© Dieter H. Engler - La Fabrique de la Cité

Berlin: transforming the city around behavioural changes

07/17/2015 - Understanding behavioural changes to keep transforming cities

A young, alternative, creative city. That is the reputation of Berlin, which attracts more than 40,000 new residents every year. As a laboratory experimenting with new ways of using the urban environment, Berlin is an inspirational example of citizen initiative, resource sharing and the expert use of digital tools and services for the benefit of the city.

Berlin, Do it Together capital

The Do it Together culture is deeply rooted in Berlin, due largely to the amount of space still available for development within the city. "Brownfield sites, overlap zones, unfinished developments… All of these terms have been used historically to define the culture of Berlin, and the mind map it still has today", explains architect Finn Geipel. Spaces here are used temporarily for a broad range of urban renewal projects.
The conversion of Tempelhof Airport is a very instructive example of this strategy in practice. Transformed into a park after its closure in 2008, there were previously plans to develop the site into office space, housing and a new library. But in 2014, a grassroots referendum voted against any new construction on the site. Berliners preferred to carry on using this enormous space in the centre of the city for other things, such as festivals, sport and community vegetable gardens.
Another high-profile example of the Do it Together culture in Berlin is the Baugruppen phenomena. Citizens resisting rent increases are getting together to form non-profit or cooperative organisations to become the project owners of their own collective developments. This bottom-up approach cuts costs, builds social cohesion and is proving to be "perfectly suited to the interstitial spaces of the city that are too small to be of interest to property developers", explains Finn Geipel.
"The great strength of Berlin is that it is a city made by its people and for its people", says Laurence Comparat, Deputy Mayor of Grenoble with responsibility for open data and freeware. But the fact that Berliners can 'build' the city in their own image is also thanks to local authorities, which promote citizen initiative and recognise it as a legitimate contribution to the public debate over how the city should be developed.

Sharing in Berlin

Launched in 2009 by two eco-friendly Berliners, the Prinzessinnengarten (Princess Garden) project accurately reflects the willingness in Berlin to be open and share with others. Located in Moritzplatz, a working-class community of Kreuzberg, these pop-up gardens cover 6,000 m² of a former industrial site abandoned for more than fifty years. Open to everyone, they introduce and promote expertise in urban agriculture to all Berliners. This consciously social and educational project could never have got off the ground without substantial citizen commitment and involvement. "In Berlin, people don't just want to join in, they also want to create things together", emphasises Marco Clausen, one of those working in the Prinzessinnengarten.
This appetite for sharing responsibility is also at work in innovation (incubators, accelerators…) and coworking spaces that have established Berlin as the European capital of innovation. Startupbootcamp, a startup accelerator specialising in sustainable mobility and energy, illustrates the will to deploy cooperation strategies in order to best answer citizens’ needs and identify the emerging uses of the city. In concrete terms, Startupbootcamp selects the most ambitious startup projects, providing them with sufficient financial capital to get started and, most of all, coaches them for the first few months of the adventure, also through networking with big companies of the mobility and energy sectors.

But private sector stakeholders are not the only ones involved in making Berlin a Sharing City. Working through accredited foundations and agencies, such as Berlin Partner, public funding can also help to shape new communities, optimise resources and expertise, and invent new forms of cooperation.

The stake of data

The large volumes of urban data now being generated are encouraging cities to become simultaneously reactive and proactive. That's the big idea behind the Responsive City concept developed by Harvard Professors Susan Crawford and Stephen Goldsmith. Data-smart city governance is becoming a priority challenge as the basis for anticipating future problems, breaking down the barriers between municipal services, and becoming more effective at identifying emerging uses of the city.
Berlin has certainly grasped the importance of this step change. In April this year, the Berlin Senate officially adopted a Smart City Strategy built around two priorities. The first is to develop technology research, with particular focus on the Tegel Airport redevelopment project (Urban Tech Republic). The second is the range of sustainable mobility options. Over the coming months, the largest mobility experiment in Berlin will be focused on the Südkreuz railway station in the south of the city. Wind turbines, solar panels, a navigation system to simplify intermodal transfers... with systems like these, the Südkreuz station aims to invent new forms of networked sustainable innovation.
The many initiatives that make up the Berlin digital culture also share a common goal of encouraging citizens to enter urban data. That's very much the case with Code for Germany, a programme kick-started by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) that enables volunteer citizens to "develop civic technologies and applications that demonstrate the importance of open access to urban public data", explains OKF project leader Julia Kloiber. Citizen empowerment, knowledge and responsibility sharing, and accelerated development of the digital culture: these are the three cornerstones on which Berlin is building to solve a difficult equation in the coming months: becoming an economic key attractive urban centre without compromising its creative, high-quality of life city DNA.