Biodiversity concept BE-U | Behrens-Ufer, Berlin

The city is a habitat – not only for us humans, but also for flora and fauna. This often leads to conflicts, especially during development activities. As a result, numerous species have difficulties finding suitable places to settle in urban areas. These include bats or birds, which rarely find roosts or nesting sites in new buildings, or amphibians, which have hardly any suitable habitats along rivers due to the paved and towering banks. The BE-U | Behrens-Ufer by DIEAG as a forward-looking urban quarter for business, science, art, culture and public life has high ecological goals. A biodiversity concept was drawn up as part of the German Sustainable Building Council (“Deutsche Gesellschaft für Nachhaltiges Bauen”, DGNB) certification process.

The aim is to integrate the ecological requirements of selected species into building and open space planning from the outset and to improve them in this way to create a habitat for animals and plants. Target species were identified in order to concretise the biodiversity strategy and derive targeted measures. These are animal species that are to be the focus of this strategy. Their habitat requirements are decisive for the design of the measures in the BE-U | Behrens-Ufer.

The concept of the measures also took advantage of the proximity to the Wuhlheide forest area and the River Spree. This offers the opportunity to provide stepping stone biotopes and new habitats in a large-scale context for animal species that occur near forests and watercourses. After analysing the different habitat requirements of the species, possibilities for promoting the target species in various focus areas of the project were finally identified. The comprehensive and long-term biodiversity strategy was developed for the BE-U and its surroundings. It goes beyond the usual measures prescribed in the development plan or planning permission. The measures formulated are designed in such a way that the habitat requirements of the target species are integrated into the open space planning so that new native animal species can settle in the neighbourhood.

Based on the biodiversity concept, we developed the open space concept for the BE-U | Behrens-Ufer.