Hobrecht-Plan
The Hobrecht plan is the usual name for the named after its principal author, James Hobrecht and 1862 came into force in the development plan of the surroundings of Berlin. This should fix the alignment plan, the leadership of ring and radial roads and the buildings of the cities Berlin, Charlottenburg and five surrounding communities for the next fifty years.
Initial situation
As industrialization occurred in Germany to a rural exodus. Lured by better earning opportunities and a wider range of jobs there were in Berlin to a rapid population growth. The population grew from 172 122 (1800) on 774 452 (1872 ). In 1919 Berlin had made a 1,902,509 inhabitants.
To the same extent as being an increase in population, the hygiene, the care of the population and especially the housing and living conditions deteriorated. The most narrow streets and lanes of the city were hardly cope with the volume of traffic. A dramatically growing industry also contributed to air pollution. Population growth led to influx in the suburbs. The infrastructure had to be developed, stations, wider roads, a developed transportation system, and the creation of technical and hygienic conditions were necessary. Added to this was the swamping large areas, for example in Charlottenburg and Wilmersdorf, which made a building for residential use and a fixing of the roads impossible. The development of a sewage system for disposal of waste water and the supply of clean water, at the same time had to be made to improve the road system into the surrounding countryside.
Starting from an increase in population to 1.5 to 2 million inhabitants (1861: 524 900 inhabitants) and the associated traffic and management development was necessary a uniform urban administration and planning.
Planning guidelines
The improvement of urban conditions was essential to the growth of the city. There were plans for necessary technical and hygienic measures and especially an adaptation of transport infrastructure.
Commissioned by the Prussian Ministry of the Interior should create plans that will meet the expected situation from 1858, a planning committee of the Royal Police Headquarters. But the police were responsible, at this time as building inspectors for the city and infrastructure planning and major construction projects. Chairman of the Commission was the young Regierungsbaumeister Hobrecht James, the younger brother of the members of parliament and later Lord Mayor of Arthur Johnson Hobrecht.
Planning should widen the roads in the city center and connect them to form a powerful network of roads. In compliance with the requirements for sewer and utility lines were to create. Areas should also be provided for the rapidly growing railway lines and stations. In accordance with the wish of the king should the city area enclosed by a boulevard street and in between a series of radial arterial roads are created. The King had as a model the Parisian street plans of Baron Georges -Eugène Haussmann. In contrast to this plan possible, no radical breakthroughs road should destroy the historically rich town district in Berlin. A ruthless use of private land was not legally possible, all undrawn areas had to be acquired by the state.
After the mapping of the actual condition present plans should already be spotted and incorporated in later planning. These included proposals for urban planning by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the building plans of Johann Carl Ludwig Schmid of 1825 and 1830, and particularly the urban development plans Peter Joseph Lenné, who had worked primarily as a garden and landscape architect. Lenne had in 1840 one of the first an overall plan for Berlin and the surrounding areas created: Configured jewelry and border trains from Berlin with the immediate vicinity. Many of Lenné concepts and ideas were incorporated into the Hobrecht plan. One of the key elements was already provided by Schmid in Generalszug approaches, a series of streets and squares, which now extends as an east- west connection from Südstern in Kreuzberg until Breitscheidplatz in Charlottenburg. In the area of the later track triangle terrain a change of plan with a Südverschiebung was necessary due to the rapidly increasing expansion of the railway systems in the determination of the original Hobrecht plan that formed the basis for the constructed here Yorck bridges.
The Hobrecht Plan
Due to the growth of the city and in 1861 made incorporations presented the plans of the Commission Hobrecht far beyond the former city area also. The on July 18, 1862 approved the development plan of Berlin environments Hobrecht plan included in the 14 departments constructed and mapped acquired undeveloped land of the cities of Berlin and Charlottenburg and the communities Reinickendorf, Weissensee, Lichtenberg, Rixdorf and Wilmersdorf.
The plan was two annular belt roads linking the cities of Berlin and Charlottenburg surrounded completely. The intervening undeveloped land should be divided by diagonal roads and arterial roads leading in all directions in rectangular building blocks. Street bourgeois houses should arise in the courtyards housing for workers and workshops was provided. Hobrecht expected that by different population groups could live together peacefully.
The Hobrecht plan itself laid down only the layout of the streets and their limits, it is a pure line of flight plan. Further regulations for construction of the block ( approximately on the use of land and the type of use ) it did not contain. That was after the then legal also not possible. Only in connection with the 1853 adopted building police order, he favored the emergence of the Wilhelmine Mietskasernengürtels. The Building Control Regulations wrote within the fairly large blocks before only that the building could not exceed six storeys at eaves height of 20 meters. Courtyards had to have the square, so that the fire engine was able to contact a minimum area of 5.34 meters.
Follow
Since the building was not covered by any further rules, developed in the following years, a very dense development. The lack of further regulations led to real estate speculation and the growth of the notorious tenements, Stone Berlin ', in which people lived under cramped conditions. It originated in the interior of the blocks back and side houses that were only the required Mindesthofflächen undeveloped. The only dimly lit by the narrow courtyards apartments and the dramatically heightened by the narrowness and high number of inhabitants sanitary conditions often led to disease. Only with the introduction of the Berlin sewer system with the twelve radial systems until 1893 improved the circumstances.
Hobrecht as the author of the plan is often seen as the main culprit for the origin of the tenements and to the adverse living conditions. Only in modern times the importance of Hobrecht plan for urban development is recognized. The actual responsibility for the formation of the dense block development carried the speculation in real estate and the legislator, who was then its control function for the development hardly perceived. Not planning is the cause of the tenements problem, but the pursuit with a minimum of financial commitment to achieve a high income yield. Despite the negative effects of Hobrecht plan was a precondition for the solution of the resulting turn of the century housing problem and enabled the inevitable for the city Hygiene introduction of urban drainage. Today is his planning determines a large part of the Berlin cityscape.
Social intentions, critical evaluation
James Hobrecht spoke of conscious social mix of residents in the front and rear buildings, basement, roof and main floor apartments a social action to:
" In the tenement children go from the cellar dwellings in the free school on the same hallway as those of the Council or merchant, on his way to the school. Shoemaker Wilhelm from the attic and the old bedridden woman Schulz in the back of the house, whose daughter worried by sewing or plastering the scanty livelihood, are known in the first floor of personalities. Here is a bowl of soup to strengthen the case of illness, as a garment, there the effective facility for obtaining free education or the like and all that turns out to be the result of the cozy relationship between the same nature and if ever so different to-do residents, a Help, which exerts its ennobling influence on the donor. And between these extreme social classes move the poor out of the II or IV floor, social classes of the highest importance to our cultural life, the officials, the artist, the scholar, the teacher, etc., and be a facilitator, stimulating and thus for society useful. And it would be almost just by their very existence and dumb example to those who live intermingled next to them and with them. "
The left-liberal urban planners, architecture critic and journalist Werner Hegemann, however, convicted in 1930 in retrospect the Hobrecht plan as a project that
" [ ... ] Endlessly green areas around Berlin for the construction of densely packed large tenement houses, each with two to six poorly lit backyards officially tended with and four million future Berlin condemned to live in dwellings, as neither the dumbest devil nor the most prolific Berlin privy or ground speculator bad could imagine. "