Keep the Hill: practising and dreaming public spaces in Weißensee
Today KIEZ:MOBIL comes to Heijala-Land, a small garden that is squeezed in-between the buildings and crosses from the Jacobsohn to the Langhansstraße 71.
It is an autumn afternoon. Fallen leaves collect under the wheels of KIEZ:MOBIL and in the corners of the garden. It is still warm enough to stay outside, so the conversation takes place around an open fire. A cup of non-alcoholic mulled wine warms people’s hands, the fire crackles, marshmallows go around on sticks as everyone slowly finds their place in the circle.
Today we are joined by Katya Romanova, an interdisciplinary designer and co-founder re:imagine your city, and Michelle Howard, a socio-ecological architect, professor and activist at Heijala-Land in Berlin.
We sit with Katya and Michelle to speak about public space, starting from this one small spot in the neighbourhood. Heijala-Land is a fitting place for a talk like this. It is a self-organised biodiverse garden and play space that neighbours have built up step by step. Nothing here feels finished or designed from above – and it should not. It is playful, wild, cozy and alive.
So what is this place, and what does it tell us about how people in Weißensee are shaping their surroundings together?
Here we publish the part of the talk with Michelle.
An island of biodiversity in Weißensee
We wanted to turn this place into a biodiverse biotope. In summer, when you walk down the street and then step in here, you really feel it is three or four degrees cooler than between the buildings outside. That difference is important.
People in Berlin often forget how fragile this is. We are proud of all the green spaces and of our “good climate”, but this will change if we lose places like this.
Heijala-Land is an important natural habitat. There is a fox living here, and a badger, and there are bats as well.
One more thing that is really important to me is this wall. We built it together, following the instructions of Rie, a member of the community initiative from Japan. She showed us a Japanese interlocking technique, so the wall is completely stable without any mortar. What I love about it is that the more moss grows on it, the more stable it becomes. It will be a real pity when this wall disappears.
The future of the space: when bottom up meets top down
What we noticed is that once the government started an official citizen participation process, it did not really click with what was already going on here. It actually slowed things down. It never really aligned the views in a good way, because they started this official process that is just much slower than what was already happening.
And the creativity does not match. It is difficult to connect these bottom up and top-down processes. There are also people who are very used to running so-called participation processes in a way where they organise everything so that you only have certain choices. You are not allowed to think creatively.
For example, they had discussions with kids about this place, but they did not do it here. They did it in a shop at the other end of the street, at least twenty minutes on foot from here. And they only gave them options from a very standard playground system. That is not a participation process.
If I were a kid, I would just say: keep the hill.
I understand there are security questions, but I would really want to rebuild the hill. Because it is a really important topography. Berlin is so flat. A little hill is really nice.
Learning to organise collectively
When we had more active people here, we realised how much you have to work, very consciously, to be anti-hierarchal. There seems to be a strange need for hierarchy and you have to positively resist it . So often I have stood here with someone arriving with a plant and asking: “Where should I put this?” And I answer: “ Where do you want to put it? This is not my space. We are just trying to look after it together.”
It seems that people are used to just being told how to do things, and have habituated themselves to this behaviour. Another great thing was just seeing not just kids, but older people digging in the ground. And you realise so few people in the city get the opportunity to dig in the ground any more.
But the question of hierarchy remains a big challenge. If one person takes the lead all the time, they also take all the responsibility and end up doing most of the work. We have been trying to pass things on and get others to take over parts, but it has been difficult.
The talk circles around struggles and small strategies of how to make spaces in the Kiez more diverse, safe and open. One after another, people share how they feel in Weißensee and where they actually feel they belong.
We speak about our dream spaces in the district, places where FLINTA* would feel good. What many people describe is simple: they want to be somewhere where people are present, where the space feels free and you can really feel a connection.
There is the wish for places where you can practise, meet, try things out without having to pay each time. Where people of different ages and backgrounds can be in the same place.
Just imagine – what if there was a library right in front of the lake?
One thing is clear: some of these spaces already exist in Weißensee.
You can visit Heijala-Land and see how a small leftover corner became a shared garden, a hill, a wall, an island of biodiversity. To learn more, join also Katya’s Romanova audio walk through Weiseensee Brachland.
And, of course, there is KIEZ:MOBIL, which in a way already shows what many people wished for: a small, movable platform that can pop up in different corners of the Kiez, create a temporary public space, and invite people to sit down, talk, and think together. You can also borrow KIEZ:MOBIL for your own events and ideas – more information is available on the website.
Polina Medvedeva
The project is organised by C-SPACE Berlin gGmbH in cooperation with Polina Medvedeva (urban researcher and co-founder of the Feminist Spaces Collective), the series of talks is co-curated by Katya Romanova. It is funded by the “Demokratie leben!” program of the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth.
