My research has been primarily focused on the effects that war has had on green spaces in Berlin. Berliners use green spaces in their daily lives to take a break from city life. However, these green spaces were heavily bombed during both World War I and World War II creating a lot of blank space in the city (Jackish, 2014). Along with many buildings being bombed, Berlin had a lot of above ground bunkers and air raid towers. Finding a purpose for these has also been a challenge that Berlin faced. This has lead to Berlin putting a hard focus on maintaining green spaces within the city.<\/p>\n
How has Berlin adapted to be able to maintain these green spaces despite having forest and buildings devastated during the wars?<\/p>\n
After researching the cities plan to reincarnate bombed buildings, bunkers, and forest, I found that they were turning them into green spaces and other innovative sites (McDonnell, 2012). Spaces like Devil’s Mountain was created after rubble was put on top of an old Nazi military academy and then turned into an old American Spy station (O’Sullivan, 2017). This became the largest hill in a rather flat country. The innovation that lead to this mountain is what they have been doing all over the city. Turning old bunkers into green parks within the city, rubble into mountains. The ideas are endless.<\/p>\n
While conducting my surveys, I primarily wanted to understand how Germans are educated on their knowledge of the history of green spaces. I asked questions like “Where you taught about the history of green spaces in school in Berlin”, in which every participant said no. “Is there any historical event that may attribute to the amount of green spaces in Berlin”. I got some varied responses but it was primarily about the use of old bunkers for green spaces. Another interesting response that I found was that many people attribute the way Berlin was formed to its amount of green spaces. They told me that Berlin was formed with many small villages and large green spaces between. When Berlin formed, they kept as much green space between the villages.<\/p>\n
Both of these answers are crucial for my research. One of them supports my overall research question, while the other provides another point to take into perspective when thinking about my research. Understanding that people in Berlin recognize the history of green spaces supports my research question that the history of war has affected the green spaces. However, the other point about the formation of Berlin as a whole city gives me further background knowledge of why Berlin has a large number of green spaces.<\/p>\n
Sustainability plays a role in this as well because Germans were discarding rubble in ways that allowed for new spaces by using recycled material. I think that the innovation that they had when doing this comes from a sustainable mindset that is set deep in their minds.<\/p>\n
I have really enjoyed this exchange and getting to understand different perspectives. I think that it is very important to understand how our country is viewed by other global citizens and the way that our culture is being perceived.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My research has been primarily focused on the effects that war has had on green spaces in Berlin. Berliners use green spaces in their daily lives to take a break from city life. However, these green spaces were heavily bombed during both World War I and World War II creating a lot of blank space […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4393,"featured_media":202,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4393"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/advancedenvironmentalresearchandtransformativesustainabilityexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}