building & housing

BerlinTXL, the transformation of a former airport into a pioneering sustainble and digitally-driven urban quarter remains one of Germany's few and exciting "greenfield developments" in the Smart City space. With this session we want to update the International Smart Cities Network on the progress since the last time BerlinTXL visited the "ISCN Global Mixer" as a speaker and thus offer a close-up to the rythm of this major and inspiring project.

Key takeaways

• Transforming an airport into a city of tomorrow: Berlin TXL turns the former Tegel site into a model for sustainable and innovative urban development.
• Building the Urban Tech Republic and Schumacher Quartier: A new hub for research, startups, and housing brings together technology, community, and livability.
• Driving innovation through data and design: Digital twins, open-source platforms, and green, climate-adaptive planning shape the district’s smart infrastructure.
• Creating real-world impact through collaboration: Over 40 companies and international partners are already contributing to Berlin TXL’s transformation.

This Global Mixer offered an inspiring look at the ongoing transformation of the former Berlin Tegel Airport into Berlin TXL – the city of tomorrow in the making. Building on a first part of the presentation from March 2024, Stefan Höffken showcases how one of Berlin’s most iconic sites is evolving into a multifunctional urban district where innovation, sustainability, and livability come together. 

The area will be home to the Urban Tech Republic – a hub for research, startups, and industry focused on future urban technologies – and the Schumacher Quartier, a residential neighborhood with over 6,000 housing units and space for more than 10,000 residents. The project is ambitious in scope, with a planning horizon of two decades.

The focus areas: 

• Promoting innovation in mobility, energy, water, and construction
• Creating a digital infrastructure with open-source platforms and digital twins to manage water, land, and buildings
• Building a data marketplace to enable secure sharing of urban data
• Integrating green spaces and climate-adaptive design

Over 40 startups and companies are already active on site, supported by international partnerships (e.g. with Mitsubishi and Incheon Startup Park).

The project serves as a model for future cities, combining sustainability, digitalization, and innovation in a real-world setting.

This event is part of the ISCN Global Mixer, a series of events organized by the International Smart Cities Network. The presentations cover a wide range of topics related to international smart city approaches and provide exciting insights into urban digitalization worldwide - in just 30 minutes.

Year of publication: 2024

Urban mining is a circular economy approach that aims for systematically reusing waste as a resource, instead of disposing it. In this ISCN Global Mixer, Tanya Tsui from the MIT Senseable Amsterdam Lab illustrates how AI can be used to close material cycles in cities and invites discussion which potential applications the approach offers.

Key takeaways

• From circular to linear: Urban Mining can shift cities’ role from sole consumers of the world’s extracted materials to providers of it as well.
• From nominal to real values: Tanya Tsui’s research approach aspires to train algorithmic models in order to more closely estimate real values of the prevalence of materials in buildings over their lifetime, rather than nominal values emerging at demolition.
• Who wants to compete with the Netherlands? While data availability in the Netherlands for building materials is already quite strong and in high spatial resolution, the presented research project would be interested to know and source from other regions as well and thus widen the scope.

Global materials demand is estimated to more than double from 79 billion tons to 167 billion tons till 2060 (OECD, 2019) and global urbanization is a main driver. At the same time, the immense negative environmental and socioeconomic consequences of virgin mining and material extraction render a shift to approaches of circular economy more and more urgent. Cities can thereby assume not only the role of absorbers of material demand, but also as providers of it – some of the biggest mines in the world are arguably big metropolises!

Against this background, Tanya Tsui, Postdoc researcher at the MIT Senseable City Lab in Amsterdam presented her project on facilitating urban mining with Big Data and AI models.

She set the scene with referencing three examples of AI-supported urban data science: 

• With “Treepedia”, streetview images are algorithmically analysed to estimate green coverage in streets and urban quarters.
• “Skyview” uses streetview images facing the sky from among buildings, to estimate radiation on areas and thus provide proxies for urban heat islands.
• In order to assess the prevalence of secondary building materials, the approach has been so far to work with “archetypes” of buildings to be found in the city. Their extrapolation on the whole building stock returns an estimate of volumes to be expected. 

However, so far these values are nominal and not yet "real". And it estimates largely waste from demolition of buildings but is not granular enough to catch material flows from renovations and the entire lifecycle of buildings. 
For this next step, Tanya tries to link building data and (disaggregated) waste data that exist in cities, always with the necessity of three core data points: material type, amount and location. 

In the Netherlands, building data are organized and provided in already relatively good spatial resolution through the Pdok data base and Register of Buildings and Addresses (BAG). Waste data on the other hand is more difficult to constitute and access. Its tracking usually begins only beyond certain thresholds and often doesn’t entail exact typological and locational breakdowns. In her quest for suitable sources and stakeholders she is thinking about demolition contractors, building material exchange platforms, building or environmental permits but is very open for other suggestions as well.

In the lively discussion after her keynote, Tanya reflected on several questions. One was why she prioritizes building material for urban mining rather than e.g. household wares (refrigerators, washing machines, etc.). To her, this focus is warranted by the sheer scale of the building sector and its climate impact, but also because data is much more accessible for it. Asked about her challenges on an operational level when contacting stakeholders, she stressed that getting relevant and accurate data remains hard to get by. But in order to motivate data provision she also underlined that insights could be properly translated into better allocation and matching of material needs. Especially if the real-time analysis reached down to component levels, quicker and precise market clearance would be a big step towards a circular economy. 

She thus subsumed her input with a call for action to the audience as she is particularly interested in additional data sources for urban building and waste data from Germany and beyond. 

If a cooperation might be of interest to you, you can reach out directly to her or via the International Smart Cities Network at iscn@giz.de 

Further links:

https://senseable.mit.edu/

Definition: XPlanung is a standardized data format for exchanging plans across planning levels and between/to stakeholders

Legal framework: Developments of XPlanung are embedded within the legal frameworks of German Online Access Law (Onlinezugangsgesetz, OZG) and E-Government Law (E-Government-Gesetz)

Two core benefits: Enabling further civic participation and interaction on planning projects; boosting local economy as assessments for developments and investments are streamlined

Next steps to come: Leveraging it as the foundation of digital building permits and as replacement of legally binding documents; integrating one portal for planning data in Germany which links XPlanung, XBau and BIM

The challenge is to change a centuries-old common data standard: Paper. This is how Ken Gericke from the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport primed the audience in this ISCN Global Mixer on the undertaking of setting up XPlanung, a standardized digital data format for exchanging plans across planning levels and between stakeholders.

The result today is an XML-based data exchange format based on Geography Markup Language Version 3 (GML 3.2.2), the extensible standard for spatial data developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and ISO TC211. (See also central office for XPlanung at xleitstelle.de) 

The two core benefits of having XPlanung and accordingly adjusted Geoportals and digitally visualized presentations of planning maps: First, it enables further civic participation and interaction on planning projects, as access in digital form is broader. Second, it boosts the local economy as the assessments of potential developments and investments are more streamlined and can be cleared more swiftly. An illustrative example of that is the Gigafactory of Tesla, a big carmaker, that was built in Grünheide, Germany. It is said that the standardized digital representation of the planning map in the area in a Geoportal facilitated the assessments of the project by corporate decisionmakers.

But addressing common misconceptions, Ken Gericke also stressed what XPlanung is not (yet). It is not a software application, nor a replacement or alteration of building codes. It is also not a replacement of legally binding planning documents in Germany. 

Nonetheless, the next ambitions are to link XPlanung, XBau (a machine-readable communication standard for construction oversight) and BIM applications into one portal for planning data in Germany.

Have a look for yourself in the recording of the presentation above.

Year of publication: 2024

The transformation and redevelopment of the former Berlin Tegel airport into the "Urban Tech Republic" and other districts is perhaps the closest one can get to a smart greenfield development in Germany.
In this ISCN Global Mixer, Stefan Höffken, the head of the project, gives an overview on their exciting plans and shares experiences on specific use cases they are developing.

Public money, public code: Berlin TXL is developing many interesting software solutions and provides the code in open license for replication.

The right blend: There is much software development and hardware use, but a crucial complementary to that are the "Entwicklungspartnerschaften" [development partnerships] managed through a moderated stakeholder process and carrying approaches to their full use.

AI enhancing use cases: For several use cases at Berlin TXL, artificial intelligence is a key enabler or crucial additional feature. Monitoring with drones, for example, can be done comprehensively and yet remain compliant with privacy concerns.

Be water, my friend: Water has many more utilities than we usually think of. It is not only part of sanitation and nutrition, but also a key factor and medium for cooling, energy management or damage control. This warrants particular emphasis on water management for smart developments.

The iconic hexagonal terminals of the former Berlin Tegel airport are testimony to past innovation, futuristic ambition and smart spatial planning. Now they are standing a bit isolated in an almost empty area of about 500ha. But not for long, as they witness with Berlin TXL a new big transformational smart district development comprising the “Urban Tech Republic” and the Schumacher Quartier and Cité Pasteur as new modern residential estates.

Stefan Höffken, urban planner with digital focus and head of the project, gave us a short overview on Berlin TXL’s overall plans and shared some experiences on the specific use cases they are developing in the project.

Their approach for smart district development has been to initially set up core digital infrastructures, such as a Data Platform or a 3D modelling of the area. To this are linked and further developed several use cases employing both newly developed software and hardware applications, e.g. LoRaWan sensors or drones. All is bound together by so-called “Entwicklungspartnerschaften” [development partnerships] with various actors and organizations from Berlin and steered through moderated stakeholder processes. 

An illustration thereof is the “Smart nature” monitoring of vegetation and identification of plant species in the area. Through drone flights a comprehensive recording of the area is done regularly and AI enables a detailed modelling of heat structures and growth patterns which then informs action for biodiversity preservation and management of the aerial climate. All this is done in cooperation with Grünberlin, a state-owned company focusing on green infrastructure.

Other use cases Stefan mentioned were a software that automatically blurs and anonymizes through AI sensitive objects in aerial images taken by drones, a more detailed and integrated heat and energy metering, and prediction-based water management. Watch the above recording of the session for more information.

Stefan Höffken also highlighted that their project welcomes further cooperation and exchanges, also with international actors. If you want to reach out to the project, feel free to do so also via the International Smart Cities Network at iscn@giz.de.

• More information on Berlin TXL can be found here: https://urbantechrepublic.de/en/
• A documentation and code of the solution for privacy-compliant blurring of aerial images can be found here on Open CoDE: https://software.opencode.de/project/1197#readme [German]
• The Gitlab online repository including the employed data platform can be found here: https://gitlab.com/berlintxl/futr-hub/