Research Methods
This research project used a mixed methods approach, triangulating findings through interviews, archival research, and first-hand observation. Using a variety of tools helped combine quantitative data and qualitative information across sources.
Archival research and various sources helped to build an understanding of the important theories around voids spaces, post-industrial spaces, urban nature, community city-making, and Tempelhof Field itself.
Access to plans, news reports, government documents, and studies informed the past, present, and potential future of the site’s development, maintenance, creation, and use.
Archival research and various sources help to build an understanding of the important theories concerning void spaces and European post-industrial contexts; discourses on urban nature and open space; neoliberal trends in community city making, and more. Detailed sources were used to identify Tempelhof Field’s specifications as well as past to present development plans, projects, law and government regulations on the field, and studies of the space’s social and biological vectors.
Sources used include news reports, publicly available laws and regulations, government plans for development, reports and records of planning process and development, personal images taken of signs, websites and proposals from pioneer projects. Most of these resources were accessible directly through Senate departments and LLCs GrünBerlin GmbH and Tempelhof Projekt GmbH.
Secondary sources include government and university studies on the field, urban planning reports, and scholarly articles on participation in the planning process. These resources were found through keyword searches of scholarly databases Academic Search Premier and articles obtained through UVM’s Howe Library ILL.
Most sources were available only in German, meaning they had to be read in German or translated to include direct quotes in the research process. Otherwise, notes were taken in English after reading a German source, and summaries were thus produced through a mental translation process.
Participants
Due to the field’s wide breadth of users, an almost incomprehensible level of people qualified as eligible interview subjects. The purpose of the interviews was to provide personal testimony to data collected about usage on the field, telling more about how and why the field is used than can be discovered through existing resources.
To narrow down interviewees, I identified key groups such as those involved in Pioneer Projects and experts with personal connections to Berlin. They were contacted in both English and German via email, and interviews were conducted in both English and German depending on the preference of the interviewee.
Allmende-Kontor, a pioneer community garden, was a preferred subject due to its status as a Pioneer Project with significant growth, a diverse member base, large amounts of information available through the internet, and proximity to other projects studied like Lernort Natur and the M.I.N.T Grünes Klassenzimmer.
From this group, I interviewed two administrative members of Allmende-Kontor: Kristin Jensel and Juan Coka Arkos. Both are residents of Berlin and active users of the field for their organization and themselves.
Kristin Hensel leads communications and publicity for the community garden, and Juan Coka Arkos is currently the 1st Chairperson of the Vorstand (administrative board).
Due to the roles that both participants hold within Allmende-Kontor, they gave personal testimony to the meaning of the field as well as speaking on behalf of their organization.
Dr. René Kreichauf was chosen as an expert source on urban studies in Europe and the United States, as well as a native Berliner. As a knowledgeable source on various urban processes in Berlin and Europe broadly, he was able to speak to both his personal experiences and larger phenomena.
The study was approved by the University of Vermont’s Institutional Review Board, and received Exemption Protocol 2 to allow me to conduct fully informed interviews with participants. The study Gemeinsam mit den Bürger*innen: Community Connections at Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld was assigned the number 2761.
Location for research occurred off-site, with the exception of previously conducted personal observation between August of 2022 and May of 2023, as I was not located in Berlin at the time of the study. Interviews were conducted virtually over video-call. Archival research occurred remotely from the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont.
Findings and Analysis
Collection of findings and analysis included a process of coding (labeling and sorting) my interview and source material before investigating themes and doing analysis.
These codes were developed inductively and deductively using knowledge of the space and initial review of research. With these groupings (of which I made 5 overarching categories and additional subcategories), I identified central themes and overlapping patterns to analyze how participants spoke of the space, expressed its value, and enumerated its uses.
With these sorted groups, I incorporated additional sources before taking my findings back to the literature and assessing them alongside existing research. This process of analysis culminated in three overarching “takeaways” from the research, corroborated between my own findings and existing literature. Here, I extend beyond data to explain why my conclusions matter and what they mean.