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Berlin’s Take on a High-Tech ‘Smart City’ Could Be Different
September 22nd 2019
By CityLab
Right now, it’s hard to imagine what Siemensstadt will eventually look like. Surrounded by old brick factory buildings and shuttered offices, the area sits at the intersection of two large roads in a neglected northern outskirts of Berlin. Cars speed by faster than they should; every now and then, a solitary traveler emerges from the underground train station. Owned by the industrial giant that gave the suburb its name, Siemens, the 50-acre site doesn’t give off much of a sense of community.
But Berlin’s new mega-project aims to change that. Over the next decade, Siemens will spend more than €600 million to create what it’s been calling “Siemensstadt 2.0,” a “smart city” project with research facilities, space for startups, logistics centers, and a new production facility—the company’s largest worldwide—geared towards renewable energy, transportation, and digital infrastructure products. Along with its new campus, the company is also creating something of a neighborhood: Some 3,000 new apartments are on the way, plus kindergartens and schools, green spaces, and restaurants, hotels, and retailers. An abandoned railway line nearby will be revived, connecting travelers to Berlin’s new (as yet unfinished) airport in just 40 minutes.
In late 2018, Siemens and an eager Berlin city government signed a statement of intent. The city agreed to spend half a million euros on updating surrounding infrastructure and this summer, Siemens asked 15 architecture firms to come up with ideas for the new neighborhood’s layout. Construction could start as early as late 2021. “There’s a fence here now,” Yashar Azad, a Siemens spokesperson, told CityLab on a recent tour of the site. “But that will be gone eventually. There’s a lot of unused space here and we want to open everything up.”
Some locals are cautiously enthusiastic about the opportunity the project could represent for the struggling area. Klaus Abel is the head of the local branch of Germany’s biggest union, IG Metall, which represents many of Siemens’ current metalworking employees. In a statement, he welcomed the project, saying it would bring jobs—but Abel also added that it was important for “Siemens to take their staff with them into this new world of work and train them.”
Other residents have expressed a familiar set of concerns about traffic and construction noise, a district politician, Daniel Buchholz, told a local newspaper. The threat of gentrification also looms large as highly paid tech workers move in. “The rents will go up,” one local told a reporter.
District leaders have commissioned a study to see whether Siemensstadt and another nearby district, Charlottenburg North, should be subject to special Berlin zoning laws created to protect neighborhood character and prevent gentrification. Berlin city councilors have recently been arguing about capping rents for the next five years and there are strict rules on rent controls and historic buildings as well as regulations designed to safeguard unique community characteristics.
Compounding both the concern and the enthusiasm is the nearby Tegel airport project. Once this airport is decommissioned in favor of Berlin’s new, long delayed Brandenburg airport, it too is slated to become something of an IT hub. Tegel’s “Urban Tech Republic” development and Siemensstadt 2.0 are only around six kilometers apart and will form a corridor in Berlin’s north west. City planners estimate 20,000 jobs will be created between the two projects, as well as housing for 25,000.
Such tech-driven development projects in the U.S. have faced fierce criticism for alienating locals rather than benefiting them. In New York City, Amazon ended up withdrawing its plans for a second headquarters due to anti-tech backlash; all around the Bay Area, the unbridled growth of the industry has contributed to a dire housing shortage. Azad stresses that Siemensstadt 2.0 will be different. “We are placing a lot of emphasis on regular dialogue and we are reaching out to church groups, sport clubs and schools,” he said. “We are also planning to include locals in the architectural competition, where they can express their wishes and concerns to the jury [deciding on the winners].”
Siemens is determined to be a good neighbor in Berlin, says Cedrik Nieke, a Siemens board member who is helping lead the project. In San Francisco, the tech boom “pushed normal society right out,” he says. “We have to ensure that that doesn’t happen here.” The name of the development is also something that the local community will decide together, and 30 percent of the apartments Siemens is building will be reserved for low-income tenants. He’ll be personally invested in the prosperity of the area: Nieke said that he would like to move there eventually, too.