,” says the singer Pat Appleton. The front woman of the Band De-Phazz is gefert for your enormous presence on the stage. At concerts, she gives everything. After that, you absolutely need a retreat, she says – a parcel of land in the small gardens elderberry Bush in Treptow on the green outskirts of Berlin. There she is digging and rooting in the earth, sings with croaking frogs and caressed the trees. Her father, a Minister in Liberia, dreams that his daughter could one day be President of the African country. But Appleton only wants to rule over your Allotment.
Maybe you should reconsider. For 2024, the small garden is to be demolished in favour of new building areas. “I’m ready to fight,” explains Appleton. “Here, I don’t just take it away.”
In Metropolitan allotment gardeners are advised to provide increasingly under pressure. It apartment prevails scarcity and in the face of skyrocketing Rents and purchase prices is more and more frequently the question of whether a city can allow you to allocate valuable space for vegetable beds and garden gnomes. In Berlin, the first gardens were built in the colonies in favor of new buildings. Many biotopes are almost in the City, also in other large cities.
gardeners are noisy protesters
Some tenants have expanded their dachas even people’s homes – particularly in Berlin often was tolerated. You can block land, on which a compacted residential area could be constructed. The foliage beeper only pay a small lease, sometimes only around 1000 euros per year, and can mow in the Top layers of your lawn. In a sense, the city subsidized the garden friends. In the post-war years, the biotopes played in inner city areas is still an important role in the supply of fruit and vegetables. But today?
most of The mayor and town planners to do gardens have a hard time with the change of use of small. If you are already swimming pools, and even schools closing because they are dilapidated, it looks not good, if you give in to traditional colony land to investors, state-owned companies or other developers, in case of doubt, more expensive new buildings to build.
in Addition, there is a certain level of green space is also quite welcome, for a fresh urban climate. And, not least, the small gardener to protest loudly, go on the road and make Poster campaigns, as in the last few weeks in Hanover, Rostock and Magdeburg. On the other hand, the adopted by the Federal government housing development will only work if there are also the corresponding surfaces.
relocated And then there is also the new Alternatives. On the South-East of Frankfurt district of Oberrad, the ICE over goes directly to a lush garden idyll. There is on the Land, but the skyscraper Skyline in front of you and takes the smell of the big city come true.
Here, the cooperative has developed “cooperation”, the Frankfurt households, thus, attracts to can vegetables, fruits, and Biolimonade buy cheap, buy. The activists work together with nearby Farms, in some years, should be provided up to 30,000 city residents with fresh food.
Under the city’s gardening trailer residents, supporters of the former life reform movement, the Old and the Young, who long for a retreat where they will flower seeds plants and white cabbage for the Sauerkraut can. They provide people and animals, keep bees, celebrations, harvest festivals, and upload to the popular lambs hikes. You claim to achieve with your Offered city dwellers, the deal otherwise, barely with diet and the environment.
For the gardener, it is inconceivable that here, on the Frankfurt side as well as the adjacent Offenbacher page to see the emergence of new office and residential buildings. The current zoning provides for it. The offer of both cities to implement the gardens to the surrounding countryside, feel the activists as unreasonable. Over the decades, grown gardens could not be relocated. The small gardener but also the local residents on your side – one for politicians, a dangerous mixture. On the other hand, Frankfurt and Offenbach have hardly any to spare.
almost a Million gardens in Germany
The landscape architect Klaus Neumann deals with small gardens. “The insects die in the city can be prevented only by small gardens,” he says. “Which are the most species-rich, ecologically diverse areas. Nowhere children biology or chemistry, you learn better than in a garden, every school should cooperate with a plant.“ It is also to be given in the colonies, what cities spend millions in the fight against litter and neglect. Small gardens are “spaces of the safest and cleanest city”.
Many would benches to the “real parks with Seating, for older people, in language and integration courses” for immigrants. “After all, you are a piece of German culture,” and belonged “to the world heritage site,” says Neumann. Even if some of the foliage Pieper visited only on the weekend, your garden gnome and flowerbeds. But these arguments, in order to allow a few gardening the fun for a few Hundred euros per year, while ring-despair search around a tenant in the apartment?
910.000 gardens, according to the Federal Association of German garden friends in German cities. They occupy an area the size of Cologne. The average garden is 370 square feet in size, the plants are taken care of 900,000 hobby gardeners, after all, about one percent of the population. There are waiting lists, many lease basic pieces are handed down””. The colonies are considered to be a fresh air vent, good for the climate protection and biodiversity.
“fight For every small garden”
The Berlin-based Investor Arne Piepgras dared to break the taboo in an open letter to the building of the Senate. He proposed to build on 3,000 acres of garden plots – three percent of main urban area – 400,000 homes, half for rent, the other to purchase. He was criticized for heavily. Piepgras, recommended that, “the small gardens to relocate to the surrounding area”, because “in sight, hundreds of thousands of Berlin citizens” to be on the search for affordable housing. He might be right, but he has triggered a culture war.
Klaus-Peter Hesse, CEO of the peak Association of the German real estate industry, ZIA, refers to the “dynamics” of today’s urban developments. The small garden culture he thinks is “outdated,” but that the Lobby “connected, mobilized, and ausbremsend”. The idea of the Modern – the functionally separated city, have changed. “Work here, live there – and elsewhere working in the garden and self-catering. This is just yesterday’s.“
Hesse, and nearly all of the city and real estate developers on mixed neighbourhoods to Live and Work, with a lot of Green, but also eco-roofs. Some argue that nationwide, 40,000 hectares of the gardens to come into the possession of the municipal Hand. The real estate economist Michael Voigtländer from the Institute of the German economy in Cologne, Germany insists on infill development to the detriment of the small gardener. “To any small garden is to be fought”, he knows, but other building sites on which to 2024, some 1.5 million homes to be built, would be essential.
In Berlin, plans to have the Senate now eleven extensive new quarters of the city. Several small garden colonies are being dredged away, for owners and tenants, it should be outside the S-Bahn ring, the new garden land. The plans are largely completed. And also the singer Pat Appleton is likely to need in the future, gardeners on the outskirts of the city.
