Archive: The Capital City of Berlin - Documentation

An important part of the new construction, of restoring and improving the technical infrastructure, concerns the provision of utilities such as mains water, sewerage, gas, electricity, heat, and telecommunications. Building below ground in Berlin, however, is a particular adventure. The historical layers of the city are hidden beneath the surface: old foundations, ruins and rubble, dangerous unexploded bombs, remnants of the sewage system, and diverse pipes and conduits that cannot be found in any plan. The location and course of existing utilities can often only be traced by looking at historical site plans and finding out about the layout of old streets.

A complete and exact site inventory, however, is a prerequisite for any work on a utilities network, which must be carried out as part of the overall planning process. All utilities work has to be coordinated with road construction as well. The planning and construction processes require an extremely high degree of coordination, as each type of cable or line is built by an individual service provider such as energy companies, Berlin's water companies, and Deutsche Telekom, etc. Responsibility for coordination rested with the Senate Department for Urban Development's Capital City Department and development agency DSK.

Finding the various utilities was, as expected, difficult. Even the service providers - the owners of the individual mains systems - often had nothing more than a rough knowledge of their own supply network. As a result of inaccurate plans it was often necessary to dig shafts and tunnels in order to determine the exact location of individual utilities and reduce the risk of accidentally severing lines. With the help of this underground detective-like work new utilities plans were drawn up. They contained the location and the course of all mains lines, old and new.

Of particular difficulty were the existing utilities in the former GDR. Mains lines, especially long-distance heating lines, for example, ran through areas outside of dedicated roadways without any consideration of property lines. This was a situation which not only called for legal solutions, but for practical ones as well. There were two possible solutions to this problem: Either the utilities had to be relocated to a dedicated roadway - in many cases this was possible - or they were left where they were, which meant they had to be legally protected against claims of compensation by the property owners. The trick was to find adequate solutions in a timely manner which would find approval before a "little" utilities problem became an obstacle to the urban development of an entire inner-city area.