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One square metre Tempelhof29. October 2009 – 09:22 by Rolf Luehrs |
German journalist proposed innovative eParticipation project – or is it just a weird idea?
Until recently Berlin Tempelhof Airport was one of the world’s oldest still-operating commercial airports. After 85 years in operation and a failed referendum against its closure, the airport shut down in October 2008.
But what to do with a former airport area in the middle of Berlin? Round about 340 hectares empty land in the centre of one of Europe’s largest cities – isn’t this an exciting opportunity for urban development and spatial planning?
And Berlin is discussing about possible uses for quiet a while and lots of proposals have already been put on the table. Even some participatory planning instruments have been applied like a web-based participation process.
However, it is still unclear how the future use will look like or how an inclusive and sustainable planning process could be designed and implemented.
In today’s edition of the German newspaper “die tageszeitung” (taz), the journalist Gereon Asmuth came up with an interesting proposal. The territory comprises round about 3,4 Million square metres and Berlin counts 3.4 Million inhabitants he reckons. Why not giving one square metre ex-airport to every inhabitant and let her or him decide what to do with it?
There are not to much possibilities to develop one square metre land, but the more citizens co-operate and support the same idea, the bigger projects could be realised. An football ground for instance would need 7.500 m2, a new central park 400.000 co-operating citizens to become reality. The entire negotiation and planning should be done using the Internet.
Sure, there are a lot of organisational and even legal problems to overcome if this approach was chosen: Should even children be eligible to participate or just voters? How could we prevent potential investors from buying the land from hundred of thousand of citizens? etc.
However, I still think this is a fascinating proposal and I have never heard about something similar. Or is it just a weird idea?
Tags: Berlin, eParticipation, inenglish, Tempelhof
One Response to “One square metre Tempelhof”
By Stefan Gehrke (politik-digital.de) on Oct 29, 2009
It is a great idea – just thinking about why we haven´t had it. It would be participation, political education, transparency and above all it would be very courageous of the Berlin Senate to try this. It would be a big logistic challenge to build a functioning system to manage all of this – but it would be worth a try. And it would be a fantastic chance for the City of Berlin to proove what a Berlin politiciuan asserted: “Berlin is the capital of participation.” That´s not yet true, but with this idea they would have the chance to become the leader. So, let´s do it!!!