A walk in Schöneberg, Berlin

Energy policy, gentrification, protest, and the humble joys of communal flower beds

I didn’t think that a humble flower bed could have quite this effect. The verges — for they numerous, every few metres — turned out to be the key feature of the streets of Schöneberg, Berlin, where I was walking with my colleagues on Friday morning.

We were being given a tour by Dr Dieter Genske (Fachhochschule Nordhausen, Universität Liechtenstein, ETH Zürich etc), one of Europe’s leading experts on the relationship between cities, communities and renewable energy, particularly in Germany. Schöneburg was the subject of our tour as it is in the midst of an increasingly fierce gentrification battle, and so providing a concentrated demonstration site for examining civic action, urban regeneration and urban development.

And Germany was the subject of our visit as — perhaps with Denmark — it has the most interesting (and arguably most successful) energy policy in Europe and beyond. Germany has created an energy infrastructure which is, amongst other things:

• highly distributed and localised (minimising transmission loss, and potentially enabling better demand management),
• increasingly based on a diverse set of renewables (doubling its share of overall energy…