2023-08-29 12:29:52
Opinion Tempelhofer Feld
There is a lot of room for speculation here. Have courage!
Status: 12:29 p.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
Could you see a border development from here?
Quelle: Christoph Soeder/dpa/picture alliance
The Senate in Berlin wants to push through the peripheral development at Tempelhofer Flugfeld. A petition, on the other hand, calls for the preservation of the open field as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But the Berliners need more than the constriction caused by the usual camp struggles.
There was a referendum. There was a law. But a law can be changed. The statement by the Berlin Senator for Urban Development, Building and Housing Christian Gaebler can be taken for political pragmatism. Some take it as a threat. Because the SPD politician has thus embarked on ideologically mined terrain: the airfield of the former Berlin-Tempelhof Airport.
In the coalition agreement, the CDU and SPD agreed to initiate a new debate about the future of Tempelhofer Feld because of “the acute housing shortage”. They want to “explore the possibilities of careful peripheral development in limited parts of the area” and launch an urban planning competition for this purpose.
Ten years ago there had already been Senate plans for a development on the airfield, which had been opened to the public after air traffic had ended. But then came the legendary referendum of 2014, with which around 740,000 Berliners gave the politicians and project developers evictions from the “field”, so to speak.
Petition: Protect the sense of spaciousness
Now around 15,000 people have one again Petition signed, which calls for the area to be protected as quickly and permanently as possible “against structural rededication and speculation”. Their goal is to “register the Tempelhofer Feld as a UNESCO World Heritage Site”. And because any development is a red rag in Berlin’s folkloric wasteland mentality, the number of signatories is likely to continue to grow.
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The fifty World Heritage sites in Germany include Roman monuments, Romanesque cathedrals, rococo castles, entire old towns, but also industrial monuments such as the Völklingen Ironworks or the Zollverein colliery in Essen. One can discuss whether the history-rich airport buildings with the imposing departure hall and the monumental hangars in Tempelhof are world heritage. They have long since been entered on the Berlin list of monuments. Berlin’s top monument conservator, the state curator Christoph Rauhut, sees one there “Future Place”which, however, requires a use that “ensures a continuous revitalization of the building”.
300 hectares of open space in Berlin
On the other hand, there are hardly any arguments in the Unesco World Heritage list for preserving a very mundane runway. The petition can only praise a “feeling of space, freedom and community”. Building on the perimeter would hardly change anything, but that doesn’t bother the signatories.
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What is a pity about the debate is that it only serves the old camps with consistently old slogans. But where are the courageous suggestions from business, the radical ones from the climate movement, the surprising ones from the population for an innovative use of the area?
That the “field” activists insist on the status quo is silly enough. 300 hectares of open space in the middle of the German capital and owned by the state should also come up with more than just pointing out the (largely home-made) housing shortage. In any case, the Tempelhofer Feld does not currently need a new urban development, but rather an open – speculative in the best sense of the word – ideas competition.
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