Berlin Neukölln
Berlin Schulbauoffensive
Berlin is growing and with it the need for schools and learning spaces, something the city has to little of. with its 770 schools (400 of them being elementary schools) Berlin can count. about 360.000 children attending normal schools and about 87.000 attending professional training schools (Berufsschule). The number of pupils have been steadily growing for the past 10 years and is estimated to keep growing.
The so-called ‘Schulbauoffensive’ was launched by the city administration in 2017 to try and curb the lack of schools spaces (as in spots for children in schools). The administration wants to be able to cope with the anticipated extra 10.000 (lowered from the initial 24.000) spots needed in 2024 and are trying to speed up the building and planning of new buildings.
The new school program by the Berlin senate requires the planning of new schools buildings to go through the so called Phase 0 before the planning starts. The projects in planning or preparation will have to conduct this phase with the respective future users and different groups that will have an influence or use to the new school. The city has brought out a manual with recommendations and information on how to conduct the phase. To make sure that the participation still takes place in this highly time sensitive and sped up building process the city has allocated extra money for the Phase 0, each school can get 20.000 - 35.000 euros to conduct the participational processes.
Neukölln is a neighbourhood in flux and full of contradictions, it changes from block to block and has numerous parallel universes. It is a place with various groups of different ethnicities, socio-economic status, cultures and age. It is changing rapidly and it is now on the radar for large investors wanting to build and big commercial firms wanting to find a foothold. All these factors are creating very many different realities within the same neighbourhood, resulting in the district’s citizens living very different lifestyles, with very different perspectives. Schools are the main place where they all come together.
Neukölln as a whole is one of the few districts that has not been hit as hard by the school crisis, but locally there is an urgent need of elementary schools .
The lack of space for schools and for the children living in the dense northern part of Neukölln has led to the local administration looking for any space available to fit for this purpose. In some of these cases the space has been found in the gardens of graveyards. The Neue
St. Jacobi Friedhof is a good example, here the city would like to build a elementary and secondary school.
Peter Petersen Schule
In this research project we collaborated with a primary school in Neukölln that will be affected by the "Berlin school offensive", the Peter Petersen Schule.
Compared to most other public elementary schools in northern Neukölln the Peter-Petersen-Schule (PPS) is a bit different. First of all, they don’t have a catchment area, the school across the yard is responsible for that area of the district. That means that children from the entire northern part of Neukölln can go to this school. Secondly, they have chosen a different educational method and are working according to the so called Jenaplan-method, a method developed by the namesake of the school and will be explained more detailed in the next section. It has attained the status of being a Unesco Project School meaning they have a strong emphasis on democracy and human rights.67
Even considering the somewhat different parameters, the school is still a mirror of the Neukölln community and 64 % of the children come from non-german speaking households and 38 % come from families with low income. One class of 25 children can hold as many as 14 native languages and most pupils are bi- if not also trilingual. The school has about 300 pupils, 30 teachers and educators. It splits its classes into ‘small’ and ‘big’ groups meaning children in grade 1-3 are grouped in one class and grade 4-6 in another. According to the Jenaplan-method this gives children the chance to grow and learn at their own tempo and seldomly is a child forced to stay back a year.
