By Juliane and Georg

Berlin is one of the densest cities in Europe and is known for its compact urban fabric of mixed-use houses that on average rise between 3-5 levels above ground. With it comes a huge lack of urban green space. The lack of urban green space made Berlin’s urban dwellers creative on their opportunities to create new public and green spaces. A public option were Tree squares or in German terms “Baumscheiben”. 

For us it came with rising anticipation about how our own Communities were organizing their Green Spaces. This also coincided with the question of how we use our immediate surrounding public space. Surrounding our research effort was an attached own gardening project. This brought us the Idea to combine our observations with our own experiences. 

These observations about how people use their streets and what challenges can appear can have an insight about many urban dwellers pressing into long unused spaces. Especially in times of drought and Climate Change. It can also give some advice about what can happen when you start your own gardening projects in public spaces and how in the end the public can react.  We chose the quantitative observation in our own “Kiez” which seemed to be easier to do individually, since the distance between our residencies is rather far to check into one project regularly.

The differences in how available space was used mainly resulted in the differences of the building structures of the houses. Since in the Günzelkiez mostly are buildings from the prewar with more insular dense urban infrastructure with side- and garden- houses, it made gardening impossible in the back of the house. The garden projects we discovered were present in the front gardens, balconies, or tree squares.

The Weitlingkiez suffered some severe damage during the second world war, which left a lot of damaged vacant lots. Those were rebuilt in the 50’s with conventional buildings which mainly have backyards and balconies, there are no front gardens present.

That is why gardening is hidden from the public eye. There is still one horticultural colony in the midst of skyscrapers that has existed since 1783.

When developing our own Gardening Projects that we made a report before (blog on 11. July), we were experiencing a bunch of mixed opinions from our communities.  It was interesting to observe how some people were quite radically in their opinion to extend those Gardening projects even into spaces contested by cars while also a few were neutral or even opposing those ideas of putting up high beds on Tree Squares. 

But as a Resume to our observations regarding our own projects there was a colorful rainbow of opinions. What we especially examined in Wilmersdorf was that despite the opinion that mostly old and conservative people lived there, there was support for even banning cars from some contested places and using the Trees Squares for further water supply for the trees. In turn one can’t forget that you are still acting on a public space which in turn means that all opinions are not only heard but felt, with vandalism being a huge problem for those gardens.