“The city’s renaissance is coming to an end!”

We meet urban planner Uli Hellweg after a workshop on the planning of a courtyard and high-rise district in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. Housing for more than 2,000 residents is to be built here, with up to 50 percent social housing, a mix of uses and facilities based on the Berlin model. We took the opportunity to talk to Uli Hellweg about the current challenges and opportunities of urban planning in general and in Berlin in particular.

Looking back to the time before the lockdown, what is the general situation with housing policy in Berlin, what works well, what works less well?

Uli Hellweg: If I compare it with Hamburg, they do it better. They work much less with regulatory measures, which the Berlin Senate does very well. I don’t want to question this in principle, but there would be much more understanding for regulatory measures such as the rent cap if you could prove that you are working massively on new housing projects. You have to mobilize space for this. With what instrument? Development law can be useful here. But standing up and saying that it won’t work, that there is too much resistance and that it will all take too long is not enough. If you look at German building law, there are many possibilities for intervention that could be used to facilitate construction if you wanted to. But informal instruments such as the Alliance for Housing and the Alliance for Neighborhoods are also things that need to be put into practice.

Who would have to talk to whom in order to achieve this?

Uli Hellweg: Part of this is that you have to create a certain culture of discussion in a city. It’s great that the Senate has a functioning culture of discussion with the building communities and initiatives in Kreuzberg and Mitte. But the building world is not just made up of building cooperatives. It consists of large and small investors. And cultivating this cultural landscape of investors would be a major task. And that works better in Hamburg, which has a different tradition. There are also more building cooperatives in Hamburg than here. In Berlin, they are now failing due to land prices. There are also too few concept tenders.

If creating incentives were the way to be proactive in this sense, how does a city like Berlin manage to create incentives when money is lacking?

Uli Hellweg: In two to three years, the local authorities will have a real money problem again; at the moment, they don’t yet. But it’s no use if there is no culture of discussion and cooperation. You have to play with the instruments at your disposal, whether it’s the conceptual allocation of building land or the issue of urban development areas or the use of funding instruments. If you can’t play this keyboard with virtuosity, and Berlin has not been able to do that in the last three years, then it’s a problem.

Does that mean they have been able to do it before?

Uli Hellweg: I think that previous senates have certainly been able to do it. Wolfgang Nagel, for example, got some things off the ground after reunification. Even if some things were perhaps thought too big back then. In local politics, it’s not the party book that decides, but the clever head. That is slowly changing at state level, and in federal politics, politics works according to completely different criteria. Things have not gone well in Berlin recently. We can only hope that things will improve in the future. Planning culture is more than citizen participation. That has to be made very clear.

Are there any specific projects that serve as positive examples?

Uli Hellweg: Alexanderplatz, Haus der Statistik, for example. I also believe that a lot is going well with the grassroots initiatives of the building communities in Kreuzberg or Friedrichshain.

It seems to be a question of the actors involved and how the available instruments are used, and less a question of the instruments themselves. Do the right people have to come along before the instruments can be used to their full potential?

Uli Hellweg: Well, the question of personnel is always linked to political constellations. But the theory that it’s not the instruments that are the problem, but the politics, to depersonalize it, is plausible. But politics is always made by people in constellations and coalitions, which means it is also made within constraints. In my view, the fact that things sometimes turn out the way they do depends on political contexts and their clientele. But again: the instruments are not the problem. After all, I was once head of the building department. If we wanted something, we got it done with the instruments. If we didn’t want something, we always came up with something. Of course, instruments can always be sharpened and made more targeted.

For example?

Uli Hellweg: There is a discussion about small development measures. We have many small gaps between buildings that could still be developed if the instrument of development law could be used. It would have to be less complex and less bureaucratic. There would also be a whole host of possibilities in terms of land law, for example in the areas of taxation, pre-emption rights or value absorption. There are numerous good proposals from the German Association of Cities and the DIFU.

The coronavirus pandemic is not over yet. If we assume three options for the outcome of the crisis, this means: nothing will change, everything will change or existing trends will be reinforced. Which position do you take?

Uli Hellweg: I would agree that existing trends will be reinforced.

Which trends would that be?

Uli Hellweg: Digitalization, for example. The example of working from home is currently being discussed a lot. Will the predictions of up to 80 percent working from home come true? It certainly won’t be quite that high in general. It will be more likely in certain sectors, such as insurance and finance. That is also an opportunity. The big insurance offices are not necessarily an enrichment for the urbanity of city centers.

both laugh

They could make more of an effort from an urbanistic point of view!

Uli Hellweg: They could! But perhaps they don’t need so much space and could then, for example, repurpose areas. But then you immediately run into the pitfalls of building law, because you immediately have to deal with fire protection and noise protection, which make conversion expensive. You would therefore have to look for the use after the building instead of adapting the building to the use. Such an adaptation strategy would be something that could be strengthened in terms of urban planning. The next trend immediately plays a role here. What about retail? It was already in crisis before corona. Delivery services are strong competitors. This frees up space in the city center and the function of the city center as a whole is at stake. I therefore believe that our city centers will change. We will have to move away from the image of the consumer city center as it was shaped in the 1950s. If you wait until vacancies start to spread, it will be too late. Vacancies are like garbage, one vacancy attracts the next. The monofunctional focus of the city center on consumption must therefore be proactively broken up.

What should cities do?

Uli Hellweg: Cities need to develop strategies now on how they can use their city centers in a more multifunctional way in the future. For creative people, for cultural institutions, for production and social activities. Certainly also increasingly for home offices. The term still has a “home” side to it. What does a home that functions as an office look like? For many people, it doesn’t work at all because they already live in cramped conditions. Would it be possible, for example, to set up small coworking spaces near people’s homes, for example in vacant store spaces? People would then have their workplace not in the city, but in their residential area or district.

Conversely, what does that mean for the outskirts of the city?

Uli Hellweg: The question is, how and where does urban space grow? This question concerns all spatial typologies, including the outer periphery and rural areas. The first ring, the Gründerzeit districts, is full and expensive in all major cities today. The second ring around the centers comprises the suburban areas and regions. Here, some communities no longer want to grow at all. It recently made the headlines in Berlin: The town of Velten in the north of Berlin is one such case, but it is not an isolated one. There are similar cases in the surrounding areas of almost every growing city. In the metropolitan regions, there is therefore a tendency towards urbanization in the third ring, i.e. in the rural periphery. This trend is being reinforced by coronavirus. And if you couple this trend with working from home, then you understand that more and more people are saying that if I only have to travel to my employer in the city twice a week anyway, then I can also live outside. So there is a certain correspondence between spatial behaviour and digitalization. This raises the big question of whether these processes are urban or suburban. Does digitalization promote the urbanization or suburbanization of the country?

What does this mean for our understanding of the city today?

Uli Hellweg: I think the renaissance of the city is coming to an end! I have always advocated and worked for the renaissance of the city. That’s all true, but you can now see that many cities are reaching their limits in terms of both price and space potential. At the moment, the trend is clearly moving towards suburban processes. This in turn has to do with a major policy deficit, namely inadequate regional planning. If regional processes such as suburbanization and peripheralization do not become the subject of policy again, then there will be no real urbanization of rural areas, which would be the great opportunity, especially for the peripheral small and medium-sized towns. Also against the backdrop of digitalization. Today, there is actually no material reason why you can’t live in an urban environment in the countryside. If you have fast internet and a good suburban train connection, that’s not a problem. But if these infrastructures, which have been promised for years, don’t exist, then no new rural towns can be built and people will have no choice but to commute or move away completely. Then there will be suburbanization and further depopulation processes in the peripheral areas, and that would be a huge opportunity wasted, namely to keep the promise of “equal living conditions”.