Bremen – Cultivated Land

Flat, expansive, and green - agricultural areas with many lakes and groves of trees are typical for the area surrounding the city of Bremen.  This land has been farmed for centuries and is therefore an archetype of the cultural landscape: land cultivated by humans.  Lakes, rivers, groves of trees, and soil form the basis of landscape elements such as fields, irrigation canals, and windbreaks (bocages), which are very common here. Production and port facilities close to the city bear witness to the internationally oriented merchants’ traditions of the hanseatic city of Bremen and its Bremerhaven exclave. The region is now home to agriculture, ship and airplane construction, the aerospace industry, and technology development.

Like many other European regions, Bremen and the surrounding area are undergoing fundamental changes due to economic, demographic, and climatic processes.  The transformations have occurred due to conversion, dismantling, densification, and new development as a consequence of structural changes.  All this has provided an opportunity for a new orientation, with which the promotion of open space design with high-quality projects and interventions could be supported. Initial projects could focus attention on landscape architecture that combines aesthetics and ecology, involving sites that are expanding and changing or that are located in newly developed urban neighbourhoods.  In this sense, our landscape interventions at the Bremen Airport Park and in Bremer-Osterholz are an investigation of urbanism as well as reflections about structures of the cultural landscape created through cultivation.

Landscape architectural design provides an impetus for the revitalization of a former industrial site.  With a mixture of business park and recreational space that is integrated into the surrounding landscape, this restructured area in Osterholz-Scharmbeck near Bremen strengthens the location’s overall identity.