deutscher landschaftsarchitekturpreis 2021

E s s a y

Social transformation

radise, for a time at least. However, this will never be fully achieved on earth. That is the biblical mes sage, but also very human. The author Wladimir Kaminer described the expulsion from paradise in a children’s book. Adam is standing at the gate, looks back and thinks: ’Well, just sitting around, having fruit drop into your mouth and praising God is a bit boring.’ This makes a lot of sense to me. People need challenges, we want to create. Pa radise is nice, for a fortnight’s holiday. But in the long run, we do not really want it. We want to shape, do something, expend energy to make our world sustainable. And that is wonderful. People are creative and so continue God’s work of creation as co-creators. We are able to live differently – we have learned this du ring the time of Covid. I do not want to diminish the crisis caused by the pandemic. If anything positive at all can be gleaned from it, it is this insight: life without air travel is possible. We can explore the area in which we live. My partner and I, for example, discovered the ‘twenty most beautiful walks around Hanover’ and thus many things that were unknown to me. ‘Less is more’ was a slogan for many years, and there was talk of the ‘ethics of enough’. Perhaps the crisis has taught us this: we can do with less. Modesty and humility are indeed virtues that make life deeper than the unceasing ‘faster, further, more and ever more’. The fi rst prize is a wonderful sign of this. Westpark in Augsburg, which was handed back to the city after the withdrawal of the American forces, is now a park landscape. We need such spaces. Especially in Covid times we have become aware of this. For me, the project symbolises places of longing, open spaces, spaces for move ment. Many children in this country can no longer

After these biblical and historic ecclesiastical con siderations, I turn to the reality of the present time. The threat posed by climate change has long been a fact, maybe not fi rst and foremost with us, although hot summers and dry soils have now given us a sense of foreboding. It primarily affects the poor countries in the global south which suf fer famine due to drought or whose existence is threatened by fl oods. Yes, there are environmental movements, and Fridays for Future is young and globally net worked. It has brought home the fact that it is no longer the eleventh hour but way past twelve. There have been climate conferences, climate re searchers and climate goals for years. But there is also Donald Trump who wants to be re-elected as president of the USA and who has degraded the climate catastrophe into an ‘invention of the Chinese’. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro is closing down environmental agencies and paving the way for large-scale industrial projects in the Amazonian rainforest. Evidently, the ongoing de forestation of the rainforest is unstoppable. Covid and Russia’s war against the Ukraine have pushed the climate crisis all the way to the back of inter national politics. 100 billion euros are budgeted for rearmament in Germany alone, funds that had not been available for climate policies. I do not consider this to be sustainable. But I think we must not be defeatist. Many people have understood that we are called upon to preserve our contemporary world for ourselves and for future generations. I think that deep within all of us there is a longing for paradise. Countless holiday brochures advertise the experience of pa

2 4