Hobrecht-Plan


The Hobrecht-Plan is the binding land-use plan for Berlin in the 19th century. It is named after its main editor, James Hobrecht, who served for the royal Prussian urban planning police.
The finalized plan "Bebauungsplan der Umgebungen Berlins" was resolved in 1862, intended for a time frame of about 50 years. The plan not only covered the area around the cities of Berlin and Charlottenburg but also described the spatial regional planning of a large perimeter. Thus, it also prepared the city and its neighbouring municipalities for the Greater Berlin Act of 1920, which greatly extended Berlin's size and population.
The plan resulted in large areas of dense urban city blocks known as 'blockrand structures', with mixed-use buildings reaching to the street and offering a common-used courtyard, later often overbuilt with additional court structures to house more people. The Hobrecht-Plan inspired new urban plans after 1990 by construction senator Hans Stimmann and his colleagues, so that the formerly-divided Berlin would grow together and become denser and livelier.
Hobrecht's plan is often compared to Baron Haussmann's restructuring of Paris, as it also resulted in wide metropolitan avenues, large urban parks and squares, sewers and other modernisation projects of the infrastructure.

History

The industrial revolution led to a swift rural exodus at the beginning of the 19th century. Berlin as the Prussian capital was the target of many emigrants resulting in a rapid growth. After the Napoleonic Wars the city grew by 10,000 new inhabitants every year accelerating in the middle of the century so that the metro area would reach the millions at the end of the century.
There had been already some urban planning on the city before Hobrecht. This includes proposals from Karl Friedrich Schinkel and planning maps from Johann Carl Ludwig Schmid dating to 1825 and 1830. Peter Joseph Lenné proposed a wider regional planning in 1840 named "Projektierte Schmuck- und Grenzzüge von Berlin mit nächster Umgebung". All the persons were well-renowned architects and city planners.
Hobrecht was instead a geodesist who had just extended his formation with a civil engineer examination on transportation planning in 1858. Soon after entering the royal Prussian urban planning police he was commanded in 1859 to head the commission on creation of a land-use plan for Berlin and its environs. He traveled to Hamburg, Paris and London in 1860 to learn about the contemporary development status in urban planning especially their sewer systems.
In the 1860s the Berlin Customs Wall was removed and there were plans to amalgamation of the many suburbs of Berlin on 1 January 1861. Based on the just finished land surveys and existing land-use proposals James Hobrecht constructed a map showing a possible land-use for a city at a projected size of 1.5 to 2 million inhabitants. It incorporated the land between the Customs Wall and a railway line being constructed to encircle the city; the area came to be known architecturally as the Wilhelmine Ring.
That Hobrecht-Plan did show two large ring roads encircling both of Berlin and Charlottenburg with dozens of arterial roads entering the city. The area between these were divided into rectangular spaces. Unlike the urban planning of Paris, Hobrecht did respect the existing roads, villages and railways including them into the planning process. The map was resolved on 18 July 1862 and it would influence the urban structure of Berlin for the centuries to come.

Results

The Hobrecht-Plan was detailed for the street area, giving only the boundary lines for housing construction. The housing construction business was rather unregulated in comparison with modern construction rules – there were some basic constraints to allow fire brigades to do their work by having the maximum height limited to 20 meters and each house had to be reachable from the streets via a backyard of at least 5.34 × 5.34 meters in size to allow the fire engine to turn. In effect, speculative builders took over with densely packed architectural designs to allow a maximum number of rooms – the foundation of the Mietskaserne tenement housing estates rings.
While Hobrecht called for the front buildings to be designed for upper- and middle-class people, the backyard buildings were mostly plagued by lack of sunlight and poor ventilation. The situation worsened in Gründerzeit times with housing construction running too slowly so that the population density rose beyond 1000 inhabitants per square kilometer – many backyard houses had two to three inhabitants per room and the citywide sewer system was not to be finished before 1893.

Reception

The Hobrecht-plan was criticized for decades as given the foundation for the social problems possibly even nurturing the street fights in the 1920s between red and brown thugs in the crowded lower class quarters. Hobrecht himself was surely in the position and he had the education to outguess the results. He promoted his plan saying
This also indicates that he had no real intention to prevent the housing conditions of the lower class which he might have seen as normal in his times. The reception in the late 20th century is much more favorable to the Hobrecht-Plan as it did also establish the basis to resolve the problems that were to come. There are no records whether he did fight behind closed doors – but he was called off on 15 December 1861 already. He went to Stettin to build a water supply system and to plan the sewer system which would be built in 1870. With the help of his brother Arthur Hobrecht – who would eventually become lord mayor of Berlin in 1872 – he was able to return to Berlin in 1869 ordered to plan the sewer system for the city. The construction works would start in 1873 lasting until 1893. From 1885 to 1897 he was council member commissioned for urban planning.