Healing farewells

New concepts are needed to save cemeteries. Important: space that enables mourning. The Cologne Future Congress “Healing Farewells” on October 25, 2019 brought together avant-garde speakers from the fields of sociology, psychology, philosophy, theology – and landscape architecture. Landscape architects Constanze Petrow and Bart Brands presented solutions, lighthouse projects and findings.

In an arch-Catholic location, the conference center of the Archdiocese of Cologne, the topic “The changing culture of mourning in the age of individuality” was discussed in a rather secular manner under the moderation of futurologist Matthias Horx. Horx, whose Zukunftsinstitut curated the “Healing Farewells” congress on October 25, 2019 – which was sponsored by the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Friedhof und Denkmal e.V. – discussed the topic with an illustrious circle of avant-garde speakers from the fields of sociology, psychology, philosophy, theology and landscape architecture. The topic was the realities of mourning, cemeteries and saying goodbye, as well as “the new aspects of mourning”.

Also present – as representatives of the topic from a landscape architecture perspective: landscape architect Constanze Petrow and Dutch landscape architect Bart Brands. The two presented solutions, flagship projects and findings from their work with their students, as well as ideas for future planning and approaches.

All participants agreed that cemeteries need to open up to new concepts. Constanze Petrow, for example, called for the cemetery, which is so valuable in terms of cultural history, to be saved. “It’s our job,” said the professor of open space planning at Hochschule Geisenheim University, “to dare and try out new things here. We haven’t reinvented it yet.”
Bart Brands showed what this can look like, for example, with his revitalization of the Amsterdam cemetery “De Nieuwe Ooster”, which he divided into plots with different rules like barcode strips. His credo is: “Everything must be possible, but not everything everywhere”. Constanze Petrow also presented current student strategies for the further development of the cemetery. She also presented the recently launched competition “Space for mourning – ideas for the cemetery of the future” for young planners, in the context of which suitable places are also to be designed as spatial situations in the world’s largest park cemetery in Hamburg-Ohlsdorf, which enable individual or communal rituals and acts of farewell.

Facilitating respectful encounters

In a research project, Petrow discovered that a loose community of formal and informally used meeting spaces, such as the water points, had formed in the tension between the private space at the grave and the public space in the cemetery. In her opinion, this spatially unresolved situation needs to be overcome in order to promote social interaction, for example with seating arranged so that people can meet. However, it is important to respect the different emotional states of visitors to the cemetery and to take them into account in the architectural design.

Open topics

Although the Future Congress was already overloaded with topics from one subject area to the next, important facets were missing, such as the views of the various trades involved in the cemetery and a look at the massive increase in burials of people from other cultural areas, particularly those of the Islamic faith. While these people – as well as Christians from Eastern and South-Eastern Europe – used to bury around 70 percent of their dead in their former homeland and only 30 percent in Germany, this ratio has now been reversed.