GRAFT writes about the Future of Living for the Anniversary Edition of the Tagesspiegel
Contradictions are not the city's problem,
they are its quality!
Our attitude toward the future always reflects our current state and how we interpret it. The future only becomes a positive place when we understand that it arises from the present and from our current actions, and is just as worthy of protection as our origins. And this clearly shows why Berlin is the perfect place to think about the future of housing: Berlin's oft-cited incompleteness is the true strength of this city, because it allows us to continually rethink it. So, when we ask how we will live in the future, it's not just an architectural question, but a reflection of our attitude toward coexistence and our vision of a vibrant city.
The social and demographic shifts of recent decades have fundamentally changed the idea of housing as a private retreat within a traditional family model. Today, more people live alone or as single parents than ever before, and at the same time, often in apartments that neither in size nor in structure do justice to this lifestyle. Accordingly, we need housing models that expand the ideal of the idyllic home. Models in which the individual apartment becomes more compact, yet the quality of life is enhanced by communally usable spaces, neighborhood infrastructure, and architecturally intelligent transitions between private and public areas.
Affordable housing can also be created by making apartments smaller, but making them so intelligent in their layout and size that people want to live there. Flexible building structures allow units to grow with their lives as they progress through life. And this is precisely where architects are called upon to apply their experience and inventiveness to design well-functioning and flexible floor plans and achieve high quality.
This doesn't just apply to inner-city apartment blocks. Analogous principles are also feasible for single-family homes. Together with entrepreneur Jana Mrowetz, GRAFT has developed "Urban Cell," a concept for modular residential neighborhoods that aims to make home ownership affordable again with innovative structural, energy-related, and, above all, social solutions. Designed for European metropolitan regions, Urban Cell combines private residential units of various sizes with a communal clubhouse, coworking spaces, multi-purpose guest rooms, and various recreational and leisure activities. This flexibility in use allows one's own living space to grow (and shrink) in line with changes in life.
This creates new living space, but integrates it into a social network rather than simply taking up green space. The option of making do with less space is not based on purely economic considerations. Rather, it's about what quality we can imagine beyond our own four walls and how future neighborhoods develop identities, embedded in the apartments and their residents. And whether they offer their residents diverse opportunities for participation and encounters.
Such concepts for new buildings complement the challenges facing existing residential structures. After all, the housing of the future will largely take place in the buildings that already stand today. Maintaining, preserving, and improving this stock in a climate-neutral, or even better, climate-positive way is becoming increasingly central.
The means by which people's physical and mental health, as well as the habitats of animals and plants, can be protected have long been known: breaking up sealed surfaces, creating (or maintaining) fresh air corridors, integrating animal-friendly planting and trees, using recyclable materials, considering shading, collecting, storing, and reusing rainwater, and keeping space free for movement and interaction... The ideas and suggestions, both large and small, are numerous, and their success is well documented. What prevents us from implementing them and making our city healthier and better?
The lack of this necessary commitment in many places can also be explained by the low homeownership rate in Germany. Historically, due to the urgent post-war reconstruction and the East German planned economy, it is among the lowest in Europe. But homeownership strengthens responsibility, generates commitment, and promotes stability. When we talk about the future of housing, new forms of ownership that enable more people to participate must therefore be much more widely adopted: cooperatives or housing groups, for example.
We must not be drawn into a new plan.
We must not fall into a new planned economy. The political and bureaucratic mechanisms that currently block construction in many places are creating a situation in which the least controversial concept wins the contract, rather than the best. What is urgently needed is the courage to allow ideas to compete and to dare to experiment. Without trust in the stakeholders, there can be no movement and no innovation. This can sometimes also mean reopening discussion processes when conditions in the city have changed. We are thinking specifically of Tempelhofer Feld – because anyone who wants to stifle discussion about a partially different use is essentially building new walls.
We must approach digitalization processes with the same open mind. Artificial intelligence will not replace planners, but it will help simplify processes, increase design diversity, and reduce costs. This is already evident today in the field of serial construction, where AI-supported processes are capable of increasing the quality of buildings by individualizing previously uniform serial products.
This represents a major opportunity, as serial prefabrication generally leads to more cost-effective production and ultimately shorter construction times, which, especially in inner-city areas, translates into fewer construction sites, less space required, and shorter financing cycles. However, this predictability also requires diverse authors: a multitude of companies, materials, and manufacturing processes that enliven the field of serial construction with choice and competition.
Mobility is inextricably linked to housing. The way we move through the city significantly determines how and where we can live. Imagine if emission-free and quiet forms of mobility dominate the streets instead of the combustion engines that are common today – the entire urban fabric would change. Street spaces can be reimagined, areas repurposed and perceived differently; the main road with its through traffic is ultimately no longer a problem. When noise levels drop, fewer soundproofing measures are necessary, and thus construction costs are lower. A different environment for public uses on the ground floor is created, creating a city where I enjoy walking.
If mobility now also includes the vertical or underground dimension, we gain new space for urban quality of life. The example of the magnetic levitation train, with planted and photovoltaic-equipped tracks, could demonstrate how this can be done. Many other innovations can be imagined in a similar way if we move from a dichotomous either/or to an integrative, future-oriented way of thinking.
And here, we shouldn't stop at the city limits, because the Berlin-Brandenburg metropolitan region has long been a reality. Almost 340,000 people commute between Berlin and Brandenburg every day. With fast and reliable local transport connections, new opportunities open up in cities like Angermünde, Frankfurt (Oder), and Wittenberge.
There are many ways to make Berlin a city we enjoy living in. A city whose greatest quality is its unfinished status and its ability to welcome people who seek and desire change. It is not a city of the nobility or merchants and their guilds, but of second-borns, soldiers of fortune, and displaced persons. Huguenots, Russians, Turks, Kurds, Indians, Poles, Syrians, and all those for whom their small towns and villages have become too small. They are not here because all the decisions have already been made. They bring their ideas, their commitment, and their dreams with them, thus contributing to the city's ongoing transformation.
This culture of enabling must not disappear in favor of a culture of obstruction. If vested interests are conserved, if change is blocked, and if diversity is replaced by dogma, then Berlin will lose what made it great. Then the capital of the possible will become a city of missed opportunities. This makes the administrative reform that began in the spring all the more urgent. It should not only assign clear tasks and responsibilities to the employees of the Senate and the districts, but also grant them freedom and scope for action. The futuristic ICC is just as much a part of our city as the traditional eaves; high-rise buildings in Mitte are just as much a part of our city as the bungalows in Mahlsdorf. Living in the future therefore requires an attitude that sees the ambivalence of the city not as a problem, but as its essence. A city is always a compromise. It is loud and quiet, dense and open, planned and grown.
If we accept this, if we not only tolerate the differences but see them as a driving force, then housing will once again be associated with freedom for all people.
