Tag Archives: Tempelhof

Urban gardening in Berlin: contributions to city quality

Guerilla Gardening: triggered reactions

by Hans Pul

Although it is still freezing (at least here in Berlin), it is the time of the year for starting planning and planting this year’s vegetables. Around this time of the year, you can start planting carrots, spinach, lettuce, and radish. Depending on the location of your gardening efforts, this can contribute to the livability of your neighbourhood. Especially relevant in municipalities struggling with shrinking budgets, more and more residents make efforts to greenify, beautify and diversify public space through gardening. Not only can urban gardening contribute to city quality, it’s also a lot of fun. As an unexpected intervention in urban space, guerilla gardening surprises and triggers reactions from the public. The video above nicely captures that.

In this blogpost I will present some examples of urban gardening in Berlin that contribute to urban quality.
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The ‘Gate’ in ‘Gated Communities’

By Renard Teipelke

The network Architects for Architects and Plattenvereinigung hosted a panel discussion (on Wednesday, August 24th, 2011, at the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin) titled “Gated Communities – Are we heading toward a two-tier society?”

The panel, moderated by an architect, included a researcher, a developer, another architect, and one local politician. The title gave hope to an interesting discussion on gated communities in Germany and specifically in Berlin. However, I could not be satisfied by the outcome. The panelists threw in all the catchwords possible: gentrification, class system, public housing, social exclusion, parallel society, federal funds, upper class elitism, ghettoization, political corruption, profit making, South Africa, retirement homes, rural idyll, Southern Germans, capitalist investors etc. Continue reading

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