Track wilderness: How Berlin is innovating urban biodiversity
Berlin is famous for its public parks. Many of them are unusual. After all, how many city parks have provided rollerbladers with two airport runways to skate on? This trend is tied to the city’s recent history. The enormous political and economic shifts that occurred in Berlin in the 20th century meant that buildings, infrastructure and public spaces could sometimes gain and lose their reason for existing overnight. After the Berlin Wall came down, decommissioned industrial zones, abandoned train stations, and the closure of the Tempelhof airport in 2007 offered new opportunities to increase the amount of green space in the city.
I visited Berlin in March to help two ecowork members facilitate their first creative workshop. The trip gave me the chance to explore a brand new park named Park am Gleisdreieck and to collect eco-design and urban biodiversity-related ideas for future workshops.
One reason our community is powerful is that it’s easy for us to contribute to each other’s initiatives. My visit at Gleisdreieck was all the more educational because of the help I received from other members. Sandra Clermont, with whom I had done a workshop in Hamburg, introduced me to my guide Birgit Beyer. Birgit works for the local Green Party government and oversaw the development of the park. Sandra and several other members with backgrounds in ecology used our shared LinkedIn group to post questions for me to ask Birgit. A member new to Berlin, Nathalie Roy, joined me for the visit and helped me interview Birgit about the park’s creation.
Our community has a very specific way of pushing for progress in sustainable urban design. First, we identify concrete challenges that must be solved in order to make environmental projects happen. Next, we get together and use creative brainstorming techniques to come up with solutions to those challenges. To guide our process, we set ourselves specific objectives that our solutions must fulfill, and constraints that they must work with. The story of how the Gleisdreieck park was designed reminded me in many ways of our own challenge-solving practice.
Gleisdrieck means railroad triangle. The park is named that way because it has been built in a space once occupied by two freight railway stations. These stations functioned between 1870 and 1952 and were abandoned shortly after the end of the Second World War. Nature started gaining ground in the 1950s, and the tracks were gradually eclipsed by a forest of pioneering species including birch, robinia, poplar, and ailanthus.
Berlin residents have been calling for the space to be transformed into a park since a citizen movement blocked its conversion into a motorway in 1974. That dream came true in 2011 when funds became available in the form of ecological compensation for the reconstruction of the adjacent Potsdammer Platz. Instead of a motorway, the park now includes a rapid bike lane linking Berlin to Copenhagen and Leipzig and is an important link in the city’s 40km north-south green corridor.
The 31.5 hectare park is divided down the middle by tracks belonging to the S-bahn number 2 and several of the city train lines. The east side of the park is more wooded, while the western side is more open and urban, with unobstructed views towards the nearby high-rises.
If I were to employ ecowork’s challenge-solving methodology to explain how Gleisdreieck was designed, this is the challenge I would propose:
How might an abandoned railway site help boost biodiversity in central Berlin?
I would then set some objectives. The solutions should
- Favor a diversity of natural habitats and support rare species,
- Welcome people of all ages to participate in a wide range of activities,
- Create a space that feels open and accessible.
I would also outline a few constraints. The solutions must
- Comply with the requirements of an ecological compensation scheme,
- Keep the natural features that have already settled the area,
- Preserve the historic railway elements.
The types of solutions that participants would be asked to develop would of course be elements to include within a park. Sorting through the solutions at the end of the workshop, here’s what the workshop facilitator would find:
Solution 1 — “Track Wilderness”
While the stations laid waste for decades, many of their railyard structures came to be inhabited by living things. Individual trees sprouted up against old train buffers and out of rusty barrels. An entire forest occupied the station’s former maintenance area. Roots anchored themselves in the sunken ground beneath the tracks where mechanics would have squeezed themselves to work on the undersides of wagons. Bats had moved into old buildings.
All of this has been left as found. It would have been a mistake to clear the space and start over when nature, by itself, had already spent years rebuilding quality soils and hosting a succession of natural communities needed for the green space to be authentic and self-sufficient. Existing, stand-alone trees were preserved even though the gnarled mounds of soil out of which they grow are an unusual feature in the surrounding flat fields. The city also hopes to use one of the station’s many blackened train bridges as a wildlife crossing where a busy street currently creates a bottleneck for species moving through the ecological corridor that the park provides.
Solution 2 — Differentiated landscaping
Both sections of the park contain large open fields. People need to have access to sections of well mown lawn but not all of it need be maintained in the same way. Doing so would make the space ecologically uniform. Instead, park planners have adopted a late mowing schedule in many parts of the park, allowing natural prairies to develop and harbor rare species and wildflowers to the delight of Gleisdreieck visitors.
Solution 3 — Ballast gardens
Track ballast is the flat, sharp edged rock present under and alongside railway tracks. Although the ballast originally present on the site was too contaminated to keep, clean ballast has been brought back and placed in small sections throughout the park. These open, dry gardens help recall the park’s railyard legacy and attract sun-loving plants and animals like wild daisies and lizards, which would have difficulty settling into other parts of the park.
Solution 4 — Fence free
Boosting biodiversity means providing a space for fragile species that would typically struggle to take hold in areas that are highly trafficked by humans. The sustainable landscaping techniques mentioned above help them take root, but keeping them around means making sure that these species and their habitats don’t come into contact with stampeding feet, bike tires and soccer balls. This problem is often resolved by fencing people out of a park’s most fragile natural areas. The Gleisdreieck developers took a different approach because they thought that raising barriers everywhere in the park would diminish the sense of freedom and openness that it should provide its users. There is a large prairie on the western side of the park that contains many rare species including wild carrot. It must be crossed in order to move from one side of the park to the other. Rather than creating a path bordered with barriers, the planners installed a raised walkway. Its beautiful rust colour contrasts with the green of the grass. There is nothing preventing visitors from stepping off it, yet so far its design has proven successful in keeping people away from the grass.
Going fence free is not always possible however, even at Gleisdreieck. In the eastern half of the park, the area above the underground metro line 7 is clear of trees. This serves the dual purpose of visually connecting the space’s many layered functions, and of accommodating rare species of birds that need to nest on the ground. But nests and eggs on the ground must be protected from dogs. Here the only solution so far has been to create an enclosure.
Solution 5 — Compensating with play
Normally, funds spent on ecological compensation must go towards the creation of green space. In one part of the park, however, a wide train bridge casts too much shade for plants to grow beneath it. Instead, colorful, creatively designed sports facilities complete with mini trampolines help fulfill the planners’ objective to make the park playful and participative for people of all ages. This “playability” objective is achieved in other parts of the park as well. There’s a dedicated space for dancing on friday evenings. A skate park has been built next to an already noisy train line so that skaters may make noise at all hours. Full-sized swing sets have been placed outside the children’s playgrounds so that even grown ups might have a go.
Solutions for all the spaces left behind
The very first workshop organized by ecowork, back in July 2015, tackled a deliberately futuristic challenge. The question we worked on was “if there are no cars left in Paris in 30 years, how will we use our roads ?” We chose to approach the issue of evolving transportation habits with an extreme but fictional situation in order to put aside preconceived ideas of the future and push ourselves to be as creative and innovative as possible with our solutions. The results of that workshop (in French) can be found here.
Gleisdreieck Park, and in many ways the city of Berlin in general, reminded me of the fictional situation we had imagined for Paris. What if entire portions of our urban infrastructure became redundant? Would we have the innovative instinct, as the people of Berlin did, to use the space left behind to improve the wellbeing of the city’s residents and the natural world? Gleisdreieck is an inspiring place, as are the actors like Birgit who contributed to its creation. By building a community of people like her, spanning multiple cities, we hope to connect inspiring eco-design solutions with the places and actors who need them.
ecowork is a community of urban transformation actors who help each other solve eco-design challenges. Our community promotes sustainable design in two main ways, firstly by providing different types of city and construction industry actors with ways to work together better, and secondly by actively producing solutions to the obstacles our members face in their sustainable design projects. Our main medium is the creativity workshop, a 5- to 15-person gathering that uses design-thinking techniques to address a practical challenge and come up with innovative solutions, quickly. Join us at www.ecowork.cc
