More than a century ago, Siemens moved its factories to the outskirts of Berlin in the midst of an industrial boom. A vast workers’ city was born that the group wants to resurrect by carrying out one of the most ambitious urban projects in the German capital.
Named “Siemensstadt” since 1914, this district in the northwest of Berlin experienced prosperous years until the Second World War when tens of thousands of employees produced cables, motors and electric pumps there every day.
But the destruction of the war, the division of the city then the construction of the Wall in 1961, stopped this development.
The site is now set to find a second lease of life in a 4.5 billion euro development project officially launched on Tuesday by Siemens, after seven years of preparations with the Berlin municipality and dozens of partners.
In the heart of “Siemensstadt”, thirty minutes from the center of Berlin, the impressive red brick buildings of the time still stand, including the “Schaltwerk”, considered the first industrial skyscraper in Europe, with its eleven manufacturing workshop floors.
Around the old factories are several housing complexes designed at the beginning of the 20th century for the group’s workers, today partially classified as UNESCO world heritage sites.
– “City of the future” –
By 2035, this area bristling with construction equipment, barriers and weeds must be transformed into a “city of the future” capable of accommodating some 28,000 employees, including 5,000 from Siemens, and 7,000 new residents, ‘adding to the 13,000 inhabitants of the district.
The project “wants to connect in a new way the worlds of work and research, housing and daily life – worlds already thought together in historic Siemensstadt”, underlined Chancellor Olaf Scholz who came to inaugurate the site Tuesday.
Vast as a hundred football fields, the space of more than 76 hectares must accommodate around a quarter of housing, a quarter of factories or research centers, to which will be added offices, shops, educational, sports and hobbies.
A way of “reconciling uses” and showing that “industry still has its place in our cities”, assured Roland Busch, boss of Siemens, during the ceremony.
This industry has new faces: the German giant with 380,000 employees worldwide has been reorienting itself for several years towards digital technology and factory automation, relieving itself of the production of heavy equipment for industry, its traditional core business. .
Another sign that times have changed: the group will not build housing for its employees, as it did a century ago. The more than 2,500 housing units planned will be built by developers, with around 30% social housing.
– “Back to the roots” –
Siemens nevertheless claims a “return to its roots”, stressing that its participation in this project (750 million euros) represents “the largest investment ever made” by the group in Berlin, the city which saw it born in 1847.
Its story began in the backyard of a building, in the now trendy district of Kreuzberg, with the production of a small device weighing around ten kilos: the index telegraph developed by engineer Werner Siemens , precursor of the teletypewriter and fax machine.
An entrepreneur keen on innovation, in the midst of the industrial revolution, Werner Siemens (1816-1892) transformed the 150 m2 workshop employing around ten employees into a flagship of the German economy.
“Unlike other industrial regions such as the Ruhr (west) and Lusatia (east), characterized by mining, coal mining and steel production, it is mechanical engineering and especially l “electrical industry which made Berlin a major industrial center at the beginning of the 20th century”, Dorothée Haffner, director of the Berlin Industrial Heritage Research Center (Berliner Zentrum Industriekultur) told AFP.
After the war, many large companies left the encircled city in the former GDR, with AEG moving to Frankfurt and Siemens moving its headquarters to Munich, where it still is.
“Berlin’s industrial landscape has never recovered from this bloodletting,” underlines Ms. Haffner.
In a Germany in full doubt about its economic future, the new Siemensstadt embodies “the future of Berlin and German industry”, assured Olaf Scholz.
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