Seeing Trees by Sonja Dümpelmann

Author:Sonja Dümpelmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2019-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 6.8. Sketches illustrating the sound protection provided by different types of plantings along Potsdamer Chaussee. (R. Dittmann, “Öffentliche Grünanlagen, ein Faktor zur Lärmbekämpfung,” Das Gartenamt 7, no. 8 [1958]: 175–80)

Due to street trees’ location along traffic arteries, many tree experts considered them more effective than park trees when it came to abating noise, binding dust, and ameliorating climate. To increase street tree density, by the 1970s, one hundred trees per street kilometer was cited in West German specialist literature as an ideal value, a goal aspired to by West Berlin’s Senate.53

To counter occasional arguments that trees did not belong in cities, where they disturbed and endangered traffic, researchers had already in the postwar years begun to elaborate on street trees’ roles in traffic guidance. In East Berlin, Alfred Hoffmann had explored trees as elements that structured transportation space and could provide visual guidance to automobile drivers and protection to pedestrians. In cities built according to the GDR’s Sixteen Principles of Urban Planning, transportation space was to accommodate all types of movement, and trees provided a valuable structuring element that could increase security as long as they were not planted too close to each other, obstructing sightlines and views, and as long as they were maintained properly. As Hoffmann showed, the distance between trunks should depend upon the expected traffic speed (figure 6.10). Along thoroughfares where higher speeds were anticipated, a fifteen-meter distance between trunks was considered ideal for drivers to have sufficient range of view over the traffic space ahead of them. Hoffmann’s East German elaborations, which built on data provided by Soviet colleagues, in turn informed the recommendations published in the 1970s by landscape architect Aloys Bernatzky for a professional West German audience. According to Bernatzky, the minimum space between trees was to be ten meters, a value that complied with the minimum density believed necessary for the trees’ benefits for public health.54

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