We are all aware of the importance of form follows function. Our city centers are one of the best examples of the application of this rule. Or perhaps the worst? Isn’t architecture also partly to blame for the empty buildings and deserted squares? Isn’t the current crisis merely accelerating what has been heralded for years? Our city centers have a lot […]

We are all aware of the importance of form follows function. Our city centers are one of the best examples of the application of this rule. Or perhaps the worst? Isn’t architecture also partly to blame for the empty buildings and deserted squares? Isn’t the current crisis merely accelerating what has been heralded for years? Our city centers have a lot of potential. We should make use of it.

Weepy comments about dying city centers, broken windows at the market in Lüdenscheidt or closed department stores all over Germany are easy to find again right now. In Berlin, the Senate has been forced to approve various high-rise buildings and is celebrating the temporary keeping open of four dilapidated department stores as if it were the Champions League. The end of German cities, indeed of European urban civilization, seems to have arrived.

I cannot understand this. The chain store-based retail trade, with its ubiquitous lack of imagination and monotony, has made the inner cities hostage to international superchains that care neither for the well-being of their customers nor for the quality of the cities. Indeed, the formerly diverse rows of stores have often mutated into clusters of ruthless highwaymen and looters along the public spaces. They want to contribute little to the common good and declare the purchasing power and frequency of passers-by to be the only criteria for deciding on a location. As international corporations, they were in a position to pay hardly any taxes, impose enormous ecological costs on society, and produce and sell T-shirts in an environmentally harmful and anti-social manner. This enabled them to pay extremely high rents and force more individual stores and service providers out of central locations. Rents that are completely excessive in prime locations and have created a commercial real estate bubble that urgently needs to be corrected. There are values on the books that no longer do justice to the current economic benefit. It will probably be difficult to avoid a wave of insolvencies. This development is already visible today in the withdrawal of department stores and retail chains, the vacant stores, restaurants and commercial spaces on many shopping streets: if hotels do not accommodate congress visitors and tourists, large parts of the retail trade go online to monopolistic structures from the USA and employees continue to work from home, many restaurateurs and retailers will see a drop in turnover. Cultural institutions such as museums, galleries and theaters may also see fewer visitors. And local authorities will see an additional loss of income. It is therefore important to take advantage of and shape the change.

City centers are not just trading centers for chain stores, but must be vibrant districts that reflect the diversity of human needs.
Dying city centers are not a contemporary issue. The problem was already much discussed in the seventies and eighties. But city centers are more resilient and resistant than they seem. They have evolved over centuries, survived crises and wars, have been rebuilt and repaired, flourished, demolished and rebuilt. Europe is home to many of the most beautiful cities in the world. They have restored historic city centers, a multitude of listed individual buildings and squares that can offer grandiose spaces for the vibrancy and diversity of a society.
It is therefore a question of offering resistance and opposing negative developments with creativity and energy. It is about rebuilding over-motorized cities so that they are made for people again. This requires active, long-term, forward-looking urban development planning. With ideas that make cities better and invite people to put down roots with love. That’s why I also see the crisis as an opportunity. Where space is freed up, new, better uses can emerge. Berlin in the 90s stands for this. Open spaces attract creative people and create the opportunity for a new start.

Inspiration Copenhagen

The resilient cities that are better able to cope with challenges are the mixed cities with retail, manufacturing, work, housing, education, play and leisure all together. Copenhagen’s Israels Plads illustrates how this can be achieved. With a market hall full of fruit and vegetable stalls from the region behind me, I look out onto a public space that is a mixture of soccer cage, basketball court, skate park, sandpit, paddling pool and beach promenade. Creative gastronomy on the first floor and a mixture of living and working above. Wonderful. A masterpiece.
Another square is called Superkiln and meanders through its bulky surroundings between firewalls with ship swings, a boxing ring, bicycle racing track and basketball court. It gives one of Copenhagen’s most socially fragile districts, Nørrebro, a social center. The new quarter at the former Nordhavn has a swimming area in the former harbor basin and a playground on top of the parking garage with the most beautiful view of the entire city. The German Embassy has moved into a former cement silo there. This is what urban redevelopment can look like. The architecture museum has placed a playground in its center, with a slide, oversized and oversized houses on a scale of 2:1 – 1:10, an overturned house and a hammock. The field hockey pitch and the wave slide are docked on from the outside.
Such playful places are rarely found in German cities. Even new facilities are usually dominated by dreary, serious minimalism. Humor, joie de vivre and play areas for young and old: not to be found. But these are becoming increasingly important if society is not to disintegrate into alien groups.

Good, bad, with potential

People need positive community experiences for which they want to come together. City centers are the places where this can happen particularly well. This is where social success and failure are decided. Like in front of the Philharmonie in Berlin. Elegant paving, thin trees and park benches are not enough. No playground for miles around. A few skaters crawl along the curb. Paved areas alone do not bring people together and fail to fulfill their purpose. They are empty spaces, perhaps just representational areas that are too expensive.

New concepts can make city centers better. In Siegen, students now populate the city center after the university campus was moved from the outside into the middle of the city. The functional city with separate areas for living, working, retail, education and leisure was a mistake. The commercial city needs to be transformed into a multifunctional city for people with housing, commerce, production, crafts, service providers, leisure, playgrounds and sports facilities, culture and education all close together. Today, there are simply too few apartments and too few contemporary places to work in the city centers. City planning councils and mayors should not just react to requests, but rethink their city together with the citizens. And plan for the long term. Münster and Freiburg are excellent examples of this. But cities such as Hanover, Bonn and Karlsruhe also have the same potential. As do Bielefeld and many, many others.

Those cities that follow a plan, give themselves a structure and bring good people into the administration will make progress. Advisory boards for the vibrant city or a board of trustees that present best practice examples and facilitate knowledge transfer can bring urbanity to the peripheral areas. Creative gastronomy, good craftsmen, manufactories and lively associations are the pride of a municipality and bring people together. In democracies and cities, continuous learning processes are the prerequisite for lasting success. Today, most city centers are potential areas for better solutions.