If you look at the Europacity in Berlin, the Munich trade fair city Riem or in Frankfurt at the Europaviertel and the Riedberg, the question arises whether we have lost the ability to create livable cities with urban spaces.

The recently completed new districts appear mostly monotonous and sterile.

Their ground floor zones are largely blind and do not create urban life.

Now one can argue that these quarters are still lacking the patina, the traces of use of a diverse, colorful, contradicting everyday life. That is a question of time, because on historical photos of newly built Wilhelminian style quarters or the striking horseshoe housing estate in Berlin in the 1920s, what is highly valued today looks bare and unwelcoming. Trees and other greenery alone change the picture enormously after a few decades.

But regardless of this, it is striking how inflationary the term “quarter” is used today.

Almost every group of buildings, no matter how small or monofunctional, is called that.

The thing with the term is tricky because it is suggestive and evokes associations rich in images - a feeling of neighborhood and encounter.

Because for that very reason it often has to do with marketing and is therefore used in a way that is guided by interests.

Even shopping centers are called quarters.

The situation is similar with the Kiez or the attribution of courtyards, which are ubiquitous in real estate today.

Strategic order module of the city

In any case, it only seems superficially clear what constitutes a quarter or a Kiez. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that we always understand something different by this, depending on the biographical or professional horizon of experience. The well-known American urban researcher George Galster hit the nail on the head with his testimony when he established that the quarter is without a doubt a socio-spatial form of organization that is larger than a household but smaller than a city - and concludes with the following: But that is also the point at which the consensus ends.

Beyond the unanswered question of size, the quarter is of course of crucial importance: on the one hand as a basic module of the city, but on the other hand as a crucial strategic link between the metropolis and the private household.

The quarter is trusted to be able to create social cohesion: Here there are spatially anchored networks, locally effective organizations and institutions, here we know each other, here there is still the possibility of communal identification - so it is said.

What does quality of life offer?

The fact is: In times of increasing uncertainty, excessive demands and acceleration, the area around the home is becoming more important for self-insurance and identification. But this also increases the demand to be able to (co) determine the rules there. The longer you are on site, the greater the need for everyone to comply with the unwritten but lived house rules. Every stranger who comes today and stays tomorrow can then be perceived as a potential threat to one's own identity, whereupon one withdraws even more rigidly from one's own kind.

But how does a neighborhood have to be designed to offer quality of life? If an undeveloped square is declared as a piazza in the sober new building districts that have quickly drawn up and is furnished with street furniture, however elaborate, it is by no means a public space. Because that presupposes an act of social appropriation. Basically, the more global and virtual our world becomes, the more people yearn for a place that conveys identity. Last but not least, the current Corona crisis has made it clear to everyone that the common physical space is an important atmospheric element for everyday life.