It has been decided: The approximately 150-hectare development area in the north of Schönefeld (Der Tagesspiegel reported) will be built according to plans by the team led by graduate engineer and university professor Christa Reicher from the architectural office RHA Reicher Haase Associates from Aachen, who developed their design together with Carla Lo Landscape Architecture Vienna and Lindschulte Ingenieurgesellschaft mbH from Nordhorn. The north of Schönefeld extends to the left and right of Hans-Grade-Allee in the immediate vicinity of the train station, the swimming pool and the town hall and is intended to accommodate around 10,000 new residents.
Schönefeld’s Mayor Christian Hentschel (Bürgerinitiative Schönefeld/BiS) is slowly reaching the limits of what is affordable with the development of the areas, as he reported on Monday evening (22 August) in the ARD daily topics (“Mittendrin”): “Today there will be 700 Apartments ready there. Next week 450 apartments will be finished there and then another 300. And these apartments are already taken, yes?! It feels like you arrive here and everyone gets off at the same time. And then the next bus will come.” Almost unchecked housing growth, which poses great challenges for Hentschel’s administration. Kathrin Sczepan, Head of the Construction and Investor Service Department of the municipality of Schönefeld, said in the article: “I need the traffic planner, who hopefully will come on November 1st. Then there are still two or three more specialists missing in the urban land use planning team. In the call for tenders there is also a “green spot”, including someone who deals with climate protection. Engineers are also gold dust.” The development is rapid. Not only the building administration is under pressure.
“There is currently a lack of 60 to 100 educators to ensure the supply of social infrastructure,” says Hentschel when asked by this newspaper. The designation of new residential and commercial areas brings with it thousands of new residents and many new tradespeople. This has an impact on the administrative work, for example in the residents’ and trade office, in the area of taxes, the traffic authority, the building yard or even IT. “In addition, there is a lack of specialists in the building department – civil engineers, land use planners, structural engineers, traffic planners – for the settlement development of investors and trade and the necessary (transport) infrastructure,” says the mayor of the Tagesspiegel. Because Schönefeld Nord is not the only project that the community currently has in the pipeline.
In mid-August, the companies Alpine, DLE and GSG Berlin founded a project company for the development of the Waßmannsdorfer Tor industrial park in Schönefeld near Berlin. The purpose of the company is to develop an area of around 15 hectares on the B 96a into a commercial site with areas for production, offices, research, laboratories and light industry – according to the companies. In a first phase, the steps involved in obtaining building rights are to be defined and a resolution for a development plan procedure to be reached in the municipality of Schönefeld. This would be followed by the concrete needs assessment and the creation of further planning bases. The land in question is already designated as commercial space in the municipality’s land use plan. The Brandenburg Economic Development Agency assumes that due to the growing demand for space in the “boom” corridor between Ostkreuz and BER or Grünheide, the demand for commercial space will already exceed the supply there by 2025.
In the volume “New City Quarters – Concepts and Built Reality” 2021, the Federal Institute for Building, Urban and Spatial Research worked out that new quarters are often designated and built without checking the resilience of the traffic and other infrastructure. Seen from the outside, this is also the case in Schönefeld-Nord. And from the inside?
“From my point of view, the currently largest infrastructure project in Germany, such as this third-largest airport, which was built on a greenfield site, so to speak, must be understood as a joint task,” says Hentschel. Although BER is located entirely in the Schönefeld municipal area, infrastructure projects would nevertheless have a national and, in this case, transnational impact. If you think about the extension of the (Berlin) U7 and several motorway junctions. “The municipality itself has switched to no longer considering and evaluating individual development plans in isolation, but for the entire municipality on the basis of a mobility concept,” says Hentschel: “Basically, inter-municipal cooperation is also expedient here and actually indispensable if you the BER and the now emerging “Boomtown”, which we refer to as “Neocity” here.” The municipality of Schönefeld, the Dahme-Spreewald business development agency and the cities of Königs Wusterhausen and Wildau have jointly commissioned a corresponding external strategy paper.
With a view of the north of Schönefeld, the mayor speaks of a “beacon in the field of building culture and sustainability”. Everything has been thought of, says Hentschel, speaking in a staccato style:
Overall network of different neighborhood units and different green areas
Quarters always linked to a central open space axis
Per neighborhood, one or two neighborhood spaces with neighborhood garage, MobHub, and other uses
Various block typologies: community block, green living, cluster living, urban block, high-tech block, productive block, work on the railway
Six day-care centers always related to green/landscape areas
Open space forms the framework for the new district
Recreational axis with small neighborhood squares, freely playable lawns and groups of trees
Seepark as the central park of the new district
Special woody plants (climate tree assortment)
Special furniture to establish identity and create different atmospheres
Roof areas optionally as semi-intensive retention roofs as rain storage for process water (garden irrigation, toilet flushing if necessary)
16 district garages with e- and share mobility and other offers
Photovoltaic systems on roofs and buildings
Use of sustainable building materials
Own biomethane combined heat and power plant with peak load boiler, geothermal power plant
Use of digital offers/apps to control energy flows, mobility, etc.
The planning area in the north of Schönefeld is the heart of the community development. Residential construction dominates there. In recent years, new districts have emerged, such as the poet’s quarter, the Sonnenhöfe, the town hall quarter and the town hall villas. Buwog is currently building new condominiums in the immediate vicinity of the town hall under the label “Schönfelds Neue Mitte”. Around 4,000 people currently live in the new development areas alone, and an additional 1,500 residents are expected even without competition. Around 7,200 people live in the district of Schönefeld, and around 19,000 in the entire community with its six districts. Now there are 10,000 more.
On Friday (August 26) the results of the competition were presented for the first time in a vernissage at the Dialogforum Airport Berlin Brandenburg (Mittelstraße 11, 12529 Schönefeld). The exhibition in the Dialogue Forum will then be open to the public from August 29 to September 9 on weekdays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
