Panorama: Architecture in Germany

It’s all about longing for green, about healthy, competitively-priced food, and about using urban brownfield sites for precisely these purposes. Urban agriculture is an important building block towards a better life for many cities, and signifies a little bit of autarchy in a globalised world. Examples from Berlin and Munich.



“Today and every day: harvesting fresh vegetables and herbs, no kidding!” The sign is a few metres away from the roaring roundabout traffic on Berlin’s Moritzplatz and marks the entrance to the Prinzessinnengarten. Robert Shaw and Marco Clausen, bosses of the non-profit company Nomadisch Grün, are cultivating vegetables to organic standards on 6000 square metres of leased land. A year ago the land was still a brownfield site filled with rubbish, today pumpkins, radishes, potatoes and the community feel are flourishing there. The two garden founders could rely on the active support of their neighbours right from the start. Robert Shaw: “We create the context for this place. The many and varied people who plant things here, do the weeding and watering, and chat together in the garden café bring it to life.” The young people of Kreuzberg explore the vegetable beds, active gardeners talk shop about potatoes, a teacher and her children come across immigrant women from Russia and Turkey who are experts at gardening. It’s from them that Robert Shaw – as a self-taught gardener – picks up the best tips for cultivating vegetables. Anyone can harvest and buy vegetables and herbs in the Prinzessinnengarten – people who help out regularly can do so at a particularly good price. But unlike traditional German allotments there are no individual plots, with one exception: schoolchildren and pre-schoolers look after their own beds from sowing to harvest.

Urban design from the bottom up

Agriculture in the city is not a new idea. The first “Community Gardens” came into being in New York in the seventies, small green oases with flowerbeds and self-supply vegetable cultivation. The founders of the Prinzessinnengarten in Berlin took their inspiration from the urban farmland in Cuba. Vegetables and fruit from urban farming are allowed to be sold freely according to supply and demand there – a market-orientated niche in Cuban socialism and a way to ease the effects of the economic and nutritional crisis. During his stay in Cuba Robert Shaw appreciated the healthy groceries from the urban farms, the relaxed atmosphere in the community garden and the opportunity to put ideas into practice directly without major bureaucratic hurdles.

Mobile farmland

Anyone who wants to design their city can do it: the success of the Prinzessinnengarten is also dependent on the availability of urban spaces that can be acquired practically and profitably. The gardeners of Moritzplatz have transformed the brownfield site on their doorstep into flourishing life.



The Prinzessinnengarten differs from its role models in one essential point: the beds are portable. The vegetables grow in disused plastic bread crates, potatoes sprout in rice sacks, herbs in former milk cartons. This method of cultivation makes gardening independent of the on-site soil quality, and the urban farmland remains portable. After all the Moritzplatz oasis is a temporary garden. Because when the Berlin Liegenschaftsfonds (property fund) sells the site one day, the urban farmers will have to give way. Thanks to Nomadisch Grün’s crating concept, relocation shouldn’t be a problem: it’s a form of agriculture that also works on house roofs, car parks and temporary brownfield sites of all kinds.

“We plant, you harvest!”

Benjamin Bauer and Max von Grafenstein on the other hand are investing in permanent farmland. After studying organic farming, the two of them took their business idea of “we plant, you harvest” to the capital. Their target group is stressed city dwellers that have neither the time nor expertise for their own vegetable beds, but still want to eat healthily and harvest their own rocket, beetroot and radishes. The two men have set up the Havelmathen Bauerngarten (farmers’ garden) on the western edge of Berlin, a large circular plot with a spiral of herbs in the middle. You can rent part of it for 290 Euro per season, which includes seeds, equipment, watering and advice. All that the tenants then have to do is weeding – and harvesting. City farmer Benjamin Bauer is happy with the first season: “We have a total of 72 customers on contract, who bring their family and friends onto the field with them, so that at the moment there are around 270 people using the Bauerngarten.”

A new dimension in urban development

The initiators of the Munich-based Agropolis project are pursuing an ambitious strategic target. The team of architects, urban planners and landscape architects is committed to the “rediscovery of harvesting in everyday urban life” and is working on establishing regional food production as a new dimension of urban development in the 21st century. The group has substantiated its concept for the large urban growth area of Freiham to the west of Munich – and won the “Open Scale” idea competition in 2009 with it, to which the city invited contestants. Freiham, the new urban district that will in future accommodate 20 000 residents, will be a building site for at least 30 years. “We suggest running a temporary farm in Freiham to ensure consistent interim utilisation of the construction land”, says architect and urban planner Jörg Schröder of Agropolis. Fields are to be cultivated, and cows, pigs and chickens kept.

Urban agriculture of the future

“This interim utilisation is a building block to integrate agriculture and nutrition specifically into the development of the metropolis of Munich”, according to Schröder. Avenues of 7 000 fruit trees are to be created, families can lease “harvesting rights” for individual trees. And according to the Agropolis plan, the “Viktualientram” on Route 19 will start to bring fresh food from the Freiham agricultural park right in the city centre starting in 2015. A supply route that is highly recommendable for reasons of protecting the climate. The thing is, transporting groceries that are not produced locally into the cities accounts for a high proportion of the carbon dioxide emissions caused there.



To expand the urban agriculture campaign, Agropolis is investing in networking between existing initiatives that are involved with healthy, sustainable nutrition. They are all to be shown on the “city food map”: the 42 Munich farmers’ markets as well as the twelve urban farms, the city’s “herb garden” programme with over 6 000 plots for people to do their own cultivation, or the farms in the green belt of the metropolis.

Maybe that’s what the agriculture of tomorrow will be like in the cities: environmentally friendly, small-scale, mobile and well-networked.