Landwehrkanal I

The Landwehrkanal runs straight across mid-city, cutting off some lazy loops of the river Spree. [See end of post for some historical and geographical background information.] It’s good for winter walking: it’s not long, less than eleven km from end to end. And unlike some of the other waterways, it presents no difficulties in the form of blocked-off banks, forests containing wild boars, or absence of public transit and cafes to take refuge in if the weather turns bad.

Landwehrkanal, near upper lock.  Photo by Roehrensee 

We live near the west end of the canal, so we start here and head east. (How low the sun is here in midwinter, how horizontal the light is all day long: if you live in a narrow street the sun may never clear the rooftops in late December and early January. We need a reasonably early start on a winter-afternoon walk, because the sun will set at three-something in the afternoon, and the twilight will begin long before that, with sunset-colors in the sky by two.) 

The west end of the canal and the nearby stretch of the Spree are the cradle of the Second Industrial Revolution (new science-based industries, chemicals and electric motors, powering past the old British coal-and-iron-and-textiles economy in the later nineteenth century). The streets are named for physicists and chemists here: the canal joins the Spree near the corner of Galvani and Einstein, and the street at the next intersection, where the first bridge crosses the canal, is named for the man who made longer submarine travel possible by filtering the air more effectively (Gustav Cauer).

The neighborhood is still full of engineering research institutes—the Technical University, which provided the scientific muscle for the Second Industrial Revolution, is here along the canal. The institutes give the neighborhood some Pop-Art zip. A big Day-Glo orange building that belongs to Materials Science faces the Spree nearby. The Pink Pipe (properly, Circulation Tank 2) stands along the Landwehrkanal, looming in the background of a popular beer garden. It’s a test facility for a research group that works on designing ship hulls and propellers to minimize energy use.

Circulation Tank 2, aka the Pink Pipe: hydraulic research facility on the Landwehrkanal 
(My photo, January 2014)

One of the things I love about Berlin is the unzoned jumble of it. Industrial and commercial and residential are knit together in the neighborhoods. A small well-mannered foundry or a properly housebroken little sawmill might live next door to you (noise and emissions reasonably controlled). Your downstairs neighbor might be a truck-driving school or a bank branch, a veterinary specializing in cats or a firm that defuses old bombs. (Doing the really ticklish work on the bombsite, of course, not under your apartment.)

I remember visiting a little foundry in north-central Berlin in the 1990s, a company that cast parts for the auto industry and the German railroad. Molten metal poured into the molds on this side of the fence, apple trees set fruit on the other side of the fence, in the back garden of the neighbors’ house, with chickens scratching peaceably under the trees.

How sad and dangerous the excessively zoned cities are, in contrast, where all the residential is isolated here, all the commercial is isolated there, all the industry is isolated miles away, with a no-man’s-land of highways and parking lots in between.

Excessively zoned cities remind me of my father’s dinner plate in the 1950s. Meat here, potatoes there, vegetables on the other side: not touching! No casseroles! Can’t tell what might be in them!

Landwehrkanal, middle stretch. On the right is the German HQ of Bombardier Transportation. (This is the part of Bombardier that makes trains, not the part that makes Learjets and CRJs) (Photo, M. Seadle, December 2013)

Excessively zoned cities are a housebreakers’ dream, too: the residential territory is uninhabited during the day, no one will hear you kicking down the door to scarf the owners’ electronics. The commercial-industrial territory is uninhabited at night, same benefit.

And yes, I know that we don’t want an integrated steel mill or a nuclear waste site directly outside the bedroom window, but a lot of commercial-industrial activity is not necessarily so un-neighborly as this. It’s a question of how you want to incur the costs related to potentially un-neighborly behavior. Move the non-residential stuff far away (high costs of drive-time, pollution, crime, etc.)?  Or reduce the un-neighborly behavior (spend to make non-residential activities quiet and clean)?

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Many German cities are less mixed-use than Berlin, but there are also other examples of beautifully unzoned urbanism not far away. Consider:  If you had a city center that was one of the great baroque-architecture showpieces of Europe, would you put a new auto assembly plant close in, right between the seventeenth-century architectural glories and the city park?

Well, yes, Dresden did, and why not, if the plant is handsome and housebroken? (The manufacturing process is quiet; public transit is good, there’s no need to deface the neighborhood with a big parking lot or to create traffic jams at shift changes.) In Dresden the workers assemble high-end Volkswagen models in a jumble of glass geometries at the side of the big city park. (Here’s a photo of the plant, decoratively lit at night. Look!  Not your grandfather’s auto plant!)

And the auto assembly merges almost seamlessly into the rest of life. The plant includes an upscale restaurant where people from all over the area come to eat. (How about a little halibut tempura with mango mousse for a starter, as the subassemblies roll by?) When the NY Philharmonic was visiting Dresden last spring, they used the VW plant for a concert venue. (Alan Gilbert, the director of the NY Phil, says the VW plant is one of his favorite places in the world to play.) 

The composer of one of the pieces on the program re-arranged the piece, which is rather percussion-heavy, to use VW parts for instruments. Brake drums give a nice pure note, it seems.

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Background Info

The Landwehrkanal is the oldest of the major Berlin canals. A Landwehr is a defensive ditch, and some of the eastern portions of the canal follow the path of the moat-cum-drainage ditch that was built in the fifteenth century to add to the city’s defenses and drain high water in the Spree away from the city center. [See A little geography post for more on the Spree and general Berlin geography.] The old drainage ditch was deepened and widened and made navigable in the late 1840s, to provide an efficient heavy-materials delivery route for the booming factory districts in (mostly western) Berlin. Other canals followed, as freight traffic increased.

The hot landscape architect of the time, Peter Joseph Lenné, laid out pleasant tree-lined walks along the banks. It seemed clear at the time that an essential element of a heavy-materials delivery route for a new factory district was landscape gardening, with places for everyone to stroll and watch the deliveries. Perhaps an occasional cafe along the way as well. (Why is it so much more fun to watch barges unload than to watch trucks unload? The Landwehrkanal is too small for present-day industrial work, but the newer canals are still working waterways. The newer canals have their greenways too, scattered with strollers, and when the barges stop to unload, the strollers stop to watch. It is as irresistible as watching the canal locks in operation.)