the city, planners would need to reconnect its two halves and to reconcile the disparities between them. Each West Berliner enjoyed an average of nearly a square meter (1.1 square yards) of retail development, while each East Berliner had less than half that amount. Landscape planners also found that citizens on either side of the wall had different preferences for public space.

"Green Space Culture" in West Berlin included substantial group use of public spaces for grilling and recreation, particularly among immigrant groups such as the Turkish, while shared gardens had a strong community role in East Berlin, said Beate Profé, head of Open Space Planning and Urban Green Space at the Berlin Senate, in an interview. The building stock on either side of the wall also differed, with East Berlin's dilapidated but historic buildings quickly becoming attractive to the former West's artist and student communities.

"From the fall of the wall onwards, the entire planning community was so excited and interested," says Jirku. "There were lots of discussion meetings and a great need to talk about how things should be."

But this kind of optimism did not always prevail. One 1990 public exhibition on planning noted that after "euphoria, fascination and fresh energy ... uncertainty, skepticism and dissatisfaction have taken their place." Still, the same exhibition stated that "Berlin has a chance to shed history and reassemble together. ... The city bears traces of its history and wounds, and now it can also heal."

Knitting it together

Research, planning, and public consultation preceded the first post-unification FNP. A 1991 report on the former border strip proposed new scenarios for the derelict land. The question of a memorial began to surface, although most neighborhoods had little interest in retaining evidence of their stretches of the wall.

A 1992 Spatial Structure Concept Plan then began spatial analysis for the reunited city. Sketches addressed ecological and connectivity issues, and established the S-Bahn (commuter train) ring as the boundary between the reunited "inner" and "outer" city. A subsequent report on "Sectoral Development Concepts" addressed commercial development, confirming that the city was likely to remain polycentric for years to come.

Priorities in the 1994 FNP included concentration of development in the inner city and urban expansion in the northeast. The corresponding 1994 Landscape Plan proposed a new green system, comprising an inner park ring and an outer park ring, as well as north-south and east-west green axes.

Today, 13 of the 16 proposed parks have advanced, including a major new park in the northeast and the north-south green connection. Perhaps the most striking is Am Gleisdreieck Park, built on a former rail yard and connecting the central park of Tiergarten to the Schöneberg Nature Reserve to the south.

Since 1994, the FNP and Landscape Plan have been modified on a case-by-case basis, but they remain the guiding planning documents for today's Berlin.

Planwerk Innenstadt and Friedrichstadt

Although the 1994 FNP addressed the development needs of the city as a whole, 1999's Planwerk Innenstadt (Inner City Development Plan) was arguably the most influential document in the reunification period. The urban design strategy addressed the central urban area within Berlin's S-Bahn ring, including the historic city center, the former centers of the East and West, and some of the most significant border redevelopment areas. The introduction indicates that the plan does not seek to "reinvent the city from scratch, instead it looks to unearth the heart of the historic city."

Planwerk Innenstadt is among the key legacies of Hans Stimmann, Berlin's building director and state secretary for urban development for much of the reconstruction period. A trained stonemason turned planner, Stimmann was a decisive leader in the architectural community. The New York Times called his work "as controversial as it is lasting ... (rejecting) grand architectural visions in the name of pragmatic city planning."

Stimmann followed a largely traditional approach, following a theory called "Critical Reconstruction." It looked to the German late 19th century aesthetic ideal, following a traditional scale and urban structure. Stimmann himself explained that "in the 1950s, Berliners sallied forth in search of their identity — one side looked to America, the other to the Soviet Union. ... the people of Berlin need to take their own themes seriously again."

Critical Reconstruction is particularly visible in Friedrichstadt, Berlin's historic center. Stimmann worked closely with a team of planners and urban historians to draft building guidelines for the district and its main shopping corridor, Friedrich Strasse. Though not always legally binding, these guidelines included "reconstruction of, or respect for, historical street patterns and building lines," "the limitation of building height in accordance with local tradition," and "the enforcement of a maximum permitted lot size of one urban block."

Today's Friedrich Strasse shows these tangible outcomes, with understated, mid-rise buildings stretching from the elegant avenue of Unter den Linden to the tourist hotbed of Checkpoint Charlie.

Capital Quarter and Potsdamer Platz

Nearby Potsdamer Platz and the Government Quarter are entirely new districts developed through international design competitions.

Potsdamer Platz, once derelict, was to become a new city center on a par with Friedrichstadt and the former centers of East and West Berlin. A 1991 design competition administered by the city drew entries from around the world, with Renzo Piano, Helmut Jahn, and Richard Rogers eventually participating in building and urban design aspects.

This largest building site in Europe was to become a contemporary business quarter, with the land developed by four corporate landowners to the parameters set in the design competition. Although the district has not necessarily captured the heart of Berliners, it has been a commercial success and a suitable hub for major events such as the Berlin Film Festival.

Meanwhile, a 1992 Capital City Agreement between the federal and city governments set the stage for the new federal government quarter. A 1993 Development Measure established the preferred sites for new buildings within a 105-acre area and set the overall planning, political, and legal context for the work.

Key goals included the integration of governmental buildings into the fabric of Berlin to avoid "single-function, desolate districts," concentration of parliament buildings along the riverfront Spreebogen (Spree Curve) site, and the expansion of the relevant transport and green infrastructure. This framework set the tone for more than 40 planning processes and authorized 2,140 real estate and planning approvals from 1993 to 2007.

Design competitions determined the outcomes for most sites within the Government Quarter. Most notably, the international urban design competition for the Spreebogen site drew 800 entries.

The Reichstag design competition, won by Norman Foster, was among the most prominent competitions for government buildings. To many, the Reichstag symbolized the complicated question of legacy, and how government facilities could be reused when tarnished by memories of the Third Reich. Norman Foster transformed the building with a glass dome, designed to welcome visitors and celebrate an era of transparency in government.

In 1999, the first government buildings reopened, ushering in Berlin's revived role as the national capital. "In the professional life of a planner, it is rare to go from urban concept to realization in just a couple of years," says Annalie Schoen, the head of the Berlin Senate's Capital City Planning team. "It was a fantastic time."

Early challenges

After a decade of major city-led reconstruction projects, Berlin experienced a fiscal crisis and a period of demographic stagnation in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 2001, the city administration, including the planning department, experienced drastic staffing cuts. Kühne explains that for Berlin, it was the end of the "German tradition where public administrations had extremely large budgets, good legal and management budgets, and strong public and political support for publicly organized urban development projects."

The city shifted focus from large-scale development to smaller efforts in partnership with local district (Bezirk) councils and sold much of its publicly owned property. Meanwhile, the temporary uses of space that had gained prominence after the fall of the wall continued, drawing a burgeoning artistic, nightlife, and tourist economy. These temporary uses came to define the international vision of Berlin, epitomized by long-time Mayor Klaus Wowereit, who called Berlin "poor but sexy."

Today the economy has been energized by international creative types, property investors, and a Europe-leading start-up scene. The population has grown each year since 2005, and is projected to continue. Accordingly, Berlin's planning dialogues now focus primarily on issues like retaining affordable housing in the face of increasing high-end development.

The city anticipates a more aggressive housing agenda in years to come, with a goal of 10,000 new housing units per year, 10 percent of which will be affordable units developed by the city. Strategic planning has returned to sites in the former West, which were largely out of the spotlight during the first 15 years of reconstruction, Kühne says.

Twenty-five years after the fall of the wall, what may define Berlin planning policy is an increased focus on bottom-up initiatives and collaboration with stakeholders such as businesses, universities, and civic groups. Although Germany's planning system has a robust public consultation process, recent use of direct democracy initiatives increases the incentive for all players to engage with communities early and often.

Several recent projects have included more collaborative processes or groups, such as Holzmarkt, a riverfront site the city has sold to supporters of a subculture initiative seeking to create a mixed use creative and living space. "We have different resources now," says Kühne in reference to various recent planning efforts. "We ... do not need ... a completely top-down strategy. This is extremely new for us."

Today's Berlin continues to evolve, with community and collaborative initiatives standing side by side with the large-scale visions that first transformed the city's post-reunification landscape.

Katharine Burgess is a planner currently living and working in Berlin through the Robert Bosch Foundation Fellowship program. Her work in Germany has included a placement at the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment and at the Buro Happold Cities Group.

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Resources

Images: Top — The Lichtgrenze (Light Border) follows the former line of the Berlin Wall over a bridge south of Bornholmer Strasse, where the wall first opened in 1989. Photo by Katharine Burgess. Middle — The cover of the last West Berlin Flächennutzungsplan (Land Use Plan or FNP), prior to reunification. Courtesy the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment. Bottom — The post-reunification open space system. Courtesy the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment.

Berlin Senate Department of Urban Development (in English): www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/index_en.shtm

Berlin Celebration for the 25th Anniversary of the Fall of the Wall (in English): www.berlin.de/mauerfall2014/en

Berlin Senate Department of Urban Development, Haupstadt Planning (in English):www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/planen/hauptstadt/dokumentationindex_en.shtml

Berlin Wall Trail (in English): www.berlin.de/mauer/mauerweg/index/index.en.php

Ladd, Brian. The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Inner Landscape. 1997.