Air, light, sunshine and lots of greenery: Berlin's dream of housing for all
IN PICTURES A tour of Berlin's suburbs, where the Weimar Republic realised its dream of healthy housing, combining architectural innovation, functionalism and modern design.
These days, it’s not just drones that have been flying around here. Numbers have been flying too.
In just one week, the Bundestag discussed two budgets: the 2025 budget, which was never presented due to the government crisis, and the 2026 budget.
It has been a surreal week: everyone has been keeping track of their own wallets and the public purse. What does this expenditure mean? This cut? Will that reform ever happen? The figures are enormous. Like the infamous Sondervermögen, disguised debt that divides experts. The problems are also enormous. And the construction sites to be opened. Because while we talk about drones, wars and broken-down trains, housing has become a national emergency again.
And here’s a fact that often surprises outsiders: Germany is not a nation of homeowners. Barely 47% of Germans own the home they live in. Compare that to the UK, where home ownership is about 65%, or the US, closer to 66%.
Renting is expensive: a student in Berlin pays between €500 and €1,200 per month. In 2024, 400,000 flats were promised: 252,000 were built. In 2025, just over 100,000. A deficit that has been accumulating for at least 25 years.
The 2026 budget promises €23 billion over five years to fill the gap: social housing, support for self-builds, various bonuses.
But will it be enough? And above all: what will be built, how, and for whom? In Germany, as you know, it’s not fashionable to talk about vision. Many still quote Helmut Schmidt’s famous motto: “Wer Visionen hat, sollte zum Arzt gehen.” (Anyone who has visions should go to the doctor).
Yet, when it comes to housing and cities, vision matters.
We Italians know this well: from the Renaissance harmony of Pienza to the nightmare of Napoli’s Scampia. European social housing also carries its burdens: soulless neighbourhoods, hastily constructed, isolated and degraded. This pattern repeats from Paris to Cologne, from Madrid to Milan.
For this reason, I would advise anyone who wants a new major housing programme in Germany today to take a walk. Not among graphs and press conferences, but in the Berlin neighbourhoods built between the First World War and the end of the 1920s.
There, far from tourism, the best fruits of that season still live on. An era of continuous crisis, yet capable of producing quality social architecture. Neighbourhoods that are still alive after a century, inhabited by old and new Germans. Not utopias, not cathedrals in the desert. But houses and urban spaces that have become UNESCO World Heritage Sites. And that is where I am taking you today, with my camera.
“...to guarantee every German a healthy home.”
So reads Article 155 of the Weimar Constitution of 1919. A sentence that sounds surprising today: one of the world’s first recognitions of the right to healthy and adequate housing. Not many constitutional texts have explicitly stated this – less than a dozen to date: not Italy, nor the United Kingdom, nor the United States.1
But where did this urgency come from? From the harsh reality of the time.
In Berlin, even before the First World War, the housing situation was catastrophic. It was an industrial city that had grown at a frenetic pace, with hundreds of thousands of workers crammed into buildings that had been constructed hastily and poorly. In 1905, nine out of ten Berliners lived in so-called Mietskasernen – five-storey ‘rental barracks’ with no lifts and tiny apartments.
Behind the now renovated and extremely expensive façades of Prenzlauer Berg, a century ago darkness, damp and poor hygiene reigned. Almost half of the dwellings had toilets in the courtyard or stairwell. Many one-room flats housed entire families. Quite a few were rented ‘in shifts’, with people coming in to sleep when others left: as many as sixty people were registered as ‘residents’ in those Berlin rooms. The war, by halting all new construction, did the rest.
At the time, there was talk of Wohnungselend, housing misery. A social time bomb. This led to the idea of radical policies: taxes on rents, solidarity contributions paid by landlords, support for housing cooperatives. And above all, a change of perspective: Berlin had to stop growing vertically and open up to the horizon. Greenery, light, air.
The decisive step came in 1920: the creation of Greater Berlin, with the incorporation of the suburbs. In one day, the city became the second largest in the world in terms of area after Los Angeles, and the third largest in terms of population after London and New York. A new metropolis, with room for experimentation.2
This is where the visionary figures of the Weimar era come into play.
Martin Wagner, a social democratic urban planner, was responsible for building and urban planning in Berlin from 1926 to 1933. For him, the city had to breathe. He distinguished between ‘sanitary greenery’ – necessary for life – and decorative greenery. He imagined Berlin as a landscape city, made up of low-rise neighbourhoods surrounded by nature, with connected suburbs and open spaces as urban lungs. And then there was Bruno Taut, a socialist and prolific architect, driven by an almost utopian idea: if people live in humane conditions, they also live more peacefully and civilly. For this reason, he dared to break with the monotonous greyness of the Mietskasernen. He coloured the houses. Red, blue, yellow, green: against the darkness of the courtyards, his architecture offered light and colour.
Together, Wagner and Taut left their mark, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Hufeisensiedlung in Britz, with its horseshoe shape surrounded by greenery. The Wohnstadt Carl Legien in Prenzlauer Berg, built for workers’ cooperatives. The Weiße Stadt in Reinickendorf, with the modern lines of the Zeilenbau. The Schillerpark, a jewel of Neues Bauen, architectural modernism. The Gartenstadt Falkenberg, the ‘colourful box garden city’. Siemensstadt, which saw architects such as Walter Gropius and Hans Scharoun at work. And the Onkel-Tom-Siedlung, famous for its terraced houses surrounded by woods.
They were houses for the people. They were also a political, social and aesthetic project. An experiment to reinvent urban coexistence. And perhaps also to design a new humanity.
Hufeisensiedlung Britz – Licht, Luft, Sonne: light, fresh air, sun.
📍 The residential complex, known as the “Hufeisensiedlung” (Horseshoe Settlement), is part of the Großsiedlung Britz, Neukölln District.
The quintessential icon of Berlin’s social modernism is undoubtedly the Hufeisensiedlung, or ‘horseshoe settlement’, designed by Bruno Taut between 1925 and 1931.
This remarkable 350-metre-long horseshoe-shaped block encircles an ancient glacial pond, transforming it into a communal courtyard that opens on one side. It perfectly embodies the modernist principles of Licht, Luft, Sonne—light, air, sun—along with abundant greenery. These elements represented not just architectural ideals but fundamental rights to be guaranteed for everyone.
But the horseshoe is only the heart of a larger project. To the west is the “Hüsung”: a second ring-shaped courtyard, inspired by rural villages. Around it are rows of terraced houses, with variations in colour and orientation that avoid monotony despite being based on only two models.
Contemporaries nicknamed it “Rote Front” (Red Front) and “Chinese Wall” due to its distinctive red façades, which remain striking today. Taut had no intention of camouflaging the houses; rather, he deliberately created a stark contrast with the conservative Heimatstil villas being constructed nearby—German architecture in its most uninspired form.
The vision was ambitious: to provide affordable, attractive and healthy housing for the working class. The reality skewed more middle class, with office workers, civil servants and artisans becoming the primary residents. Nevertheless, the neighbourhood established itself as an exemplary model of quality housing accessible to a broad spectrum of society.
Today, the Hufeisensiedlung is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and, in part, a living museum. Since 2012, visitors have been able to visit the information centre in the front building or even rent a house furnished in 1920s style for a few nights. However, it is not a theme park: it is a living neighbourhood, with cultivated gardens, children playing and residents proud to live in a utopia that, a century later, continues to function.
Wohnstadt Carl Legien – Urban life with light and colour
📍 Prenzlauer Berg. The settlement is located east of Prenzlauer Allee, between Schönhauser Allee and Prenzlauer Allee, along Erich-Weinert-Straße.
While Britz exemplifies the garden city concept, Carl Legien represents the urban settlement model. I see it daily when leaving my home, which was built in the 1990s. Located in the heart of Prenzlauer Berg, near the Weissensee border, these districts hold significance beyond Berlin’s architectural history—they served as the main stage for the peaceful revolution of 1989, later captured in television dramas.
Here, Bruno Taut and Franz Hillinger constructed six long U-shaped blocks between 1928 and 1930—compact and dense, yet filled with light and air. These weren’t isolated houses in green surroundings, but modern, functional flats equipped with kitchens, bathrooms, balconies and courtyards. Balconies were provided even for workers: no longer a luxury, but a right. The designs included space for fresh air and “community” fruit trees.
Each building faces large tree-lined courtyards, accessible from the street on one side to allow sunlight and breezes to flow through.
All flats benefit from greenery—gone were the narrow, dark and unhealthy backyards of the Mietskasernen. Colourful loggias and curved balconies soften the austere lines, while community is fostered through shared amenities: communal laundries, collective spaces and a small internal shopping centre.
The choice of name is not accidental. In 1930, the complex was dedicated to Carl Legien, a social democratic trade union leader who organised the general strike against the attempted anti-Weimar putsch of 1920.
Upon seizing power, the National Socialists enacted their revenge by renaming streets in the neighbourhood after Great War battles and combatants, while also covering Taut’s vibrant colours with grey. Only after reunification did the façades reclaim their original warm tones of red, blue and yellow—a welcoming carousel of soft colours. Meanwhile, the GDR had altered the street names, which still today bear the names of anti-fascists honoured by the Democratic Republic.
Strolling along Erich-Weinert-Straße or Gubitzstraße, you immediately sense a radical departure from nineteenth-century urban planning. Here, streets no longer serve as ornamental façades concealing decay, but function as corridors leading to open, bright, communal courtyards. Balconies overlook these peaceful spaces, where residents can enjoy either tranquility or the cheerful sounds of children at play. While the exterior of this settlement might appear somewhat anonymous, the interior transforms the experience with abundant greenery, natural light, and vibrant splashes of colour.
This architectural experiment was genuinely affordable for working-class families of the time. Today, it continues to embody, in every brick and beam, a simple yet revolutionary idea: that even a densely populated city can be equitable, healthy, and deeply humane.
Weiße Stadt – The white city
📍 Reinickendorf, along Schillerpromenade / Aroser Allee.
While the Carl Legien complex featured vibrant colors in an urban setting, the Weiße Stadt (White City) in Reinickendorf represents pure modernism: clean geometric lines, predominantly white facades, and essential, functional spaces all designed for comfortable living.
Built between 1929 and 1931 by Otto Rudolf Salvisberg, Bruno Ahrends and Wilhelm Büning, the Weiße Stadt (White City) addressed two pressing needs: providing efficient housing for thousands of Berliners while embodying the principles of Bauhaus and Neues Bauen. The distinctive fan-shaped blocks, suspended access galleries, clustered vertical balconies and bridges spanning streets were all carefully designed to maximize natural light, enhance functionality and create an impression of architectural lightness.
Yet despite its name, the white façades were far from monotonous. Vibrant coloured doors, blue window frames, red roofs and thoughtful chromatic details throughout the common areas and courtyards create a surprising and dynamic visual rhythm.
The symbolic block, suspended above Aroser Allee, reflects the sun from the south and turns yellow on the shaded north side, with a blue strip on the roof — a small spectacle of light and colour in the middle of the city.
Though compact, each flat featured modern kitchens, bathrooms, balconies and access to shared amenities including laundry facilities, vegetable gardens and green courtyards. The innovative maisonette design provided street-level entrances with private gardens on the ground floor and duplex apartments above. Despite its peripheral location, the neighbourhood maintained strong connectivity through twenty-five local shops that satisfied residents’ daily needs.
Innovative infrastructure made the Weiße Stadt cutting-edge: no coal stoves, but a central district heating system instead. This system deserves separate discussion as it represents the most efficient method for managing both traditional and renewable urban energy sources—a standard adopted in East Berlin during the GDR era but subsequently neglected by West Berlin. The development also featured optimised space usage without compromising resident comfort.
Schillerpark Siedlung – rhythm and colour of red brick
📍 Berlin-Wedding, in the Mitte district, adjacent to Schillerpark
While the Weiße Stadt embodies the clean, geometric aesthetics of the Bauhaus, the Schillerpark Siedlung in Wedding reveals another facet of modernity: warm red brick and the harmonious rhythm of loggias and balconies.
Designed by Bruno Taut between 1924 and 1930, the Schillerpark Siedlung opens onto the adjacent park of the same name, offering ample green space. The apartments, facing south-west and south-east, maximise exposure to natural light. Each block is designed to optimise ventilation: three units per landing with the central flat slightly protruding ensure air and sunlight in every room.
Red brick façades are enhanced with exposed concrete pillars, loggias and balconies featuring white plaster details—a restrained design that stands in contrast to the vibrant colors of other garden cities. The semi-open courtyards provide recreational spaces and children’s play areas, while communal laundry rooms in the attics foster a sense of community life.
Despite the simplifications imposed by the economic crisis of the 1920s, the innovative spirit of the project remains evident: internal green spaces, solar orientation and functional yet people-friendly buildings.
Gartenstadt Falkenberg – the garden city “colour box”
📍Treptow-Köpenick, East Berlin, a few minutes’ walk from S-Grünau station
If Schillerpark Siedlung is all about red brick and functionality, Gartenstadt Falkenberg is the opposite: an explosion of colour. It is no coincidence that it has gone down in history as the Tuschkastensiedlung – the ‘watercolour box’.
Located in Treptow-Köpenick in the far south-east of Berlin, not far from the airport, this area was selected in 1912 by the building cooperative (founded twenty years earlier) to create an authentic garden city. The project was entrusted to the young Bruno Taut, who had recently returned from a study trip to England with the German Garden City Society.
The first nucleus, the Akazienhof, maintains a rather traditional design: multi-family blocks arranged around an elongated square, with gardens at the rear.
But along Gartenstadtweg, Taut dares to be more adventurous: low, simple houses, but painted in cornflower blue, intense yellows, bright reds, even black façades with contrasting white window frames. No stucco, just colour and shape.
The houses—predominantly single-family, one or two-storey dwellings—are arranged in staggered groups that follow the natural contours of the land, breaking the monotony typical of rigid workers’ housing rows. While the sloping red-tiled roofs and wooden shutters echo traditional village architecture, the overall effect is far from provincial. The design makes a powerful statement: social housing can be joyful, liveable and even poetic.
Walking around, it sometimes feels like you’re not in Berlin—or even in a real place—but in an idyll. The locals, accustomed to visitors with cameras, bring you back to reality. They joke around (the Berliner Schnauze, the somewhat crude humour of old Berlin, can now only be heard in these neighbourhoods) and sometimes even invite you for coffee in their garden. They always say hello—because while the city may appear rough, Berlin is actually much kinder than you might think.
The original project envisaged around 1,500 dwellings, but the war interrupted the work. Only a handful of blocks and around eighty houses were built. After reunification, careful restoration work restored Falkenberg’s colourful appearance. Today, walking through these winding streets, you get the feeling that every window and every façade has a different character – as if the garden city were a small urban rainbow.
Ringsiedlung Siemensstadt
📍 Siemensstadt, situated on the border between Spandau and Charlottenburg in western Berlin.
Siemensstadt serves as an open-air laboratory where diverse styles of modern architecture converge and challenge one another. It’s no accident that architectural giants who now dominate history books collaborated here: Walter Gropius, Hans Scharoun, Hugo Häring, Otto Bartning, Fred Forbat and Paul Rudolf Henning. This ensemble of distinct voices was orchestrated by city councillor Martin Wagner alongside landscape architect Leberecht Migge.
Scharoun designed the neighbourhood entrance adjacent to the Siemensdamm U-Bahn station. The complex, nicknamed ‘Panzerkreuzer’ (armoured cruiser), features distinctive nautical elements including circular portholes and ship-like railings. Scharoun himself resided here for thirty years, closely monitoring his creation.
Walter Gropius’ long white buildings stand elegantly in rows, all precisely oriented north-south to maximize natural light and airflow.
At the rear, Hugo Häring allowed himself some freedom: coloured clinker bricks and balconies with soft, almost organic shapes. An idea of ‘living architecture’ that breaks with the rigidity of Neues Bauen.
Along the railway line runs a long block nicknamed Lange Jammer, or ‘Long Misery’, which protects the neighbourhood from the noise of the trains. It is an inhabited wall, which still amazes today with its severity. A little further on, a charming semi-circular pavilion now houses an information point and a café.
Rather than presenting a uniform style, Siemensstadt embodies a collective challenge: to prove that social housing could simultaneously be functional, standardized, and diverse. While not all solutions impressed contemporary critics, it is precisely this plurality of approaches—this creative tension between discipline and imagination—that has earned the neighborhood its UNESCO World Heritage status today.
Onkel Tom Siedlung: the ‘parrot neighbourhood’
📍 In the Zehlendorf district, not far from the Grunewald woods, in the south-west of Berlin. You can get there directly from the Onkel Toms Hütte underground station.
In Zehlendorf, at the heart of a middle-class villa district, the proposal to build social housing sparked immediate controversy. When the GEHAG cooperative purchased a large plot in 1926 to construct a modern housing estate near the new underground station, wealthy residents protested against what they saw as “proletarianisation,” fearing their properties would depreciate.
Ultimately, however, the estate didn’t attract the poorest residents. The flat-roofed terraced houses, set among tall pine trees and designed with colorful facades by Bruno Taut, Hugo Häring and Otto Rudolf Salvisberg, remained too expensive for working-class families. Instead, they were primarily occupied by civil servants and public employees.
The neighborhood centered around the Onkel Toms Hütte underground station, which opened in 1929. Along Argentinische Allee, Taut created a 450-metre building that shielded the residential area from railway noise—an inhabited barrier that represented a bold urban planning solution.
Critics were quick to criticise it: because of its brightly coloured façades, the settlement was soon nicknamed Papageiensiedlung, ‘the parrot neighbourhood’.
Nearby, conservatives countered with the Am Fischtal experimental colony, distinguished by its sloping roofs, shutters and symmetrical façades—a direct challenge to Berlin modernism. This dispute, known historically as the ‘Zehlendorf roof war’, prefigured the political conflict that would ultimately extinguish both the architectural vision of Neues Bauen and the Weimar Republic’s political experiment in 1933.
Why was Onkel Tom excluded from the UNESCO list? When nominated in 2006, many houses were in poor condition with incorrect fixtures, inconsistent colours and questionable restorations. Given the settlement’s urban and symbolic importance, this decision now appears short-sighted.
Since then, residents have initiated positive changes to restore the neighbourhood’s original character. A small gallery—the Bruno Taut Laden—opened inside the U-Bahn station in 2010, showcasing documents, photographs and contemporary art. This effort has helped restore memory and dignity to a neighbourhood that, despite lacking UNESCO recognition, remains one of the most compelling examples of Weimar’s housing vision.
The Collapse of the System and the End of a Dream: 1929–1933
Even the most beautiful dream can falter. Despite their bright, green houses and architectural innovations that we still admire today, the Siedlungen could not save the Weimar Republic from buckling under the weight of the Great Depression.
The global economic collapse of 1929 depleted public resources. The Hauszinssteuer — a crucial rent tax that funded much of the social housing program — collapsed, making it nearly impossible to finance new Siedlungen developments.
Construction activity (Bautätigkeit) plummeted. Though architecturally impressive, new homes often remained out of reach for workers and poorer families. The constitutional promise of healthy housing for all Germans largely remained an unfulfilled ideal.
As unemployment soared, the housing shortage returned with devastating force. The urban landscape deteriorated, marked by vacant dwellings, high rents, crumbling buildings and neglected maintenance. While precise homelessness figures for 1933 are unavailable, the crisis clearly worsened housing insecurity throughout the country.
This climate of social frustration channeled popular discontent toward extremist movements. While democratic parties struggled to offer credible solutions, the NSDAP positioned itself as a radical answer to the crisis. The Siedlungen, once symbols of progress and hope, became silent witnesses to a society racing toward catastrophe.
Today, as we wander among the colourful and bright houses of the Siedlungen, admiring their architectural ingenuity and fresh ideas, we confront a poignant reality. Behind these façades lies the memory of a broken dream—a vision of a fairer, healthier and more modern society swept away by economic crisis and the rise of National Socialism.
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