KarunaNews Story

Tempelhofer Feld, a 953-acre decommissioned airfield that is the German capital’s largest open space, highlights a question that many urban governments are faced with -- what to do with abandoned airports when green spaces in urban areas are declining and affecting peoples’ health. That’s why success stories like Tempelhofer Feld are so significant. The airfield was reopened in 2010 by the Berlin Senate as a city park and residents voted in 2014 to preserve the space completely for public use. The city’s Senate has run a competition to unearth new ideas for the development of Tempelhofer Feld, with the winners including proposals for installing a water slide, a library and autonomous vehicles. Yet for one visitor, one of the most important features is its connection to Germany’s difficult and dark times. “My wife is Jewish and Russian, so it’s an opportunity to talk to the kids about the Nazis and the Holocaust,” says Felix Koch, who lives in Cologne but visits regularly. “… you have people forgetting about what happened, and the generation that experienced it all is dying out.”