Landing an aircraft at the old Berlin Tempelhof Airport used to involve a descent path that took the plane low over the residential neighbourhoods of Neukölln, Kreuzberg, and Tempelhof, past the roofs of six-storey nineteenth-century apartment blocks, and down onto two enormous concrete runways set inside the tight urban geometry of central Berlin.
It was one of the more unusual approaches in commercial aviation, because the entire operation was happening not on the outskirts of a city, the way most airports work, but in the middle of one, roughly four kilometres south of Alexanderplatz. Which is why when Tempelhof finally closed to air traffic on 30 October 2008, the question of what to do with the roughly 300 hectares of prime central Berlin real estate the closure released back to the city became one of the more consequential urban planning decisions in modern European history.
The eventual answer turned out to be almost nothing. Which is not what any of the property developers, city officials, or infrastructure planners involved in the debate had expected, and which is why the story of what happened to Tempelhof after the airport shut down is now cited by urbanists across Europe as a specific example of what a city can look like when its residents refuse to hand over their public spaces to whoever offers the highest bid for them.
What Tempelhof used to be
The airport itself had a long and complicated history. The airfield was originally a Prussian military parade ground in the eighteenth century, then repurposed as a picnic ground for Berliners in the nineteenth. It was formally designated as an airport in 1923, and Deutsche Luft Hansa, the predecessor of the modern Lufthansa, was founded there in 1926. During the 1930s, the Nazi government commissioned the architect Ernst Sagebiel to design a new terminal building on the site, which opened in 1941 as one of the largest buildings in the world by floor area. The terminal’s arc-shaped facade, which stretches for more than a kilometre around the airfield, was designed on a scale intended to project the ideology of the regime that commissioned it, and remains today one of the more architecturally imposing survivals of the period anywhere in Germany.
The airport’s most famous chapter came after the war. Between June 1948 and May 1949, during the Soviet blockade of West Berlin, Tempelhof became the main hub of the Berlin Airlift, when American, British, French, and other Allied aircraft flew in food, fuel, and other supplies to the two million residents of West Berlin who would otherwise have been starved into Soviet control. At the peak of the operation, cargo planes were landing at Tempelhof once every ninety seconds, twenty-four hours per day, for nearly a year. The airlift kept West Berlin alive. It also cemented Tempelhof’s reputation as one of the more symbolically important airports in Europe, and made the Nazi-era terminal building, which the airlift pilots had used as their operations base, a strange kind of Cold War monument to the reversal of what it was originally built to represent.
Commercial operations continued at Tempelhof through the second half of the twentieth century, though the airport’s runways, at just over two kilometres each, were too short to handle the larger modern jets that came into service from the 1970s onward. By the time of the closure, Tempelhof was handling around 350,000 passengers per year on smaller aircraft, primarily short-haul European routes. The decision to close it, made by the Berlin Senate in 2007, was driven by the plan to consolidate all Berlin flights at the still-under-construction Berlin Brandenburg Airport further south. The last two commercial flights departed on 30 October 2008.
What Berliners did instead
According to the city of Berlin’s own official reference material on Park Tempelhofer Feld, maintained by the Berlin State government on its Berlin.de public information portal, the immediate question after the airport closed was what to do with the enormous open space at the centre of the closed airfield. The runways, taxiways, and grassy zones between them added up to roughly 300 hectares of contiguous flat ground, which was more open space than any other single location in Berlin, and more than most world cities have at their disposal in any comparable central location. The terminal building itself was declared a protected landmark, which meant it couldn’t be demolished. Everything else was theoretically available for development, and by 2009 the Berlin Senate had already begun consulting property developers about master plans for the site.
What happened next, according to the American public radio network NPR’s contemporaneous 2010 reporting on the park’s opening day by the Berlin-based correspondent Monika Mueller-Kroll, was that the city decided to open the site as a temporary public park while the redevelopment plans were being finalised. On 8 May 2010, the gates were opened and the concrete airfield, the two runways, and the grassy zones between them were made available to the public. Roughly 200,000 people showed up that first weekend. Kite-flyers filled the airspace above the runways. Cyclists and skaters rolled down the taxiways at speeds no city street would have allowed them. Groups of Berliners set up picnic blankets in the middle of grassy areas that had, twenty years earlier, been considered restricted airport perimeter.
The city’s original master plan called for building 4,700 apartments and a new civic library on roughly a quarter of the site, keeping the runways and central grassland as public parkland. The plan looked eminently reasonable from a housing policy standpoint. Berlin was, and remains, in the middle of a decade-long housing shortage, and central land is exceptionally scarce. But the Berliners who had, by 2013, adopted the temporary park as one of their favourite public spaces were not enthusiastic. A citizens’ initiative called 100% Tempelhofer Feld gathered enough signatures to force a binding referendum on the development plan. On 25 May 2014, the city voted. Sixty-four point three per cent of Berliners voted to preserve the entire site as public open space, with no construction at all permitted on the runways, taxiways, or grassland between them. The referendum was legally binding. The apartments were not built. The civic library was not built. The runways stayed open.
What that means today, on the daily use of the space, is that a stretch of Berlin roughly the size of Central Park in New York sits at the centre of the city with almost nothing on it. The two former runways, each just over two kilometres long, remain intact as continuous strips of concrete running north-south and east-west across the field. Cyclists use them for uninterrupted rides through the middle of the city. Kite-buggy operators use them for the kind of high-speed wind-driven sledging that requires long unbroken flat surfaces that essentially don’t exist anywhere else in urban Europe. Berlin’s kite-flying community, which is unusually large by European standards, uses the open air above the airfield for what is by some accounts the largest kite-flying scene of any major world capital. A six-kilometre cycling and skating trail loops the perimeter. Dog-walkers, sunbathers, barbeque enthusiasts, and roller-skaters share the rest of it. There are no cars, no motorbikes, and no mopeds anywhere on the site.
What the site is, on the accumulated evidence of its first fifteen years of civilian use, is one of the more unusual public spaces in Europe. Which is what the residents of a city that had, within the same century, lived through Nazi propaganda architecture, the Berlin Airlift, forty years of Cold War division, and reunification, decided they preferred to a set of eminently sensible apartment blocks. The runways, on the current municipal record, are staying open.
