The Big Good Future #3 - CCB Magazine ENGLISH

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The Magazine of the Creative City Berlin Platform

The Big Good Future #3 Sustainability and Culture

This year is going to be a good year. And no matter when you pick up this magazine, in 2022, 2023 or 2024, don’t doubt it. Believe in the future. Because the people we’re featuring in this issue, Berlin’s cultural and creative professionals, do.

Despite the notorious permanent crises and the constant ups and downs of the corona pandemic, the entire cultural scene is suddenly working on setting a green agenda: Some are preparing elaborate climate assessments and optimizing their carbon footprint. Others are introducing recyclable alternatives to society or rebuilding the city. It’s no longer about do we want to become more sustainable. It’s about the need to become more sustainable because the climate crisis demands it – and this poses completely new challenges for cultural professionals.

We, Creative City Berlin, present the first cross-sector cultural magazine on the topic of sustainability for culture. It con­ tinues our series “The Big Good Future”. This time we’re asking: How and by what means do cultural professionals shape society? What are their goals, visions, paths? And how sustainable is the culture out there that we’ve been connecting and reporting on for years on our platform Creative City Berlin at Kulturprojekte Berlin? For example, there’s fashion designer Hannah Kromminga, who produces one hundred percent recyclable clothing. There’s architect Jörg Finkbeiner, who’s building the first recyclable high-rises. And there are those who are ecologically retrofitting Berlin’s clubs or founding entire villages on the outskirts of the city based on sustainability criteria. And finally there are the artists whose visions are leading the way, demonstrating that the sustainability debate, which is more urgent than ever, is not a purely ecological one.

It also has a social and economic dimension, because at the end of the day it’s all about the question of whether we can live from what we do and what drives us. We have accompanied this city’s creatives on their paths. We confronted them with scientific perspectives and fed their positions back to

science. We have been to their production sites and project spaces, present their ideas, visions and solutions, bringing together their concepts and comparing them. In doing so, we never focus on just one industry and do not reduce sustainability to a mere ecological issue. We also address new ways of financing, take up the question of space and outline alternatives to social security. All in all, we pool expert knowledge and provide practical tips and assistance. And there is never just one way. The only path to more sustainability takes many steps, and this issue is about this maximum diversity.

Finally, two questions remain. First, what is this mysterious cover all about? You’ll find out on page 51. Second, how do you make a magazine sustainable when you’re already writing about it? And there is not just one solution to this. We finally decided on a paper from Arctic Paper that is based on the EU Ecolabel and is C2C-certified – but even that can be contested, and we do (see the debate on p. 32/33). And we don’t just close the magazine with a bang after 104 pages. We are carrying on our tradition from the last issue on the topic of digitization and continue the debate on Creative City Berlin, true to the motto: from magazine to platform and back again. With this in mind, enjoy the following pages, with eco-friendly greetings from the editorial team.

Jens Thomas Editor-in-Chief of Creative City Berlin

Editorial

We, Creative City Berlin, are the central platform for cultural and creative professionals in Berlin.

We network, mediate and inform – and we support those working on innovative, creative and sustainable solutions.

From analog to digital and back again: This is how the new CCB Magazine works

Imprint A publication of Creative City Berlin / Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH Publisher Corinna Scheller Editor-in-Chief Jens Thomas Editors Felicia Holtkamp, Boris Messing, Jens Thomas, Alison Winter

Translation Edit Stephan Schmidt

Imprint

Proofreading Boris Messing Design STUDIO BENS Printer trigger.medien.gmbH, Berlin Paper Munken Kristall paper from Arctic Paper Munkedal was used for this magazine. It has been awarded the Cradle to Cradle Certified ® certificate at bronze level and is based on the EU Ecolabel.

Coordination Annette Meier Editorial deadline February 2022 Cover motif Lignin from the “Black Liquor” project © Stögerer / Kempkens

© 2022 Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH

Klosterstraße 68 10179 Berlin www.kulturprojekte.berlin CEO: Moritz van Dülmen Funded by

This is how it works

Authors of this issue Sabrina Apitz, Zane Berzina, Jacob Sylvester Bilabel, Stephan Bohle, Nicola Bramkamp, Seneit Debese, Axel Fischer, Sema Gedik, Nora Sophie Griefahn, Korina Gutsche, Shai Hoffmann, Felicia Holtkamp, Lisa Jaspers, Tim Janßen, Lubomila Jordanova, Tatjana Kaube, Daniel Kerber, Lino Knocke, Jeannine Koch, Van Bo Le-Mentzel, Boris Messing, Alicja Möltner, Markus Sauerhammer, Nina Schallenberg, Melanie Seifart, Anna Theil, Jens Thomas, Linnart Unger, Alison Winter, Magdalena Ziomek

The Big Good Future #3 is also an analog-digital print product. You can read 30 articles right here in the magazine, and find another 40 online in CCB Magazine on Creative City Berlin by scanning the QR codes below the articles – and the magazine keeps on growing online.

Enjoy! www.creativecity.berlin #ccbmagazine #sustainability

The coalition agreement, the basis for the Senate’s work, is so to speak still warm: more than 150 pages full of projects that the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Green Party and the LINKE want to continue with improvements and get under way with over the next five years. Together.

Just the chapter on culture alone describes over six pages what improvements are in the pipeline for the city’s cultural scene and what we are tackling in a completely new way.

And as a kind of headline to all these plans, it makes it clear that Berlin’s cultural policy is “committed to the principles of freedom, social justice, fair remuneration, equal pay, ecological sustainability, equality, diversity and inclusion.” These are not just fine-sounding words that don’t cost anything – they are our principles by which we measure ourselves. And we have been working according to these principles for years in countless projects and facilities. Nevertheless, there is still plenty to do.

This issue broadens the horizon for what needs to be done and can be done and offers new insights. Since its inception – for cutting down only as many trees as can grow back – the idea of sustainability has taken hold in almost all areas. Culture, both production and presentation, is no exception – and yet culture has always been something special.

Culture has always been radical and new, upsetting the status quo, rebelling against the conditions and disrupting certainties. But culture is more than that: “Culture is a common good and cultural institutions have a role mo­ del function in society.” (p. 43) It is essential for society’s understanding of itself. In other words, the sustainability debate we so urgently need to conduct can and must receive important and new impulses through culture. At the same time, culture is indispensable for bringing the debate to the wider society.

There are some very interesting things to read, for example the interview on the Schaubühne: avoiding, reducing and compensating for CO2. Thoughts on club culture and how to find ecologically sustainable solutions there.

Or the article on project spaces for sustainability in the arts. Then on to fair pay and overcoming the gender pay gap, each also contributing to sustainability. The ideas on building and on the protection of historical monuments by using the existing building structures … All this makes me realize how we get from headlines to actual content and the amazing ways in which this city has long been contributing to it.

Dr. Klaus Lederer Senator for Culture and Europe Photo © Petrov Ahner

We can all do something, wherever we may stand, to make the way we work ecologically sustainable and climate neutral. However, it is clear to me that political policymaking support is needed to pave the way for such great initia­tives, innovative ideas and revolutionary thoughts.

Greeting

Culture has always been radical and new, upsetting the status quo, rebelling against situations and disrupting certainties.

And the sustainability debate we so urgently need to conduct can and must receive important and new impulses from ­culture.

Intro and Perspectives 1

Editorial

2

Legal notice

3

Greeting

6

What does this world need?

Five positions to start with

10 How did the concept of ­sustainability enter culture?

A ­foray through history

Contents

12 The lead interview: In conversation with Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber

Ecology 18 Fashion & Circular Economy – How do we make things for the future?

Fashion expert Hannah Kromminga explains it 22 How sustainable is the literary scene? In conversation with Anke Oxenfarth from oekom publishing house 26 The first Cradle to Cradle houses are being built. The architect Jörg Finkbeiner plans and builds them.

30 Promising the earth, or is the future really green? A debate about Cradle to Cradle 34 What does ecological filmmaking look like? By Korina G ­ utsche 36 How do you manufacture ­sustainably? A visit to the fashion label A New Kind of Blue 40 The art business wants to go green, but how? The example of Schaubühne 44 Are clubs becoming sustainable now? In conversation with Clubtopia 48 Art meets design, problem meets solution: This is how the future is made 54 CO2 calculators compared 55 The seal check

She She Pop Photo © Benjamin Krieg

58 Small but beautiful: Auf Augen­hoehe is the first fashion label for small people. By Sema Gedik 62 Smart but fair: A cooperative ­creates social security for the self-employed. By Magdalena ­Ziomek and Alicja Möltner

Economy 80 What does it take to make a ­sustainable society?

In conversation with sustainability researcher Niko Paech 83 About us: What Kreativ Kultur Berlin has to offer

64 Just talking is not enough: A commentary by Nicola Bramkamp on the gender pay gap

84 What do sustainable funding and ­financing methods look like?

An overview by Sabrina Apitz and ­Melanie Seifart

­ ollaboration: 66 Neighborhood and C A visit to the first Berlin ­Sustainability Gallery

86 Small up against big: Do alternative business models stand a chance?

By Felicia Holtkamp

70 Do-it-yourself, create villages: ­Frederik Fischer founds a village in Brandenburg

90 Big finances small: Are s­ ustainable investments in the creative ­industries the future?

In conversation with Juliane Schulze from Media Deals

74 Are you still on it or are you ill ­already? What does creative work have to do with health? In conversation with the communication agency Shitshow

94 How sustainable is crowdfunding?

Expert Shai Hoffmann explains 96 Special Digitalization: Does digitalization create more sustainability? A conversation with transformation researcher Prof. ­Tilman Santarius 100 Nine perspectives to finish with: What will tomorrow’s society look like?

Black Liquor Photo © Stögerer / Kempkens

Contents

Social

What does this world need?

Statements

6

Five positions to start with.

We need a new alliance between design, research and business.

Zane Berzina one of the founders of greenlab, professor at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee and artist © Julia Wolf

The corona pandemic has shown that politicians are suddenly listening to science. I would also like to see this in the field of sustainability research. Since our founding in 2010, we at the greenlab of the Weißensee School of Arts have formed an interface between design, research and business – the goal is to create synergies for a more sustainable future. We have funded around 100 projects so far. Many of the projects that have started at greenlab have great potential: A New Kind of Blue, for example, is developing zero-waste strategies for de­ nim (see p. 36). Black Liquor is exploring the potential of lignin, a waste stream from paper production, as a sustainable material (see p. 51). Mujo, on the other hand, uses algae to make packaging that dissolves in water after use without leaving pollutants behind. This is how society is shaped, this is how social change begins. Because the problems of the 21st century are so complex that individual disciplines can no longer solve them. So, what is needed is a new alliance between design, research and business. There is also no doubt that industry and business benefit from such cooperation. Or, in the words of design theorist Victor Margolin, design produces “tangible results that can serve as demonstrations or arguments for how we might live.”

Stephan Bohle Sustainability expert and founder of the consultancy futurestrategy

We need a home office law and sus­ tained investment.

Jeannine Koch former director of re:publica and current chairwoman of the board of media:net berlinbrandenburg

© Kerstin Jana Kater

© Emely Timm – Die Hoffotografen

For almost 20 years, I have been advising companies on how they can become sustainable. Back then, sustainability was a niche topic. Now, an entire society is adapting to it. In my consulting work, I recommend not doing things half-heartedly. If you want to become sustainable, you have to transform your entire business model: processes, structures, the mindset and the values of the company. And we all need to start now. Unfortunately, sustainable companies are still at a disadvantage because they internalize their environmental and social costs to a greater extent and do not transfer them to society. This principle is set to change; in January 2021, the new CO2 price was introduced, starting at a low 25 euros per ton. In June 2021, a new supply chain law was also passed, requiring companies with more than 3,000 employees to comply with human rights and environmental standards through their supply chains. The proportion of companies that adhere to strict sustainability criteria is still a meager 0.15 percent. That is clearly too low. However, the trend shows that 52 percent of all consumers already pay attention to sustainability when making purchases, and recent studies even assume that this figure is more like 70 percent, including an increasing number of younger people. In the long term, this will not only change corporate culture. It will make society a more sustainable one, and here I’m hoping for new impetus and concepts from the cultural and creative industries in particular.

We are currently seeing that digitization is changing every­ thing: event formats are becoming more digital. The topic of “Beyond Entertainment” is gaining in importance. Forms of immersive experience offer new opportunities for encounters, and let’s be honest: do we still need to fly to Düsseldorf just to shake hands? I don’t think so. The corona crisis has vividly demonstrated what is possible and how new hybrid events can enrich culture. What’s more, the home office decisively advances the idea of sustainability: as a Greenpeace study recently found out, 5.4 million tons of CO2 could be saved annually if 40 percent of employees worked permanently in a home office two days a week. That corresponds to 18 percent of all emissions caused by commuting. And those who don’t have to commute permanently don’t just cut CO2 emissions.

They also reduce the stress caused by commuting. It can also make the surrounding region more attractive, which relieves the tight housing market in Berlin. In other words, we don’t just need a home office law that empowers employees. We need investment funding for culture that is sustainable. This is exactly what I am campaigning for. As chair of the board of media:net berlinbrandenburg, I represent Berlin as a location through an industry network with 450 members.

7

We must favor those who act ecologically.

The onus is now on the institutions.

Nina Schallenberg Curator of the National G ­ allery and Sustainability Officer of the P ­ russian Cultural Heritage ­Foundation

Statements

8

© SPK / Dominik Twillemeier

In the light of man-made climate change, national and international cultural institutions must get moving – they must make their contribution to climate protection. This also applies to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK). We are pursuing a vision of sustainable action in ecological, social and economic terms. CO2 neutrality before 2035 is our first goal.

But how is this to be achieved? On October 1, my colleague Daniel Naumann and I took up the newly created positions of sustainability officers. They are an initial result of what we as SPK employees have initiated in numerous discussions and projects for more sustainable action at the Foundation. In a participatory process, five working groups were established to promote measures in the areas of resource conservation, recycling, greening, mobility and food. And a foundation-wide task force focuses on overarching issues such as recording CO2 consumption or developing governance. In close collaboration with these groups, we are drafting a sustainability strategy for SPK in which the various strands come together. To channel the processes, we are also aiming for EMAS certification of the foundation, which will give us information about the environmental impact of our actions and support sustainable development in the long term. Preserving objects and knowledge for future generations is one of SPK’s core tasks. Therefore, we have a duty not only as individuals but also as an institution to ensure that this world is fit for the future.

We need to turn the fear of doing without things into an appetite for innova­ tion.

Jacob Sylvester Bilabel Founder of the Green Music ­Initiative and Head of the Aktionsnetzwerk Nachhaltigkeit © Daniel Pasche

For me, it all started in a shared apartment. At some point in every living community, there’s a situation where you’re sitting in the kitchen and someone says the fridge is broken. Usually no one feels responsible for that. I was the one who felt responsible – and today I take care of sustainable issues in the field of culture. In 2012, I started the Green Music Initiative. In the fall of 2020, I launched the Aktionsnetzwerk Nachhaltigkeit (Sustainability Action Network), a cross-sector focal point for the topic of operational ecology in the field of culture and media, which is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, among others. The goal is to advance the issue of sustainability in culture. As an action network, we focus on operational ecology and pool the expertise of around 30 partners, from the German Museums Association and the German Federal Film Board to the Humboldt Forum and documenta. Together with the Cologne Chamber of Industry and Commerce, we offer certified training courses for “Sustainable Culture Transformation Managers” and have launched a CO2 calculator for culture sponsored by the E.ON Foundation. It’s important to know that 85 percent of emissions in the cultural sector are comparable to those in many other sectors. Heating, ventilation, electricity – it’s no different at the museum than in the paint shop, the big chunks are the same. But our calculator is set up for fine-tuning in the cultural sector, something that no other CO2 calculator has been able to do so far. Because if we want to change culture, we have to act now. We need to turn the fear of doing without things into an appetite for innovation.

Find players, networks and experts in Berlin‘s cultural and creative scene on Creative City Berlin with more than 24,000 profiles!

www.creativecity.berlin

story

In the beginning was the forester

10

The concept of sustainability is taking over culture. But where does the term come from? What does it stand for and how have sustainability aspects become established in the cultural and the creative industries? A foray through history Forest management

Ecology movement

Limits to growth

The Freiberg Administrator of Mines Carl von Carlowitz was the first to talk about “sustained use”. In 1732, the Chief Master Huntsman Hermann Friedrich von Göchhausen demanded that only as many trees should be felled as can grow back. The concept of sustainability was born.

The first wave of the ecology movement emerged. The cultural sectors did not yet play any role. However, the mid-19th century saw the growth of the Arts and Crafts reform movement in England, striving for an alternative to mass production.

In 1971, Viktor Papanek called for doing without and for ecological production criteria in “Design for the Real World”.

In 1972, the first major international environmental conference was held in Stockholm. In the same year, the Club of Rome’s groundbreaking report “The Limits to Growth” was published. In 1973, the term and strategy “eco-development” were established through the activities of UNEP.

1713

1860

1970th

Sustainability

1968

1980th

Club of Rome

The Greens

The Club of Rome was founded, bringing together experts from various disciplines from 30 countries. In the same year, the International Design Center (IDZ) was founded in Berlin. One of the two inaugural exhibitions was entitled “Design – Umwelt wird in Frage gestellt” (Design – Focus on Environment).

The Green Party was founded in 1980.

In 1982, Joseph Beuys initiated the project “7000 oaks”. The Brundtland Report, written in 1987, shaped the modern understanding of sustainability.

Cradle to Cradle

1.5 degree target & 17 goals

Gallery Climate Coalition

In 1992, the UN Conference convened in Rio de Janeiro. Culture as a factor of sustainability was considered for the first time in Chapter 36 of Agenda 21. In 1994, the sustainability triangle was established, interlinking the areas of eco­ logy, social affairs and economy. In 1996, the first Circular Economy / Waste Management Act came into force in Germany. At the end of the 1990s, the Cradle to Cradle principle was developed (see p. 30).

Since 2010, the German Federal Cultural Foundation has produced several publications on sustainability in culture. In 2012, the Circular Economy Act, intended to help conserve resources, came into force. In 2015, the Paris climate targets of 1.5, maximum 2 degrees of global warming were enshrined in international law and the 17 global sustainability goals of the UN’s 2030 Agenda were adopted: Sustainable work, production and consumption were defined as international goals for the first time.

In London, the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC) has been formed to reduce CO2 emissions in art businesses by 50 percent by 2030. An offshoot has also been formed in Berlin. The German Federal Cultural Foundation has launched a pilot project on climate accounting with 19 institutions, including the Schaubühne Berlin (see p. 40).

1990th

2020

11

2010– 2015

2000th

2015 –2020

2021

Tutzing Manifesto

European Green Deal

Supply Chain Act

In 2001, the Tutzing Manifesto was written by cultural institutions and cultural practitioners to strengthen the “cultural-­ aesthetic dimension” of sustainability. In 2006, economist Niko Paech established the post-growth economy (see p. 80). Initiatives such as the Green Music Initiative were launched, and the Common Good Economy (GWÖ) was written by Christian Felber. Individuals and companies were thus provided with a value-oriented measurement tool.

Numerous initiatives have been set up in Berlin: ESMOD has initiated the “Sustainability in Fashion” course of studies.

The Green-showrooms and the Ethical Fashion Show have been set up as part of the Berlin Fashion Week. In 2016, the first lab for the textile circular economy, the CRCLR House, was launched, and initiatives have also emerged in the film sector. In 2019, the European Green Deal was adopted by the European Commission to set net greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union to zero by 2050.

On June 11, 2021, the Supply Chain Act was passed, and will come into force in 2023 (see p. 101). In addition, the Single-Use Plastic Ban Ordinance and Single-Use Plastic Labeling Ordinance have been passed. Something is also happening in the area of social sustainability: the new Accessibility Act has been in force since May 2021 (see p. 60) and further steps will follow in 2022. We can look forward to them with anticipation.

Illustrations © Stefan Dittrich

Lead interview

12

“We have one decade left”

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber is one of the world’s most renowned climate researchers. He was an advisor to Angela Merkel, he introduced the idea of tipping points into research, and the Paris climate targets of no more than two degrees of global warming are also attributable to him. Now, at 71, he’s moving forward with his latest life’s work: the “Bauhaus of the Earth” project to advance ecological architecture. We spoke with him about having the ­courage to be consistent, a possible new government of the climate and what art, culture and politics can learn from research.

Interview: Jens Thomas

Photo © Paulus Ponizak

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber holds a PhD in physics. Until September 2018, he was director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), which he founded in 1992. From 2009 to 2016, he was chairman of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU). He is a long-standing member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and has advised numerous important decision-makers.

CCB Magazine: Mr. Schellnhuber, you are considered one of the world’s most influential climate researchers and can look back on a 40-year career as a climate expert. If my calculations are correct, you have a 13-year-old son. Is he already taking part in the Fridays for Future protests?

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber: Oh yes, he is indeed – he’s a bright boy. However, he is even more interested in political systems and social justice. I’m curious to see what path he will take later on.

In 1992, you founded the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), from which you stepped down as director in 2018. It continues to have a decisive influence on science and politics today. You once described PIK as your greatest life achievement. Do you still remember the first steps you took?

Of course, I do. In 1990, the first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had just been published. That’s when it became clear to some that action had to be taken.

Klaus Hasselmann, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics last year as a climate modeller, had suggested at the time that an institute for climate impact research be established. The then Federal Research Minister Heinz Riesenhuber (CDU) brought me to Potsdam in 1991 as the founding director of PIK. At that time, however, man-made climate change was still a rather exotic topic. However, I sensed that it was going to become a major topic of the century. And also, because I advised Angela Merkel in her then function as environment minister from 1994 on, the institute steadily gained influence. We started small, with about 20 staff. Bizarrely, we were based to begin with in the offices of the former Stasi headquarters in Berlin’s Normannenstrasse. Fortunately, we were then able to move to Potsdam’s Telegrafenberg, where Albert Einstein and other immortals of science used to work. Today, PIK employs more than 300 permanent staff and up to 100 guest researchers in five buildings.

In 2006, Angela Merkel personally appointed you as climate advisor to the German government. To be honest, climate policy achievements have been somewhat disappointing. Did you give the government wrong advice for years, or did they simply not listen to you enough?

Neither. As a physicist, Angela Merkel certainly understood the issue. But it may well have been her party that put the brakes on doing more. That is the paradox of scientific advice: you can determine precisely what needs to be done on the basis of solid research. But politicians usually look for superficial solutions, because voters would immediately punish the imposition of short-term disadvantages in favor of long-term benefits. And over the years, people have simply not taken tipping points seriously, where drastic changes become irreversible once a certain temperature is reached – these include the ice sheets melting, the Gulf Stream ceasing to flow, or the Indian summer monsoon getting increasingly chaotic.

When the financial crisis hit in 2008, the climate issue was off

13

Staying well below 2 degrees will not be possible. But by strengthening carbon sinks through refore­ station, reclaiming wetlands and organic architecture we can slowly work our way back into a tolerable temperature range.

14 Lead interview

the table anyway. Only now is the problem being recognized across party lines. That’s why I have hope that the new government could become a climate government.

Oh yeah?

True, the exploratory paper was full of tortured compromises.

But the spirit behind it is an open one. I could imagine some groundbreaking things being set in motion over the course of the legislative period. These include, for example, the inevitable transition to a regenerative, bio-based circular economy. The basic prerequisite for this is a transformation ministry that brings together energy, industry, land use, construction and mobility. The goal of the next government must be climate neutrality by 2040.

You were one of the first to call for global warming to be limited to a maximum of two degrees. As a member of the German delegation, you played a key role in negotiating the Paris climate targets of 1.5 and 2 degrees in 2015. What hope do you have that the Paris climate targets will still be achieved?

Staying well below 2 degrees and even below 1.5 degrees seems to me hardly feasible at the moment. To achieve this, we would have to limit the carbon dioxide content in the earth’s atmosphere to a maximum of 450 ppm. Global emissions would have to fall to zero well before 2050. The chance of that happening is maybe five percent. I was surprised any­ way that the 1.5-degree guard rail was agreed in Paris. That was – understandably – wishful thinking right from the start.

Now I’m even assuming that we’re going to overshoot the two degrees. But by strengthening carbon sinks through refor­estation, wetland reclamation and organic architecture, we can slowly work our way back into a tolerable temperature range. If nothing is done, the earth’s temperature will rise by as much as eight degrees in the next few centuries, and by four degrees by the end of this century alone. In terms of earth history, that would be like living 30 million years ago, with brutal weather extremes and sea level rise in the tens of meters.

Mr. Schellnhuber, our issue is called “The Big Good Future”. We are looking at sustainability strategies in culture and the creative industries. In your opinion, what role do cultural professionals play in the current climate and sustainability discourse?

They have to get up out of their easy chairs and say, “We’re not going along with this anymore.” And who, if not those working in the arts and culture, can shine a bright light into the dark corners of industrial modernism? For years, I myself have tried to win over art and culture players to the climate debate – without any notable success. Only now is a whole armada setting out to resist climate change. What we need are cross-sector innovations. The transition to a regenerative circular economy is inevitable. The cultural and creative industries can make a decisive contribution to this.

You have just launched the “Bauhaus of the Earth” project to advance timber construction via circular processes. The building sector accounts for 40 percent of total CO2 emissions. The concept of sustainability was founded in 1713 by Hans Carl

von Carlowitz with the demand that only as much wood should be felled as could naturally grow back. As a climate scientist, are you calling for the clearing of forests?

No, absolutely not. In particular, we need to reforest degraded areas around the world in order to sequester CO2. Forests absorb almost a third of the CO2 emitted by humans every year.

We must now abandon the mistakes of the past by stopping using steel and concrete that cannot be recycled properly.

This is also where our “Bauhaus of the Earth” project comes in. We want to address the Green Deal, the transformation of the entire national economy toward sustainability, with the Bauhaus concept. The Bauhaus came into being in 1919, striving for total works of art that brought together architects, designers, craftsmen and artists. Today, we must pursue this approach anew under ecological auspices.

And what does that mean now?

This means that we specifically use wood, bamboo, hemp, loam and other materials without a heavy CO2 backpack.

Among other things, our concept envisages recycling well over 90 percent of the recyclable materials used in construction. There will soon be more than 50 scientists, building experts and creative minds working on the “Bauhaus of the Earth” project. At the heart of the project is the vision of an organic architecture whose renewable raw materials are taken from a wisely managed biosphere in dynamic equilibrium. This presupposes an attractive demand market for the existing forest developing in a positive way despite its use.

The harvested biomass is stored in durable products such as cross-laminated timber or chemical-free furniture. In this way, we remove some of the CO2 emitted by the fossil fuel industry from the earth’s atmosphere. The bottom line is that we can thus release significant amounts of the carbon budget we still have worldwide to limit global warming to two degrees compared to pre-industrial times.

Authors like Peter Wohlleben would disagree with you. He argues that we must not clear-cut forests but allow them to grow naturally in order to strengthen the existing forests as a carbon store.

Architects like Daniel Fuhrhop even turn away from new construction altogether – they say it must be about rebuilding the existing stock. And opponents of the circular economy argue that it does not move away from overconsumption. In this issue, sustainability researcher Niko Paech calls for a drastic reduction in consumption and production. He says this is the only way a sustainable society has a chance.

Now that’s a whole lot of false or questionable statements!

How many printed pages are you giving me to reply? Let me briefly clarify the following. Of course, new construction is needed if the additional two billion people expected on this planet by 2050 are to find a home. Moreover, billions of the earth’s current citizens still live in informal or squalid settlements. To ignore this would be postcolonial arrogance. Incidentally, even prosperous Germany is full of ugly, dysfunctional post-war buildings that need to be replaced. And as for

Artists and cultur­ al workers have to get up out of their easy chairs and say: We’re not going along with this anymore.

And who, if not they, would be able to shine a bright light into the dark corners of indus­ trial modernity?

15

Prof. Schellnhuber. Describes himself as one tough Bavarian. He has been researching climate change for 40 years. Photo © Paulus Ponizak

the newly fashionable romanticization of the forester, we’ve been managing forest ecosystems for 1,000 years or more, and it’s perfectly sustainable. What the nature purists fail to realize is that a forest left to its own devices will eventually reach the climax state, at which point it will no longer sequester CO2. By contrast, the value-added extraction of biomass sets something like a permanent pump for “negative” emissions in motion. And as for the circular economy, of course even circulation enthusiasts should keep in mind that all vital cycles on earth can only be partially closed. Without the constant inflow of solar energy, however, nothing works at all.

And if we make extensive use of it, we as a civilization can also turn so to speak in ever-larger circles.

Mr. Schellnhuber, in this issue we address the issue of sustainability in the various cultural sectors. It is striking that art often practices radical renunciation, while the creative industries approach sustainable solutions in an entrepreneu­ r­ial way. When young climate activists went on hunger strike last year, you called for an end to it – but made it clear that you yourself could imagine a hunger strike as a last resort. Should we be worried about you?

No, at least not yet (laughs). In any case, I’m one tough Bavarian and could probably last a long time without food. My open letter to the hunger strikers was an ethical necessity, because it really was a matter of life and death.

Final question: How radical do art and culture have to be to be able to make a difference?

Art and culture have to get to the bottom of things, even where it is painfully cold and dirty. At the same time, it dismays me when young people go on hunger strike. They should be falling in love, having fun and making bold plans at that age. But when Greta Thunberg came to my office the year before last, I realized that young people today are taking on the burden of responsibility for the future because conventional politics has shied away from that responsibility for too long. And many cultural workers are now willing to share this burden as well.

We now have one more decade to change course. Let us do our duty to humanity.

Ecology

Fashion & Circular Economy – How do we make things for the future?

How sustainable is the literary scene?

The first Cradle to Cradle houses are being built Promising the earth, or is the future really green?

What does ecological filmmaking look like?

How do you manufacture ­sustainably?

A visit to the fashion label A New Kind of Blue The art business wants to go green, but how? The example of Schaubühne Are clubs becoming sustainable now?

Art meets design, problem meets solution: This is how the future is made CO2 calculators compared The seal check

17 Black Liquor Photo © Stögerer / Kempkens

Fashion 18

Rag Back

Ecology

A young Lenny Kravitz? No, an unknown man in a white SILFIR suit. Photo © Studio CNP

The fashion world causes billions of dollars in environmental damage every year.

Hannah Kromminga, founder of the app GIFTD and the fashion label SILFIR, wants to set an example. Through her app, used clothing can be given away. The collection is 100 percent organic or mechanically recyclable. How does the concept work?

Interview: Jens Thomas

Hannah Kromminga has a degree in business administration and started her career in the London start-up scene in 2010.

She is co-founder of Greentech Alliance and works as a strategy consultant in the field of circular economy. In 2019, she won the European Culture Prize “TAURUS Förderpreis Next Generation”.

Photo © Europäischer Kulturpreis

CCB Magazine: Hannah, you are an expert in textile circular economy. You developed the app GIFTD and founded the sustainable fashion label SILFIR. You call the SILFIR collection “sustainable fashion – The Soft Workwear Uniform.” At first glance, it is one thing above all: white. What is so special about it?

Hannah Kromminga: The collection is a simple, sustain­able unisex two-piece that is suitable for all body shapes and any activity. SILFIR stands for innovative unisex collections based on a circularity concept, which means transparent material and value-added processes. However, we are not only concerned with the clothing, but also with the life cycle of the garments.

SILFIR is based on the concept of the circular economy. What is the problem?

The problem is that 230 million brand-new clothes are shredded, shipped or incinerated in Germany every year.

According to Greenpeace, one in five garments is hardly ever worn. Global textile production roughly doubled between 2014 and 2020 – around 200 billion garments were produced worldwide in 2020. In addition, according to the IEA, the textile and leather industry causes annual CO2 emissions of around 89 million tons. It’s clear that we can’t carry on like this. That’s why we recycle all our fabrics and also offer a comprehensive repair and recycling service.

Water, CO2 and waste consumption are also significantly reduced for each garment. Through a take-back system we developed, we enable every customer to return the suit or give it as a gift to friends, family and neighbors via the GIFTD app.

Your collection also has an integrated ID chip that provides information about all those involved in production, manufacturing methods and processes when you run your cell phone over the label. What is that all about?

We want to create transparency! The precursor of our ID chip is the collection of fashion designer Ina Budde. With SILFIR, we were the first Berlin prototype, so to speak. The ID chip is a kind of circularity ID, which means it is integrated into each garment and allows customers to trace the production history in detail online via QR code scan or URL: Who were the people involved in the production? Where did the fabrics come from? Were they fairly traded and were the workers fairly paid? Because we’re not talking about a national problem here, but one with international implications – from the sale of a T-shirt that costs 29 euros in this country, 18 cents is left over at the end for the seamstresses in Bangladesh. In addition, the Circularity ID helps recyclers to identify the garments and recognize their exact composition, and that is crucial for meaningful recycling.

How do you produce a collection like this? What criteria do you use to select the materials? Where and how is production carried out? Are your employees paid fairly? And what are the points where you say, no, we won’t do that.

19

In Germany, 230 million brand-new clothes are shredded, shipped or incinerated every year. One in five garments is hardly ever worn. We need new solutions here.

Fashion 20 Ecology

The employees of our production partners are all paid fairly, and we select materials for their compatibility with nature.

We are driven by the zero-waste idea, which means that every garment is designed to be one hundred percent biologically or mechanically recyclable. Everything is made from the most innovative and sustainable materials. The patterns are designed by our designer Anja Krause here in Berlin and realized with materials from Circular-Fashion’s database. Production is done according to Fair Wear Foundation standards in Northern Portugal. A no-go for us is to throw sustainability standards overboard for the design. Sustainability always comes first. It’s a balancing act, of course, because you can’t be one hundred percent sustainable.

You start with the concept of a circular economy.

A criticism that is often leveled against it is that it does nothing to reduce overconsumption. The Greenpeace study “Fashion at the crossroads” criticizes the fashion industry for being under the misapprehension that we can go on like this for­ ever if only everything can be recycled.

I wouldn’t disagree with that. But the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. The concept of the circular economy is based on the central premise of reducing waste to a minimum. In Germany alone, more than a million tons of clothing waste is produced every year. We can no longer ignore that. And of course, this can only be achieved by reducing overconsumption. So, clothing needs to be long-lasting, and we need to be able to give it back when we’ve finished with it, either by making it compostable so that it can be put back into biological

The concept of the circular economy is based on the central premise of reducing waste to a minimum.

In Germany alone, more than one million tons of clothing waste is generated each year. We can no longer ignore this.

circulation, or by using technology to recycle by breaking it down into its component parts. One problem in fashion production, for example, is that zippers or buttons can’t simply be composted. That’s why using technology for recycling is so important, and this is also where our app GIFTD comes in: We reallocate resources, guaranteeing reuse until the garment is completely worn out. This means that recycling can be pushed back for as long as possible.

But how do fashion labels make money from that?

It’s an open secret that many small fashion labels can barely make a living from their work. And the big chains are focusing more and more on sustainability, in other words, they are competing with the small labels. How do you manage to hold your own as a sustainable fashion label on the market against others and, above all, against big industry?

You need to invest in order to reach a competitive production run size as quickly as possible. But the vast majority of labels don’t manage to do that. What the small labels do succeed in doing is creating the pressure to innovate. They provide the impetus and initiate topics – and they benefit from the fact that they are involved from the very beginning and shape production and distribution as well as growth strategies in a sustainable manner. In this respect, they even have an advantage over the large companies, which, incidentally, is also confirmed by the 2019 Pulse Report by the Boston Con-

Photo © Daniel Weigel

Photo © Daniel Weigel

lot of adjustments, especially in the beginning, to be able to place the product on the market. That’s not easy, and that’s why many label operators have other projects as well, because otherwise they can’t make ends meet. My main project is GIFTD, the app. And what I advise everyone is this – don’t be too enamoured with your ideas! Look to the ones that work. Your mission has to be meaningful, not just for you, but for other people too. I’d advise anyone starting up a fashion label to first read the standard software startup books like the ones by Eric Ries. You can learn a lot from them.

This is where you can give your old away – put them back into circulation via the GIFTD app. Photo © Karolina Leckowskaya

21

sulting Group: It will take the large labels and chains years or even decades in the marketplace to be able to adapt to the sustainability trend – the changeover is complex and costs money. The vast majority of small labels will not become major competitive brands. Nevertheless, they play an important pioneering role for the entire industry through their innovations in material development, in the manufacturing process as well as in the distribution model.

Finally, one more tip please: How do you build a sustainable fashion label according to circular economy criteria? And how can you make a living from it without violating sustainability standards?

You build a sustainable fashion label just like any other business. You have to come up with a clear concept and make a

Literature 22 GGP Media – large-scale printing plant of the Bertelsmann Printing Group, which has also been offering C2C printing since September 2021.

Photo © GGP Media

Ecology

Business as usual?

The publishing industry is undergoing a moral crisis: should it make its products more sustainably or carry on the same as ever? Anke Oxenfarth is a literary and social scientist. She has been working since 1999 at oekom Verlag, one of Germany’s leading sustainability publishers. At Future Publish in Berlin, she spoke about publishing in the future – we talked to her.

Interview: Boris Messing

Anke Oxenfarth has been an editor and reader at oekom Verlag for over twenty years. She is head of the sustainability department there. Since 2002, she has also been editor-in-chief of the Journal “Politische Ökologie“.

Photo © private / Mario González Toimil

CCB Magazine: Ms. Oxenfarth, in 2011 you launched the project “New Environmental Stan­dards for the Publishing Industry” for oekom Verlag together with the Frankfurt Book Fair, a nationwide model project. One of the results was the “Kleine 1×1 des nachhaltigen Publizierens” (Fundamentals of Sustainable Publishing). Shouldn’t we dispense with rustling newspapers and beautifully bound books altogether?

Anke Oxenfarth: Why should we do that?

Because it would be consistent. In Germany, more than 240 kilograms of paper are consumed per capita each year. Of that, 75 percent is recycled paper, but if other countries consumed as much, there would be no more forests.

No, it would be completely insane to do without books and newspapers. Digital reading or e-book readers are not the solution. In fact, the Internet is one of the biggest power guzzlers of all. If the Internet were a country, as the Greenpeace study “Grüner klicken” (Greener Click) concluded back in 2017, it would have the sixth-largest electricity consumption in the world. And in all probability there was a significant increase in consumption during the pandemic. While it’s not clear what the contribution of e-book readers is to that, what can be said is that the raw materials needed for a switch to digital products are finite and would come primarily from countries where human rights are trampled underfoot and where the exploitation of raw materials has long led to considerable social and ecological dislocation.

But the trend is moving from analog to digital.

I don’t think books will ever disappear completely. The invention of modern printing by Johannes Gutenberg in 1450 was a decisive step toward cultural civilization, and we don’t want to part with that. E-books also have a meager share of more than five percent of the book market – although their share is growing. Media history has shown that when a new medium comes along, the old ones don’t disappear completely. The change takes decades. That said, I share the arguments of the 130 reading researchers who, at the end of 2018, in the Stavanger Declaration on the Future of Reading, made a case for the advantage of printed books over e-books for a deeper understanding of texts and the retention of content. The Stavanger Declaration plausibly demonstrates that our brains process information in different ways when we read it on the Internet, on a cell phone, or in a book. No, we don’t need to give up books and newspapers. We need other solutions.

And what might they be?

When it comes to sustainable publishing, the first question is, what is the impact of the product I’m making? Where is the Achilles’ heel and what can I do to change it? Specifically, for printed books, that means I should look at what paper I print them on. If I use recycled paper, I use significantly fewer resources. At the same time, I’m also investing in the circular economy by using less water and less electricity. Then I have to look at what inks I’m using: Do they contain mineral oil or not? It is now standard practice to print with mineral oil-free

23

The question is: As a publisher, do I want to be part of the solution? Or just carry on as before?

Literature 24 Ecology

inks. I also have to think about how I plan my print run: Do I base it on a realistic sales forecast, or do I say we’ll just print 5,000 more copies? If you sell them, fine, but if you don’t, you have to pulp them and that would be extremely unecological.

It’s also very important where I get my printing done. In China, to save two cents per copy? Just because the transport costs are negligible? Or do I get my printing done in my own region and thus strengthen the local printing industry? That way I also save on emissions. These are the things that publishers can consider.

There are around 3,000 book publishers in Germany, and around 400 in Berlin – three quarters of which are so-called micro publishers. Aren’t publishers currently more concerned with their survival than thinking about sustainable publishing?

And do publishers even know about their own ecological footprint?

Yes and no. Publishers have only started to think about ecological standards in the last few years. Other countries are not much further ahead. In Great Britain, for example, there is a manifesto for more sustainability, the Green Bookselling Manifesto. However, this is aimed at the book trade and not directly at publishers and manufacturing. And yes, not everyone can afford to make calculations about how they could make their own footprint more ecological. When we launched our sustainable publishing project in 2011, most publishers weren’t even thinking about it. Now, at least, we’re further along. But there is still a lot of room for improvement, especially among the big publishers. So far, they’ve mostly only acted in accordance with sustainability criteria on a selective basis.

Can you give us some examples?

Let’s take Oetinger Verlag, which has produced three children’s books according to cradle-to-cradle criteria. That means the book is compostable at the end. But we don’t yet know whether C2C paper can be recycled, since only the ­users know the C2C criteria. A few of the big publishers now use recycled paper for some of their books, but not as consistently as some smaller publishers. Or Ullstein Verlag, which ran a big campaign at the end of 2018 to market a book without a plastic cover. That wasn’t very far-reaching in terms of the eco-balance, but it did cause a slight tremor in the industry, and you have to give Ullstein credit for that. We are grateful for such campaigns. But the elephant in the room is and remains paper.

Sales in the publishing industry in Germany have remained remarkably stable over the past twenty years. At the same time, more and more publishers are running out of money. It’s getting tight, especially for small publishers. Doesn’t sustainable publishing end up costing publishers too much money?

Yes and no. My publishing house, oekom Verlag, is also under great financial pressure to succeed. But it was a conscious decision to say that we would now publish sustainably. Publishers need to ask themselves whether they want to be part

Not every publish­ ing house can afford to make calcu­ lations about how to make their own foot­ print more ecological.

Still, things are going to change.

of the solution? Or just carry on in the same old way? If you print on recycled paper, it costs more money. But it’s also possible to put your books together in such a way that the difference is not so great.

Ms. Oxenfarth, you have been working for oekom Verlag since 1999. Your publishing house is a flagship eco-publisher. What role does it play in networking other publishers in the context of sustainable publishing?

We have made a name for ourselves over the years. Since we started in 1989, our goal from the outset has been to elevate environmental sustainability from being a niche conversation into the social mainstream. In the course of the “New Environmental Standards for the Publishing Industry” project, which ran from 2011 to 2015, we held various workshops for different stakeholders such as publishers or printers. We also went to the Frankfurt Book Fair three times and put sustainability on the agenda there. We’ve tried to mediate between science and the individual players in the book industry. In the course of this development, we also came up with the idea for the “Blaue Engel Print Products” eco-label, which has been around since 2015. Since then, I have been invited time and again to various events in the industry and try to bang the drum for sustainable publishing on panels or in lectures.

The “Blaue Engel” eco-label is over 40 years old.

For those who don’t know the label, what’s it all about?

The product-related “Blaue Engel” eco-label has been around since 1978 and is awarded to products that are manufactured in an environmentally friendly manner. Books, journals or magazines that work with environmentally certified print shops that meet certain criteria are allowed to use this “Blaue Engel” on their products. Today, it is mainly found on magazines and advertising brochures, for example for the REWE supermarket chain. Only very few books have been awarded the label. This is mainly due to the difficulty of finding suitable recycled paper for book covers.

In 2020, the EU member states passed a directive banning single-use plastic from 2021. Is voluntary commitment enough or does the book industry also need statutory ecological legislation?

If the state were to be consistent in reducing subsidies for fossil fuels and ending them altogether in the short term, the economy would change course quite quickly on its own. In addition, it would certainly be a good idea for the legislator to provide clear political guidelines and perhaps also financial incentives to ensure that environmentally friendly production becomes the standard in all industries. Until that point is reached, we need pioneers in all sectors of the economy who recognize the signs of the times and simply lead the way. And fortunately, there are already plenty of them in a wide variety of industries.

You might also be interested in this: Want to know how to make compostable books and what the book market has to do with sustainability?

Find out more in CCB Magazine.

Photo: Frauke Weller © Katrin Schmötzer

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Architecture 26

“We don’t build trash here!“

Ecology

Stands its ground, but has twelve floors: the Cradle-to-Cradle Woodscraper. Photo © Partner und Partner Architekten

Steel, concrete, plastics – pure pollution. This is how the construction industry has built for decades. The architectural firm Partner und Partner from Berlin wants to change that. They are building so-called Woodscrapers, twelve-story wooden high-rises constructed according to the cradle-to-cradle principle and whose components can all be recycled. Are these the houses of the future?

We spoke to Jörg Finkbeiner, Managing Director of Partner und Partner.

Interview: Boris Messing

Jörg Finkbeiner is one of two managing directors of the architectural firm Partner und Partner, which specializes in circular timber construction. In 2019, the firm won the German Ecodesign Award, and in 2021, the German Sustainability Award.

Photo © Partner und Partner Architekten

CCB Magazine: Mr. Finkbeiner, you did an apprenticeship as a carpenter before studying architecture. Do you still remember the first piece of furniture you made yourself?

Jörg Finkbeiner: Oh yes, when I was twelve or thirteen, I built a coffee table. It didn’t last long, but that sparked my passion for wood. I’ve always loved to build and tinker. My journeyman’s piece at the end of my carpentry apprenticeship was a standing desk, for which I even received a guild award. I still use that desk today.

With your architectural firm Partner und Partner, you are building two twelve-story wooden high-rises in Wolfsburg – the first of their kind. Wood conjures up ideas of well-being and tranquility. But what about safety and fire risk? Is wood even stable enough as a material to build a high-rise?

I often hear that wood burns, rots and creaks! But that is a false picture. Wood does burn, that’s true. But there are very clear fire safety regulations, especially for high-rise buildings, which must and can be complied with. In house fires, by the way, most people die not from combustion but from smoke inhalation. And the staircases of our Woodscrapers are built of reinforced concrete, which is non-negotiable in Germany. So nothing can burn there, and the escape routes are passable even if there’s a fire. Wood is also very safe in terms of statics if it is built correctly. In Vienna, there is now a 24-story wooden high-rise building that is 84 meters high. Wood can carry loads very well.

How will the Woodscrapers be used when they are finished?

Most of the units will be residential. Downstairs there’s commercial space, a small café, a bike rental shop, a laundry. But essentially it’s residential. The wood creates a very special living atmosphere.

The Woodscraper is built according to the cradle-­ to-cradle principle. You also talk about “circular construction". What does that mean?

As far as circular construction is concerned, we are breaking completely new ground with the Woodscrapers. All building materials can be separated and recycled into their respective material cycles. For example, we don’t use toxic glues to join the wooden parts. So what circular means is that the individual parts of the building can be dismantled after 50, 70 or 100 years and completely recycled, for example for the construction of a new building. This corresponds to the C2C principle.

Wood construction is ideal for this, because we only use prefabricated building elements, which incidentally also considerably reduces construction time. Our construction project is also being supported by a research project of the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (German Federal Environmental Foundation). A comprehensive life cycle assessment of the two buildings was carried out, and everything is balanced down to the last screw. Compared with a similar conventional-style building made of reinforced concrete and plastic composites, we have a significantly better eco-balance. Our building is resource-positive, i.e. we produce no waste during construction.

27

With our Wood­ scrapers we are breaking new ground.

All the building mate­ rials can be separated and recycled into their respective material cycles. That is the future.

Architecture 28 Ecology

Building with concrete – Building with wood More than 50 percent of global waste comes from the construction industry. We want to make a contribution here.

Since when has architecture actually been concerned with C2C? People were already building circularly before the Indus­trial Revolution. This was mainly because buildings were constructed from a small number of regional and predominantly natural or renewable building materials. Reusing a wooden beam after a house had been dismantled was simpler and more economical and so that’s what people did. Our glo­ bal, branched supply chains and immense number of complex building products mean that we can’t do that now. This amounts to a system change, and this way of thinking about architecture is relatively new.

How long does a wooden house like this last?

That depends on how well you look after it. The old town hall in Esslingen, for example, a six-story wooden building, will soon be celebrating its 600th anniversary. Question answered?

What about the costs? Is building with wood according to the C2C principle more expensive?

I’m often asked this question. In short, with Woodscrapers, construction is about two percent more expensive than conventional construction. But this does not take into account the fact that we build faster, produce no or very little waste, and all materials can be reused. Our method also saves a lot of time and energy for remodeling the house. And we have no toxic waste to dispose of.

You emphasize that buildings have an impact not only on the occupants, but also on society. What do you mean by that?

Wood appeals to people in many ways: the feel, the smell, the aesthetics. And wood is also demonstrably good for sleep; the heart beats more calmly when you sleep in a wooden environment. But above all, the social impact refers to parameters such as climate-damaging construction, waste generation, etc., which are avoided by C2C wood construction. With conventional construction, these costs are shouldered by the community at large. If we build badly and produce waste, then society pays for it in the end. In this respect, it naturally has an impact on society if we build in a resource-positive, climate-friendly and circular way instead.

Keyword: architecture at eye level. Which stakeholders have to be involved in circular construction to achieve the best possible result?

We tried to get everyone involved at the table as early as possible and convince them of our idea. The specialist planners, for example, were at the table right from the start. All the players, from the structural engineers to the planners to the fire department, were familiar with our plans at an early stage and were able to present their objections and ideas. This interaction was very important to us.

How realistic is Partner und Partner’s building ­concept when applied to a large city and its needs?

Could entire city districts be built according to the C2C principle?

This much CO2 is released:

This much CO2 is bound:

587 kg

1t

in the production of 1 t of cement

per cubic meter of wood

19 m. t annually in the production of cement, lime and gypsum for construction in Germany

320 kg

13 t annually per hectare of forest

1,2 b. t in the forests in Germany in total

in the production of 1 m3 reinforced concrete

40–80 t 16 m. t

in a single-family house made of wood

per year in the production of iron and steel for construction in Germany

1.600 t in a Woodscraper

Sources: Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development, Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt, Thünen-Institut

This is no longer a dream of the future. In Berlin-Tegel, 3,000 to 5,000 apartments are to be built from wood. And in Weißensee, an entire block of wooden houses has already been built.

We are also currently planning a timber construction district in Buckower Felder. That’s the direction we need to take. People keep asking me, do we have enough wood? Yes, we do.

With 12 to 15 percent of the annual timber harvest, we can cover all the residential construction needs in Germany. And one thing is certain – we’ll soon be running out of concrete because we’re running out of sand.

You are a member of the German Sustainable Building Council. So far, the association has certified a total of 6,000 sustainable buildings – that’s a drop in the ocean. Again: How viable is circular, sustainable construction for the future? What resistance must be overcome? Who needs to be convinced?

That’s a lot of questions! You know, the construction industry is a very sluggish sector. Reinforced concrete is the building material of the 20th century, all the value chains that have developed since the Bauhaus days are firmly established, and it takes time for that to change. In addition, the reputation and careers of many architects are at stake. A switch to wood would mean that more planners, structural engineers, architects, builders, skilled workers, etc. would be needed to deal with it. These are enormous capacities that will not develop overnight. When in doubt, you just do things the way you’ve always done them. There’s always a risk involved in being the first to dare to do something new.

And what can policymakers do to promote C2C construction and minimize risks?

The system change I’ve already alluded to goes beyond just designing and building houses, of course. Legal regulations must be followed and complied with. But laws are always

r­ egulations that react to problems that arise. Our world is dynamic, technological innovations come faster than laws can react to them. So, what I’d like to see is policymakers regulating fewer details, but proactively creating structures, laws that enable and, in the best case, demand innovation. Then we would be able to implement new ideas and concepts much more quickly.

How far away are we from a paradigm shift from fossil to post-fossil building?

We are still at the very beginning. Especially in Berlin. But I’m an optimist. I have the feeling that something is getting underway. There’s certainly an awareness that something has to change. And I’m convinced that circular construction based on the C2C principle has a great future.

How do you actually live yourself? Do you have furniture from Ikea in your home?

I live in a cooperative project on the Spree River, in Spreefeld Berlin, where we came in as construction managers. It’s a hybrid building made of steel and wood. A passive house.

Honestly, I’d be lying if I said there’s no more Ikea stuff in our apartment, but that’s the stated goal. The co-op has a carpentry shop downstairs, so I’m going to have a go there soon.

29

More than 50 per­ cent of global waste comes from the construction industry.

We want to make a contribution here.

Less waste is more future.

You might also be interested in this: A city made of wood, conversion instead of new construction, and what’s behind the concept of the circular city? Read our special in the CCB Magazine with a wealth of experts.

Photo: Eike Roswag-Klinge © Jens Thomas

Discussion

Product

Production Use

Biological cycle for consumer products

Biodegradation Plants

30

Biological nutrient

Product

Production Use

Technical ­circulation for consumer products

Ecology

Technical building material

Take-back

Dismantling

Content Source: Cradle to Cradle NGO

Cradle to Cradle, the principle of composting all raw materials after use or using technology to put them back into circulation, has been considered a promising alternative to conventional production for years.

But does it always make sense? A discussion.

What’s it all about?

Cradle to Cradle, abbreviated to C2C was founded in the late 1990s by the German chemist Michael Braungart and the U.S. architect William McDonough. The goal is to make all materials recyclable, biologically or using technology. Products should either be designed in such a way that they can be broken down into separate groups of identical materials – here, we are talking about such things as electronic items, flooring or bicycles, for example the Econova flat-screen TV manufactured by Philips in 2010 and the 100 percent recyclable Senseo Viva Eco coffee machine, or products can be biologically recycled after use, for example compostable T-shirts like Trigema brand ones.

What is the actual situation?

There are no reliable figures on the percentage of all products in Germany that are biologically recyclable. What can be said is that despite high collection and recycling rates, the use of recyclable material in Germany is currently only eleven percent. Only around 10 percent of clothing waste, for example, is recycled. Also, according to a WWF study from 2021, plastic

packaging in Germany is made of around 90 percent virgin plastic. More than half is incinerated after use. According to the study, however, more than 20 million metric tons of plastic could be saved by 2040 through new recycling processes – that would be equivalent to more than six times the an­nual consumption of plastic packaging in Germany. 68 million tons of greenhouse gases could be saved.

Criticism The concept is criticized for not moving away from increased consumption, but assumes that a high level of consumption can still be retained with endless cycles of circulation. It is also criticized for the possible unfeasibility of implementing it. A system based on C2C would involve the complete restructuring of industry. And it is not yet clear how we would move from capitalism, which requires endless growth, to a circular economy that consumes only what can be recycled.

There is also the question of whether the process always makes sense. For more, read the discussion below.

31

Promising the earth – or is the future ­really green

Discussion Ecology

32

Yes. Cradle to Cradle is the fu­ ture. If we want to transform the econo­ my and society, we must manage all re­ sources in cycles – technologically and biologically.

Nora Sophie Griefahn and Tim Janßen from the C2C NGO, a Berlin-based organization that supports cradle-to-cradle processes in society. They are co-founders of the C2C Congress.

Photo © C2C NGO

Species extinction, resource scarcity, climate change – we humans have caused a great deal of major damage. For decades, we have been employing the same strategy to combat this, trying to reduce our negative footprint. Yet in spite of more than 40 years of climate and environmental policy we are on the verge of reaching tipping points in the earth’s climate system – or have long since passed them. At the same time, the world population is growing and increased numbers of people will need energy, goods and food in the future. On its own, the path we have been pursuing to date of reducing emissions and curbing consumption is therefore not a suit­ able strategy at the global level for countering the climate and resource crisis in the long term and securing a future worth living for coming generations. Because in our current linear system all this would mean is that resources run out a little more slowly and a little less CO2 is released into the atmosphere. But being less bad is not enough.

Instead, we humans must change the systems we ourselves have created in such a way that irreversible damage is not only avoided, but ideally natural systems are rebuilt. That’s why we need cradle to cradle. This means that all products must be designed and developed for their specific use scenario in such a way that they can circulate in biological and technological cycles. Materials that inevitably enter the environment from abrasion or wear and tear when using a product should be biodegradable. Products that are not subject to wear and tear should be constructed in such a way that their materials can be separated by type, making them truly recyclable. Production should use only renewable energies from recyclable plants, and soil, water and air should be protected – or better still cleaned up and strengthened. And humane working conditions should be mandatory at every point in all value chains.

But let’s not misunderstand each other. We are not saying that C2C should be a call for unrestrained waste. It doesn’t mean throwing a biodegradable T-shirt away in the woods after only wearing it once. But whether someone needs two pairs of jeans or 20 is a cultural question. And if all the components of these jeans can circulate in cycles, then even the consumption of 20 pairs of jeans – as superfluous as it may seem to some – no longer poses a threat to our habitat. And C2C is applicable in all industries today. In some, such as textiles and construction, the approach has already reached large companies. In high-tech industries such as automotive or IT, on the other hand, there are only a few products that conform to C2C. But a circular C2C economy is possible, as shown by numerous products and business models that have already been developed using this approach. We now urgently need to set framework conditions and implement technologies and processes that promote this development. This is the only way to make tomorrow’s world work.

The cradle to cradle (C2C) principle sounds promising. The concept may be a good approach for fashion items, televisions or bicycles, where items can be put back into circulation either biologically or using technology. This does not apply to paper and printing, where the concept often literally promises the green earth. The worst example for me is the C2C certification of stone foil. This is a mixture of rock flour and plastic to which the term “paper” does not even apply, because it does not contain a single fiber. It can’t even be disposed of with construction waste, it can only be incinerated, there’s nothing sustainable about it at all. And for other printed products, C2C may still be okay as an additional feature if a product otherwise complies with a proper environmental label such as the Blaue Engel eco-label or the EU Ecolabel. But C2C must not be an alibi for a lack of recyclability, which it is currently becoming. After all, what print shop buries its waste paper behind the house? Who composts their old books? In Europe, 72 percent of paper was recycled last year. This socalled recycling quota refers to the total consumption of paper, cardboard and carton. In Germany, the figure is as high as 78 percent. A print product has to qualify for this. It must be optimally recyclable, not compostable or edible.

Staying with the example of printed products, there are clear contradictions here. The paper cycle needs a healthy coexis­ tence of new and recycled paper. But that’s no reason to condemn recycling. At present, enough virgin fiber enters the cycle. What is much more important is that we need to collect more, recycle more and ensure that printed products also remain recyclable so that they can be made into white paper again. The C2C principle does not guarantee this. Printing inks should be “deinkable,” that is, they should be able to be separated from the fibers and removed from the fiber soup during recycling. And this is precisely what many cradle to cradle certified printing inks are not. On the contrary, applications have been made to register a number of printing inks that are not deinkable and therefore not suitable for Blaue Engel print products for cradle to cradle so that they have at least some kind of environmental label. What this means is that the whole thing is of no benefit to the environment at all, quite the opposite. In my opinion, the whole procedure is too non-transparent and expensive, much more expensive than a real, i.e. ISO-compliant eco-label. Unlike the Blaue Engel, there is no public discussion of the criteria for C2C – it is a private, commercial label, a business model. Not to say greenwashing. Unfortunately, some market participants are currently jumping on this bandwagon, partly out of ignorance, partly out of desperation.

Axel Fischer, chemist and press officer of INGEDE, an international research organization. Since 1989, INGEDE has acted as an advocacy group for companies in the paper industry to promote the use of recovered paper in the production of new graphic papers.

Photo © private

33

No, the cradle-­tocradle concept promises things that it cannot deliver at many points. Many things cannot be put back into circulation at all. And it often doesn’t make sense to do so.

Film

It’s green, let’s shoot

Filmmakers are becoming increasingly aware of the need to produce in an ecologically compatible way. Something is happening at last. But it is also a fact that reusable cups and vegetarian catering are not enough.

Ecology

34

When I look to the future, I see green: Whether it’s a feature film or a TV series, a TV station or a media company – everyone wants to go climate-friendly. Will green productions soon be the norm?

I’ve been concerned with our environmental awareness since I studied environmental engineering over 30 years ago. I first came to film professionally in 2010 through further training as a film production manager, convinced that films are the perfect medium to draw attention to global issues like climate protection. After two years of research trips and unsuccessful grant applications for my first feature film project, “The Untold Story on Blue Whales,” I shifted my focus to making the film industry itself more environmentally sustainable. In this context, I developed the vision 2020 “Babelsberg goes green". I first took it to the Medienboard, then to the Ministry of Economics, to the state capital Potsdam, to the regional media network, and talked to the Babelsberg film studios. I really knocked on a lot of doors. Of course, I wasn’t the only one who wanted to draw attention to the relevance of green productions for climate protection. But back then, in 2012, green filming was largely unknown. The rethinking began with the Green Film Initiative from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research at the Babelsberg Film University. There was also the Green Production Guide from the Berlin Brandenburg Film Commission, as well as the booklet “Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg goes green” for the Berlinale and the Green Filming Passport from Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein. But that’s about it.

Since 2020, there has been serious momentum in the media industry. Not just for me, because I’m now giving more and more training seminars at the Babelsberg Film Uni-

versity and other media institutions, and finally as a – paid!

– green consultant for film productions, developing sustain­ ability concepts and preparing climate assessments. The voluntary Green Filming Passport, which has only been awarded about two hundred times so far, has finally become a mandatory Green Film Passport, linking film funding with compliance with ecological and social criteria. This includes the entire production process, including pre- and postproduction.

And the Media and Film Society in Baden-Württemberg is also setting important standards with its “100 Green Productions” initiative. These include some rbb Tatort and Polizeiruf productions, for which I acted as an advisor. All productions had to be produced according to specified ecological criteria and be finalized by the end of 2021. In addition, as of January 1, 2022, every producer receiving federal funding is required to implement effective ecological measures. Uniform standards are currently still being tested in practice. So, things are happening.

However, 100 green productions are still too little when we look at the total number of all film and TV productions in Germany. We need to solve two problems in particular as soon as possible. Firstly, we need to get a grip on so-called funding tourism. Filmmakers who receive funding from more than one funding agency are obliged to shoot wherever they get the money. This may be understandable, because the money should be spent where it is applied for. Trades and service providers from the region should also benefit. At the same time, this involves a logistical travel effort including higher CO2 emissions. The whole team has to travel from one state to another just to shoot a few scenes there. The funding guidelines need to be revised here, and binding talks are needed between the regional funding institutions and with the state governments. Secondly, we need to address the availability of technical infrastructure: If there are not enough

by Korina Gutsche

climate-friendly cars for rent during the filming period, or if the necessary E- or CNG-charging stations are not available in the region where filming is taking place, if the few hybrid generators cannot be booked, or if the power connection for construction work with green electricity is too expensive, as it is here in Berlin – how are the producers supposed to comply with minimum ecological standards? This is where politi­ cal input is needed above all. Policymakers must use economic development funding to finance practical solutions so that the film industry can try this out and implement it. Another largely unnoticed aspect is the CO2 emissions caused by streaming and digitization as a whole. This problem also needs more attention.

Last but not least, sustainability in the film industry must not be reduced to ecology alone. It also requires sustainable work structures, so that fair remuneration also offers longterm, socially acceptable work prospects. In the theatrical film sector, MFG, MOIN Filmförderung, Hessenfilm and Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg now require compliance with social standards. These are all relevant steps that we must take together. Only in this way will the film industry ultimately achieve the change in values toward a low-emission and resource-conserving mode of production.

35

For the future, we have to solve two problems: Firstly, we need to get a grip on so-called funding tourism. Secondly, we need a technical infra­ structure that is truly sustainable.

Where can I find more information?

The Green Film Passport is a sustainability check for the entire value chain of a film. It gives you an overview of green storytelling, from location selection right through to the use of special effects and distribution. www.moin-filmfoerderung.de Green Filming: Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg offers a wealth of information on green filming, from catering and camera to lighting, costumes, financial institutions and much more. www.bbfc.de/service/green-filming Korina Gutsche has been advising on sustainable filming and giving training seminars on this topic since 2012. As a green consultant, she develops sustainability concepts and climate assessments for film productions. www.bluechildfilm.com Photo © BLUECHILDFILM

Green Film Shooting: Journalist Birgit Heidsiek has compiled important background information on the subject. www.greenfilmshooting.net

On Site 36 Ecology

Photo © IDZ | Tim van der Loo

Text: Boris Messing and Jens Thomas

37

Tote Hosen not dead yet

Jeans are 150 years old. Congratulations! In the 1950s, they became a sign of rebellion and being different – but that was not sustainable. Berlin-based Tim van der Loo and Sandra Nicoline Nielsen from the design studio A New Kind of Blue recycle old denim fabrics and reinvent jeans – fashionable, ecological, functional. We visited the pants duo at their place of work and wanted to know: How do you make jeans sustainably?

3

38

2

Krossener Straße, corner of Gryphiusstraße. A dog pees on a bicycle, its master stands there in joggers and looks on, bored – that’s how you know you’re in Friedrichshain. We have an appointment with Tim van der Loo and Sandra Nicoline Nielsen, who want nothing less than to bring the fashion industry into a new, circular age. Tim greets us warmly. We squeeze into the small kitchen, masks on, coffee brewing, and off we go.

Ecology

The place: a coworking space in Friedrichshain, where fashion designers and textile visionaries come together. In the front area, sewing machines are rattling and patterns are being worked on. At the back is where A New Kind of Blue is based. The design studio is admittedly one of countless companies that have taken up the cause of sustainability. But with their current project, New Blue, they are almost the only ones specializing in textiles, making new jeans from recycled denim. The problem is that conventional jeans are usually produced using high levels of chemicals. The popular “used” look is created by sandblasting – if protective clothing isn’t worn, the dust escaping can result in deadly silicosis (“black lung”) or is intensified by aggressive and health-endangering chemicals. And even organic jeans production uses large amounts of water, even when toxic chemicals are replaced with substances that are kinder to the environment and health. How is New Blue solving the problem?

Tim and Sandra get started. They tell us that their goal is to shape old into new. This not only saves resources. They also want to shape a new consumer consciousness and make the principle pursued by the fashion industry up to now – take, make, waste – obsolete. This principle is easy to explain – cotton

1: The production workshop of A New Kind of Blue.

Photo © IDZ | Tim van der Loo; 2: The creators: Tim van der Loo and Sandra Nicoline Nielsen. Photo © Jens Thomas; 3: The fleece: not assembly line work, handmade. Photo © Jens Thomas

On Site

1

is harvested and processed into a product at record speed. The goods are then sold cheaply and, after use, burned or dumped in landfills. All this, says Tim, is a linear process, the quality of the products is usually low, and the clothes are quickly replaced by new ones or thrown away by the customer. He became aware of the problem two years ago when he worked for the textile port of the Berlin City Mission, a non-profit organization that, among other things, collects clothes for the homeless. Forty tons of clothing arrived there per month, he says, somewhat upset, but only 15 percent of it was usable, the rest was soiled or was too old and had to be thrown away. He wondered how old denim could be made into new textiles. But no processes existed for hand-me-down jeans.

After graduating in 2019 from the Weißensee School of Art in Berlin, Tim received a scholarship from Designfarm Berlin to realize the development of New Blue. He was joined by 33-year-old Dane Sandra Nicoline Nielsen, whom he had met a few years earlier at a festival on the circular economy. The project eventually gave birth to their design label, A New Kind of Blue, which specializes in circular design solutions. New Blue is their first joint project, for which they were awarded the Eco-design national prize last year.

How do you make jeans sustainably? We change rooms and go to the production facility. Tim van der Loo, a lanky man with a 30-day beard, shows us the patterns created by his recycling method. He resolutely retrieves the disassembled pieces from a stuffed bag, from which he shapes new things; new things from torn trouser scraps, things that would usually be thrown away. New Blue combines two technologies to do this, fleece formation and digitally assisted embroi-

At the same time, their pants are not at all like ordinary jeans. They are thicker, fluffier. What’s special about their process is that no chemicals are used in their recycling method, nor, unlike conventional jeans production, does it use water. Sandra illustrates the problem in numbers. The ecological footprint – she cites the highly regarded report “A New Textiles Economy” by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation – is a disaster in the fashion industry: CO2 emissions in 2015 were 1.2 billion tons, as high as those of international air and shipping traffic combined. The report concludes that a value of $500 billion a year is lost due to the throwaway mentality and lack of recycling of clothing – out of a total value added of $1.3 trillion, that’s a huge sum. Only one percent of the world’s clothing is recycled. In addition, 17 to 20 percent of industrial water pollution is caused by textile production, while the cultivation of cotton in particular consumes huge amounts of water – yet almost 25 percent of the world’s population already suffers from extreme water shortages. The additional chemicals used in the production of clothing, such as dyes and bleaching agents, and microplastic particles that enter waterways through washing are an environmental problem that must be taken seriously. Environmental organizations and fashion players are aware of this.

Yet little is changing.

At New Blue, they are working on change every day.

Their method, says Tim, can theoretically be repeated on a consistent basis. The product does not neces­ sarily have to be made of denim; the technique can also be applied to polyester or wool, for example. Aesthetics are also important to him. Each pair of pants gets its “own story,” which, the idea goes, continues endlessly. “The circular economy system will change the world,” Sandra is also convinced. This Dane with the penetrating gaze has a degree in techno-anthropology and has worked in the field of waste management. The pants duo is still at the prototype phase.

There is still a long way to go to create a product that everyone can afford, especially since it is important to the two creators to produce locally and guarantee fair wages. They are currently working with a textile research institute in Spain to find sustainable dyeing methods – with some initial success.

And it should not stop at the pants. Tim shows us a jacket that looks as little like jeans as the pants. On the wall hangs a prototype of a denim slipper. “This could be another product for the future,” says Sandra.

But they don’t yet know exactly how to proceed, she says. For now, their Re-FREAM grant is enabling the duo to make ends meet and continue developing New Blue and expanding their A New Kind of Blue brand.

After that, they say, comes the next step. But can the product be commercially marketed? That ultimately depends on potential partners they want to work with, Sandra says. The company could also imagine producing directly for the Levi’s brand. The question is just whether the eco pants would then simply be produced by the competition. More and more fashion chains are taking up the cause of sustainability. This is evidenced not only by the “Pulse of the Fashion Industry” report. In June 2021, a new supply chain law was passed that will force companies with more than 3,000 employees to be more sustainable from 2023, even though the law has a few loopholes (see p. 101) and protection of workers’ rights and the environment remains a problem area in the fashion industry.

All in all, our visit shows that jeans are alive and well.

They are now 150 years old. Invented by Levi Strauss in 1873, they were first worn by workers, farmers and cowboys in America, but after the Second World War they spread all over the world. In the 1950s in particular, they became a symbol of rebellion and being different – but the pants were never ecological. Now jeans may be getting a new turn. Tim and Sandra are currently still trying to find new sources of financing and one or more distribution partners in Germany, which unfortunately turns out to be not so easy. But the will is there, and that’s how beautiful stories always begin, until the world changes – and that’s where our conversation ends. We say goodbye with a fist bump from a distance of 1.50 meters, straighten the mask once again and take a last look at the pattern. Outside it is raining. Not a dog in sight.

39

dery. The technique of fleece formation was developed by Tim together with the Saxon Textile Research Institute; the old, stained or otherwise unusable denim is torn into its fibrous components and separated, then a fleece, or non-woven fabric, is formed from the fibers by carding and fleece laying. In the second technique, digitally supported industrial embroidery, the fleece is consolidated in a final step into a stable fabric, which can then be used to make patterns for pants – it’s where dead pants come back to life.

Theater 40 Ecology

The guest performances are the problem Cultural institutions not only want to face up to ecological challenges – and reduce their CO2 emissions, they now have to. As part of a pilot project of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, the Schaubühne Berlin has for the first time drawn up a carbon footprint assessment. How does it work? What does it involve? We talked about it with Tobias Veit, director of the Schaubühne.

Interview: Alison Winter

Photo © Gianmarco Bresadola

Tobias Veit has been working at the Schaubühne for 20 years. After studying directing at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin, he worked as a production manager at the Baracke at the Deutsches Theater under the artistic direction of Thomas Ostermeier and Jens Hillje.

Photo © Franziska Sinn

CCB Magazine: Mr. Veit, last year the Schaubühne took part in a pilot project on climate accounting along with 18 other cultural institutions. Isn’t such a carbon footprint assessment incredibly strenuous and grueling?

Tobias Veit: Yes, it’s a tremendous amount of work to begin with, a lot of data that had to be distilled down everywhere.

Our team did a great job and was justifiably proud.

How long does a carbon footprint assessment like this take?

It took four months in total. The first request came in September 2020, and everything was collected and recorded by the end of January last year. In retrospect, that was surprisingly fast for all the data that had to be collated.

How does a carbon footprint assessment work?

We began by recording CO2 emissions. We made the analy­ sis in collaboration with the environmental consulting firm Arqum. Different areas were divided into three scopes.

Scope 1, for example, contains direct greenhouse gas emissions from combustion processes – stationary and mobile.

Scope 2 contains indirect greenhouse gas emissions such as electricity or district heating. And Scope 3 contains all other indirect greenhouse gas emissions such as business travel, water consumption or waste management. At first, it is difficult to understand how water consumption or waste are linked to CO2 emissions because, unlike heating or exhaust gases from transportation, there seems to be no direct link. These indirect sources of emissions are therefore converted into CO2 equivalents, since the production of waste naturally consumes CO2, but this cannot be calculated as easily as for a combustion engine.

Where are the biggest problems at the Schau­ bühne? In which area is CO2 consumption highest?

In the case of the Schaubühne, Scope 3 emissions alone account for almost three quarters of all CO2 emissions. And within this scope, the guest performances are particularly significant at 85 percent. In short, the guest performan­ ces are the problem. That came as a surprise to us! But of course, we travel around the world, and we did an especially large number of guest performances in 2019. We were in Tokyo, Mexico, Europe, Asia … We flew four million miles.

What comes next? How can you as a theater cut back on CO2 emissions?

There are three ways: avoid, reduce and offset. Let’s go straight to guest performances. Guest performances mean cultural exchange and cultural understanding. That has a high value, and it should remain so, socially, politically and artistically. So not traveling is not a solution. However, the question of carbon footprint must always be taken into account. Compensation is therefore unavoidable, but at the same time there are many other ways to enhance sustainability, for example by traveling by train within Europe, even if travel time is working time and that makes the guest performances more expensive. A change in thinking must take place here.

41

Most of the Schaubühne’s CO2 emissions come from its guest performanc­ es. But not traveling is not a solution, since guest performances mean cultural ex­ change.

Theater

Politicians must tie fund­ ing for theaters to ecologi­ cal standards and thus make a pact with the respective insti­ tution. Culture is a common good, and cultural institutions have a role model function in society.

42

How does carbon footprint accounting work?

Greenhouse gas emissions

Procurement

District heating

Emergency power

Waste

Business trips

Electricity

Vehicle fleet

Water

Staff travel

SCOPE 1 Direct emissions

Transport logistics

SCOPE 2 Emissions from ­purchased energy

Ecology

SCOPE 3 Upstream indirect emissions

SCOPE 3 Downstream indirect emissions

Example Schaubühne

You might also be interested in this:

In 2020, the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC) was formed in London to reduce CO2 emissions in art businesses by 50 percent by 2030.

Now Berlin is following suit. We spoke to the initiators.

Do you know what EMAS certification is, how to go about getting it and whether it makes sense for you?

Christoph Hügelmeyer, Technical Director of Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes in Berlin GmbH, explains in an interview on CCB.

Where can I find more information?

Looking for specific information on carbon footprint accounting? Read the Federal Cultural Foundation’s documentation on carbon footprint assessments in cultural institutions.

Are mobility and sustainability compatible, and if so, how? Julie’s Bicycle clarifies this in a guide for the performing arts.

Photos © Timo Ohler / © Roland Schneider

43

One reason why the Schaubühne and many other theaters organize so many guest performances is money. No guest performances, no income. In the end, does culture simply have to cost more to be more sustainable?

That’s what it boils down to. Ultimately, that’s a dialogue we have to have with politicians. If the answer is that we need to reduce CO2 emissions, then that definitely means it will cost more money. However, there is another point where policymakers could help us – and that is with compensation. That is the last thing that ought to be done, but since we have to travel if cultural exchange is seen as desirable, that’s what we will do. We ourselves, as a theater, are not allowed to make compensation payments. Funding legislation does not allow that, because administratively it is a donation. This is an area where policymakers could create legislation to give us a helping hand.

But offsetting CO2 emissions only postpones the problem. Is there anything else that the Schaubühne is doing to be more environmentally friendly?

The most important thing is that we have created an awareness of the problem with the carbon footprint assessment, not only with management, but also with our staff. A climate group has been set up in our company to gather ideas and suggest things that can be done to reduce CO2 emissions.

The ideas are then proposed to us as a list of measures. For example, we came up with the idea of buying a few cargo bikes instead of a new car. The props and technical staff will soon be riding them around the city. Another example is the season booklets and monthly fanfolds, which are printed on recycled paper. And we will also pay more attention to such simple things as waste separation in the future. Once the awareness is there, a different kind of pressure will be created, not just on management, but on each individual.

The Arts Council in England has managed to cut CO2 emissions in cultural institutions by 35 percent within six years by linking funding to compliance with ecological standards. Do we need something like that?

I think it’s right for politicians to link subsidies to ecological standards, but at the same time it’s a pact that’s being made.

Culture is a common good, and cultural institutions have a role model function in society, if you will. So if cultural institutions show that the carbon footprint can be reduced year on year, then there is a good chance that this can be communicated to the outside world with a certain impact.

Music 44

Cryptorave 9, Athens: Omsk Social Club and Bitnik Media Group. © Mike Tsolis

Ecology

Green Clubbing?

Rambazamba around the clock, that’s what normal club life in Berlin looks like – when there’s no corona, that is. Climate-friendly it is not. Clubtopia, a project of clubliebe e.V. and the Clubcommission Berlin, wants to change that: The team advises Berlin clubs on how they can become more climate-friendly.

What does the Club for Future look like?

Interview: Jens Thomas and Boris Messing

Konstanze Meyer works at Clubtopia and is responsible for ecological and social sustainability. Matthias Krümmel advises clubs on energy issues and is a specialist for climate protection policy at BUND, the Association for the Protection of the Environment and Nature in Germany.

Photos © clubliebe e. V. / Karoline Kohle

CCB Magazine: Hello Konstanze and Matthias, for over a year all the clubs in Berlin were closed. You support the Berlin club scene in becoming more climate-friendly. Aren’t the clubs facing problems right now that are completely different than having to deal with annoying climate issues?

Matthias Krümmel: You might think so. But the discourse on climate compatibility and reducing CO2 emissions is not off the table. On the contrary, the question of how to make clubs more climate-friendly or even climate-neutral will be occupying the club scene for a long time to come.

How do you make a club climate-friendly?

Konstanze Meyer: That can be done in very different ways. A first step, for example, would be to switch to a certified green electricity provider according to the GSL standard. The seal distinguishes providers that offer additional environmental benefits and do not produce energy from fossil fuels. Green electricity doesn’t necessarily have to be more expensive, either. Otherwise, we recommend many small steps, all of which are worthwhile and improve a club’s energy carbon footprint.

Such as?

Konstanze: Such as switching to LED lighting and using energy-efficient refrigeration equipment, and of course environmentally friendly mobility and logistics. Clubs can also do a lot in the area of waste and resource conservation, using cleaning agents that are as chemical-free as possible, avoiding packaging waste, using reusable tableware and reusable containers for drinks – these are just a few examples. A big step would be to insulate the buildings. But that can be expensive.

How expensive is a comprehensive climate-friendly modernization? The rents per club are between 5,000 and 15,000 euros per month. Many are already having problems meeting the horrendous costs. Can Berlin clubs even afford it all?

Matthias: You’re right, it’s not easy. However, many of the measures we recommend can be implemented without financial resources or for a pittance. It doesn’t always have to be complete modernization, which is in any case something the landlord is responsible for, unless you are the owner yourself. For example, existing technical equipment such as refrigerators or ventilation systems can be used more efficiently or sometimes even used less. This saves clubs a lot of electricity and money. Other measures, such as switching to energy-efficient LEDs, cost a little but pay off in the long term, usually after just a few months.

Ecological awareness in the scene is growing: Fridays for Future, Artists for Future, Entrepreneurs for Future, it’s hard to keep track of it all. Do you sense this awareness among club operators and the Berlin club scene as well? Is there a serious interest in a climate-friendly conversion of club operations?

Matthias: Yes, there is. More and more club operators are welcoming the fact that climate protection is becoming an im-

45

Even a small club consumes three times as much elec­ tricity on a weekend as a thrifty single house­ hold does in a year.

That means it is re­ sponsible for about 30 tons of CO2 emissions per year.

Music 46

portant, if not the only component of sustainable business.

The scene is realizing that it is a cultural pillar of sustainability: Alongside economics, ecology and social issues, everyday culture in particular represents a common level of action and understanding. Night culture makes a decisive contribution to climate protection communication. Many people forget that.

Do they?

Konstanze: When we talk about climate protection communication it means talking about the best practices of everyday club life without pointing fingers. When artists or collectives and campaigns such as “Music Declares Emergency” talk about the climate crisis, it is often about attitude, social responsibility and awakening. In Berlin, culture and the creative industries account for a large part of the gross domestic product, which correlates with a large climate impact. A number of creative workers now want to change that. Beyond this intrinsic motivation, we are helping them to set out on the path to climate neutrality and, despite this, no, precisely because of this, not to forget to dance.

Can you put a figure on that? How damaging are Berlin’s clubs for the climate?

Matthias: Even a small club consumes three times as much electricity on a weekend as a thrifty single household consumes in a year. That means a small club is responsible for about 30 tons of CO2 emissions per year. Added to this are the CO2 emissions from heating, waste, water, mobility, and so on.

So that makes way too much.

Konstanze: If we were to supply all 250 Berlin clubs with green electricity, we would reduce CO2 emissions from around 10,500 tons a year to 700 tons – not including catering, heating costs, air conditioning, mobility and waste. But that would already be a big win.

Can you describe your daily work? If we were club operators, what could you do for us?

Konstanze: We advise clubs in very different ways. As a rule, we do an on-site inspection. During this inspection, we record all CO2-relevant facts, such as how much electricity is consumed, what equipment is in the club, how often it is used, and so on. We then use the data collected to draw up a carbon footprint assessment and research suggestions for improvement, which we then submit to the clubs. We then help the clubs to implement them. We also offer them support beyond energy consulting. On the web, for example, there is an online guide to sustainable club operations, the Green Club Guide, which is currently being updated and given a new form.

Matthias: We also organize the Future Party Lab. Here, professionals from the sustainability industry exchange ideas with the club scene. Together they develop innovative solutions for sustainable club nights. This series of events is accompanied by an ideas competition that highlights particularly innovative and climate-effective solutions and supports their implementation. And we regularly organize Round Tables for a Green Club Culture and invite committed club operators and event organizers to work together on a Code of

Ecology

Photo © clubliebe e. V. / Karoline Kohle

Conduct for environmentally and climate-friendly behavior in club operations. This Code of Conduct is intended to help club operators in the future to take a concrete approach to improving their carbon footprint and to communicate this to the outside world.

But will your suggestions be implemented? How sustainable are your consultations?

Konstanze: Green electricity reduces carbon dioxide emissions by at least a factor of 15, which is the simplest and most efficient measure. If energy-saving technology and optimized consumption behavior are added to this – as an optional extra – a lot has already been solved, at least in terms of energy. But the decisive factor is what the clubs can implement with their guests, together with the team as an agreement, and also together with the operators and collectives.

Finally, there’s a lot of discussion at the moment about what incentive systems need to be created to make people behave in a more climate- or environmentally-friendly way. Bans are also an issue.

What measures do you think make sense for club culture in particular?

Konstanze: A first measure would be if clubs were at last given the prospect of being able to stay in their locations. If club operators could plan for many years in advance, they would also be more willing to invest in climate-friendly technology and renovation measures. Club culture needs space. But that is becoming increasingly scarce in a growing city like Berlin. Preserving locations for Berlin’s diverse club culture is thus an essential prerequisite for the sustainable development of clubs.

Matthias: The existing clubs also need financial support. For example, there would have to be a support program to advance ecological renovation or to purchase energy-efficient equipment. Here we would like to see a fund comparable to the one for noise protection in clubs – only for the implementation of climate protection measures.

Where can I find more information?

An important resource is Julie’s Bicycle Green Music Guide.

It serves as a guide for music companies and individuals to plan activities in a more environmentally friendly way.

For more information on promoting a climate-smart music and entertainment industry, visit www.greenmusicinitiative.de.

A good overview of guides for sustainable cultural events, facilities and productions has also been compiled by sustainability researcher Annett Baumast.

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Photo © clubliebe e. V. / Karoline Kohle

Art meets design 48

© Charlotte Bastian

Charlotte Bastian

Ecology

The eternal ice of the Arctic will not last forever. For decades, the ice at both poles has been melting at an increasingly rapid pace. In just a hundred years, the glaciers in the Alps have halved in size; by 2050, they are expected to shrink by another half. The consequences of this are that sea levels are rising and the Gulf Stream is weakening, causing floods, storms and droughts. Berlin artist Charlotte Bastian is concerned with changes of this kind. Her collages show a destroyed, littered natural landscape that has been altered by climate change – ice floes meeting empty skyscrapers, a pile of concrete rubble pushing ahead of the sea, plastic waste spreading across the barren ground of the crater-like landscape. These pictures take their cue from romantic landscape painting and this makes them all the more disturbing. We interviewed the artist for CCB Magazine.

Jörn Birkholz and Stephan Groß

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Coal, oil and gas are both a blessing and a curse. They’ve made the dream of flying possible, free travel for free citizens and the apartment that’s always warm. Now they are bringing us climate change. Despite the realization that we cannot go on living in luxury, a large part of humanity still behaves as if there were a tomorrow without restrictions. The artists Jörn Birkholz and Stephan Groß call such behavior a “fossil addiction”, society clinging to growth even though its limits have long been recognized. In their collage “Night and Day”, the artist duo visualizes the fatal cycle driven by constant stimulation, with CO2 emissions rising and car traffic clogging the streets with its constant cacophony. Is there an alternative to this? What would a society that spurns growth look like?

Night and Day © Birkholz / Groß

Art meets design

Hartmut Kiewert

Ecology

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According to estimates, industrial livestock farming contributes between 15 and 50 percent to climate change, and around 763 million animals each year die agonizing deaths in factory farming in Germany. In his paintings, artist Hartmut Kiewert imagines a different relationship between humans and animals where pigs, cattle and chickens have escaped the fattening farms and slaughterhouses, the industrial plants have crumbled to ruins, and humans and animals live in close proximity. There are pigs lying in the living room, fox and deer exist in harmony and the streets are free of cars and overrun by the animal world. But the artist himself does not just paint new realities. He lives them too, eating a vegan diet and using painting materials that are free of animal products. In CCB Magazine he tells us what he’s about.

Hartmut Kiewert, No Cars Go, 2020 © Hartmut Kiewert

51 Black Liquor Oh god, what’s this? Oil of Olaf? The next big environmental mess? No, it’s a new recyclable alternative from Black Liquor, a project created at the Berlin-Weissensee School of Art. Black Liquor aims to replace petroleum-based plastics with lignin-based materials. Lignin is the second most abundant biopolymer on earth after cellulose. It can be extracted from black liquor and is what gives trees their strength. To date, it has been burned almost exclusively to generate electricity.

Black Liquor wants to use its lignin-based plastics in a way that puts them back into the natural cycle. The project is in cooperation with greenlab. We interviewed the team in CCB Magazine.

Photo © Esther Kaya Stögerer, Jannis Kempkens

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Art meets design

Photo © SOAPBOTTLE / J. Breitenhuber

Ecology

Soapbottle According to WWF, between 4.8 and 12.7 million tons of plastic end up in the oceans annually – with around one million seabirds dying each year as a result. Designer Jonna Breitenhuber developed the Soapbottle as an alternative at the University of the Arts. As the contents are used up, the container slowly dissolves from the outside as well. What’s left can be reused as hand soap or made into detergent by adding washing soda and baking soda. The soap is made from natural raw materials and is biodegradable. The product is still in the implementation phase. But the idea could set a precedent – in the CCB interview, the designer explains how.

Urban Eden

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What could a climate-resilient city look like? The designer Paulina Grebenstein has developed the urban space concept Urban Eden to find out. Special green spaces are created in cities to store rainwater, which is released when it gets hot and thus provides cooling. After all, cities are up to eight degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside. By 2050, aver­age temperatures in Europe’s cities could rise by a further five degrees. The consequences are increasing periods of drought and heavy rainfall. Grebenstein also wants to relieve the burden on the sewage system through sophistica­ ted rainwater management. In the future, for example, rivers could be cleaned by new filter systems. Imagine being able to go swimming in the ever-dirty Spree River someday. Wouldn’t that be great? The Berlin-based designer has been awarded the Federal Eco-design Prize for her concept. We joined her while she worked.

© Paulina Grebenstein

Calculator & Eco-Seals 54

CO2 Calculator How can you calculate your carbon footprint? We list the most important ­calculators here – but this list is not exhaustive.

No, don’t stop moving your feet, calculate your own carbon footprint. But how? Most people don’t distinguish enough between carbon footprint and ecological footprint. The carbon footprint is a measure of the greenhouse gas emissions of individual persons or entire institutions.

It calculates not only emissions of CO2, the biggest climate killer, but also of other greenhouse gases such as methane. The ecological footprint, on the other hand, is a measure of natural resource consumption, providing information on our personal lifestyles. This includes things like food, consumption, waste, housing or mobility. It can be calculated by the Global Footprint Network, for example. The carbon footprint, on the other hand, focuses on CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions; it is thus only a subset of the ecological footprint. It can be calculated quite accurately using various calculators – you just have to have a little patience and time.

German Federal Environmental Agency

The gold standard of all carbon footprint calculators comes from the German Federal Environment Agency. It is available free of charge for all. It enables you to make a quick check or carry out a more detailed calculation.

The calculator is used in private homes and is aimed at the general population. What’s good here is that you can compare your own footprint with the national average and also get tips on how to improve your carbon footprint. The calculator gives you a good overview of your lifestyle. www.uba.co2-rechner.de

Action Network Sustainability

Adapted from Julie’s Bicycle, the Aktionsnetzwerk Nachhaltigkeit has developed its own calculator, which is currently still in beta and will be available for use free of charge from mid-March 2022. It is also aimed specifically at the arts and culture industry. In quality and detail, it should be on a par with the Creative Green Tool from Julie’s Bicycle. www.aktionsnetzwerk-nachhaltigkeit.de

Artlogic

The carbon footprint calculator from Artlogic is primarily intended for museums and galleries. It is available free of charge from the Gallery Climate Coalition homepage. The calculator is easy to use, but not as sophisticated as Julie’s Bicycle. It primarily addresses specific idiosyncrasies of museum and gallery operations, such as the logistics of shipping freight and packaging arrangements. Users need to be registered. The data is collected in English. www.galleryclimatecoalition.org/de/carbon-calculator

MFG

Medien- und Filmgesellschaft Baden-Württemberg (MFG) is the only institution to have developed a carbon footprint calculator for film and television productions. The calculator tries to map the entire production process as far as possible.

Equipment, lighting, catering, transportation, waste management and post-production – every item is included in the calculation to get the most accurate picture of the carbon footprint. The calculator can be used free of charge via the MFG homepage. www.mfg.greenshooting.de

Julie’s Bicycle

Ecology

The calculator called “Creative Green Tool” by Julie’s Bicycle is specifically designed for the arts and culture industry. The NGO is supported by Arts Council England and the EU, among others. The calculator has the advantage that it has already evaluated thousands of items of data, so it is very accurate. But it does take a little patience and a lot of information to get an accurate result. Not something to be doing on the fly. You can only use the calculator if you are a member; the data is collected in English. www.juliesbicycle.com/reporting

Where can I find more information?

You want to know more and are looking for additional seals?

Just check out our sustainability section on www.creativecity.berlin

Eco-Seal Check There’s a whole slew of sustainability seals out there. It’s hard to keep track of them all. Here are 10 eco-seals that you should know about as a cultural worker.

Blauer Engel

The Blauer Engel has been the German government’s environmental label for over 40 years. It is one of the longest-established environmental labels in the world and its standards are high. The seal is known primarily for environmentally friendly paper products, but it can also be found in the areas of household, electrical appliances, construction, office, energy / heating, garden / leisure and commerce. The award is based on the aspects of climate, environment, health, water and resources. However, the Blauer Engel does not guarantee that a product is completely harmless. The seal merely certifies that products represent a more environmentally friendly alternative.

Cradle to Cradle (C2C)

The idea behind Cradle to Cradle is that all materials can be returned to the production process. Since 2010, the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute in San Francisco (USA) has been awarding a seal for this purpose. It is awarded at five different levels (basic, bronze, silver, gold, platinum). Materials from the construction and furnishing industries to books and textiles are certified. Criticisms of the seal include a lack of transparency and a cost-intensive process (see discussion on p. 30ff.).

Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS)

The GOTS seal is considered one of the highest standards in the textile sector. It strives for a uniform social and ecological standard for textile processing. The fibers must consist of at least 70 percent organically produced natural fibers. From 95 percent, products are given the suffix “organic.” GOTS inspects all manufacturing processes and follows the guidelines of the International Labor Organization. The seal has met with hardly any criticism.

IVN BEST

Naturtextil certification is considered one of the strictest eco-labels in the textile industry. The raw materials must come from organic production, and synthetic fibers may not be used. Substances that are hazardous to health or the environment are prohibited in the production process. Comparable quality labels for textile production are Made in Green (Oeko Tex) or Bluesign.

Fair Wear Foundation (FWF)

The seal of the Fair Wear Foundation aims to improve working conditions in companies in the textile industry worldwide.

The FWF is active in 15 production countries within Europe, Africa and Asia. Its members are about 80 textile companies representing about 120 brands. Its critics say that the companies have to commit themselves only to working towards implementing the Fair Wear standards.

Green Film Pass

The Green Film Pass (Grüner Filmpass) is the successor to the Green Filming Pass (Grüner Drehpass) and has been issued by the Film Commission Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein (FCHSH) since April 2020. Filmmakers must prove that they are shooting on location in an environmentally conscious manner. In contrast to the Green Filming Pass, this Green Film Pass relates to the entire value chain of a film, including post-production.

Green Globe

To date, there is no sustainability seal for the cultural event sector. However, the Green Globe has been certifying hotels and event centers as well as trade fairs since 1992. It is evaluated according to 248 certification criteria, of which only 125 have been applied to date. Certification is also expensive. The process is supported by a Green Globe accredited consultant.

Green Electricity Label (GSL)

All cultural operators need electricity, and the Green Electricity Label identifies electricity from renewable energy sour­ ces – GSL was the first green electricity label in Germany in 1998. The certified green electricity must come from renewable energy sources. Electricity traders may not have stakes in nuclear or coal-fired power plants. Reporting is public and transparent.

TCO Certified

The TCO Certified seal distinguishes IT equipment ranging from computers, notebooks and monitors to projectors, headsets and smartphones. Durability and recyclable design are assessed. Ecological and social standards are monitored.

The TCO seal is one of the strictest sustainability seals for IT products. But critics point out that only individual products and not companies are certified. Companies that are under criticism can still be given the seal.

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EU Ecolabel

The EU Ecolabel has been in existence since 1992. The standard is considered to be very high. The seal can be found in the areas of household, construction, electrical appliances, textiles and paper production. The focus is on recycling and waste reduction in addition to pollutant reduction, low water and energy consumption. One of the criticisms made against it is that socially responsible standards have not been taken into account for many product groups.

Social

Small but beautiful: Auf Augen­hoehe is the first fashion label for small people Smart but fair: A cooperative c ­ reates social security for the self-employed Just talking is not enough: A commentary on the gender pay gap Neighborhood and C ­ ollaboration: A visit to the first Berlin S ­ ustainability Gallery Do-it-yourself, create villages: ­Frederik Fischer founds a village in Brandenburg Are you still on it or are you ill ­already?

What does creative work have to do with health?

People of flesh and blood: the Berlin performance collective She She Pop Photo © Benjamin Krieg

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Fashion 58

At eye level

Social

Photo © Anna Spindelndreier

Sema Gedik founded Germany’s first fashion label for little people. Here, she talks about the difficult beginnings and the first successes and wonders why diversity still doesn’t play a role in the fashion industry.

by Sema Gedik

This is the founder: Sema Gedik. Originally she comes from Helmstedt in Lower Saxony. In 2010 she moved to Berlin – today she runs her label Auf Augenhoehe (At eye level).

Photo © Auf Augenhoehe

I can still remember it clearly, it must have been 15 years ago. My cousin Funda was once more desperately looking for clothes to fit her and couldn’t find any. Funda is small in stature. She lives in Turkey, and she always likes to look elegant. At the time, I was studying fashion design at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences (HTW), and it was clear to me that something had to change here. My studies were all about economics, including ecological sustainability, but didn’t include inclusion. So I took a close look at fashion for people of small stature and found out that there was no label for little people. There wasn’t even a brand that was explicitly aimed at little people.

That’s why I started Auf Augenhoehe, the first fashion label for little people in Germany and even worldwide. It all started in 2013, initially as a purely research project at the HTW. We were a small team and received a scholarship – not everyone is so lucky. That enabled us to create our initial pattern constructions and develop prototypes. As you may not know, there are more than 780,000 people of small stature worldwide. In Germany, there are around 100,000, although this figure includes anyone who is less than 1.50 m tall. The problem is that there is no clothing size chart or template for pattern construction that you can use as a guide. That’s why I did everything myself. I approached people of short stature, measured them and finally created the first clothing size chart for short stature. We are currently developing the “Fit Finder", a new software for sizing.

I have based all this on the most common form of short stature, achondroplasia, for which the proportions are completely different, with shorter, differently formed arms and bulkier buttock circumference. That is why ordinary clothes often do not fit. Many have to have their clothes specially tailored because even children’s sizes don’t fit. Mick Morris Mehnert, a little man I’ve worked with for years, once told me, “I just got tired of trying on Mickey Mouse shirts all the time.” There was no way he could find a suit to fit because they were always too tight around the chest. I paid attention to all these things when creating the collection. And in my conversations with people of small stature, I have always felt a great sense of gratitude.

After all, who gives a moment’s thought to how people of short stature dress?

Auf Augenhoehe is now on the market. Its first collection was shown in 2015 during Berlin Fashion Week, and since 2018 we’ve had an online store. For women the range includes cardigans, blouses and tights, and for men there are shirts, chinos and college blazers. Everything fits! I just wonder why we are the first and so far only ones doing something like this?

There are clothes for wheelchair users or pregnant women here and there, but none for little people. The first fashion labels catering for people with physical disabilities have been started, such as Mob in Austria, or fashion designers like Christa de Carouge and Julian Zigerli, who organize fashion shows with and for models with disabilities. But nobody is catering for people with hyposomia or microsomia. And we are talking about an industry that on the one hand is organized

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These days there are garments for wheelchair users or pregnant women. The first fashion labels for people with physical disabilities have even been started – but none for little people.

Our label can just be a first step.

Fashion Social

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Photo © Anna Spindelndreier

on a small scale where on the other hand the large fashion chains that dominate the market totally ignore hyposomia. We see this in Fashion Spot’s “Diversity Reports” where diversity that includes older, plus-size, transgender and non-binary models and models with disabilities hardly gets a look in.

On the catwalks of this world, the percentage of transgender women or non-binary models is usually less than 2 percent.

The same applies to plus-size models – the topic of inclusion and disability does not even come up. And this is despite the fact that society has been promoting inclusion for years. Germany has had an inclusion law for schools since 2009. In May 2021, an Accessibility Act was passed in the German Bundes­ tag for the first time. It obliges companies to provide barrier-free access to products and services by 2025. It does not explicitly mention fashion production. And there are a number of exceptions, especially for smaller companies.

This shows that our label can only be a first step. We call this inclusion fashion. We don’t want to segregate. We want fashion for people with microsomia to become a matter of course.

Of course, it’s difficult to make a living from a fashion label like this. The competition is fierce, and yet I would be thrilled if especially the big chains were to follow suit. That would not only underline the urgency of our work, but at the same time it would make it clear that fashion for little people has finally arrived in the mainstream fashion industry. Wouldn’t it be nice if little people could buy fashion off-the-rack for once? That would be progress towards the sustainable society everyone is talking about at the moment. We’ve made a start. Now others have to step up.

You might also be interested in this: Want to learn more about fashion and sustainability? Read more articles in the CCB Magazine with experts like Ina Budde, Daniel Kroh or the Label Format.

Photo: Daniel Kroh © Dario Srbic

Workshops, panel discussions, training courses, festivals?

Discover current events in your area on Creative City Berlin!

www.creativecity.berlin

Photo © Anna Spindelndreier

Self-Employment Social

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Smart but fair

Magdalena Ziomek and Alicja Möltner founded SMartDe eG in Berlin six years ago, a cooperative to empower the self-employed. Their starting point is social ­sustainability, since the working conditions of creative professionals and other self-employed people are often precarious, with a lack of social security – ­especially for those who cannot be insured through the artists’ social insurance scheme (Künstlersozialkasse).

by Magdalena Ziomek and Alicja Möltner

Photo © Edyta Gontarski

It all started about eight years ago. Magda was working in the agitPolska project at the time, and Alicja was a freelance cultural manager and musician, and like so many creative people, we were plagued by questions like, How do I make ends meet? How do I organize my work so that I have social security? For years, the numbers have spoken for themselves: there are more than four million self-employed people in Germany, and 2.3 million of them are solo self-employed. Half of them do not pay into the state pension scheme, and only a fraction have access to unemployment benefit insurance. In addition, many struggle with paperwork, with the personal liability risk if something goes wrong, even with orders or late payments from clients. All of this affects the security of artists’ creative livelihoods.

That’s why we started the Smart cooperative in Germany six years ago. The goal was to improve social security for the self-employed. We advocate a working approach of social sustainability; according to the calculations of the Federal Ministry of Economics in the “Monitoring Report on the Cultural and Creative Industries 2020”, only 14 percent of creatives in Germany manage to generate an annual turnover of more than 17,500 euros as freelancers. And the corona pandemic demonstrated clearly the considerable social and economic risks to which many solo self-employed workers are exposed. This is where we come in: Anyone can join our cooperative, with annual membership shares starting at 50 euros. All active Smart members can process orders through the cooperative and be employed by the cooperative. Based on their earnings, they receive an average monthly salary from Smart. While members are still responsible for arranging orders with their customers and providing the services, Smart takes over the administrative processing of the order.

We invoice the customer for the service and take care of the travel expenses, reimbursement of expenses and, under certain circumstances, even the dunning process. If orders are processed via their employment with Smart, members don’t need to register their self-employment with the tax office and that saves a lot of bureaucracy. Lastly, the cooperative pays social security contributions and income tax. For each order processed through Smart, a fee of seven percent of the net order total is paid to our cooperative. This is used to finance the services that everyone uses.

So much for the facts. But what does it look like in practice?

For example, a tour manager is in charge of a tour; the order situation varies greatly – in the summer there is a lot going on during the festival season, in the winter there is rather a lull. If that tour manager is employed by Smart, her income can be used to generate a stable average monthly salary. Because when confirmed orders come in during the summer, the cooperative makes advance payments and pays out a salary in advance based on future orders.

So we’re closing a gap, and that’s been long overdue. And we know all too well about the needs of cultural workers: We all come from the culture sector – we’re musicians, cultural managers, creatives of all kinds. Smart started in Belgium. We’ve had an office in Berlin for six years now – we’ve just moved for the fourth time. In the beginning we were in a co-working space in Bethanien, with four people and one desk. Then we were in a garage in Mehringdamm, and since 2018 we have been based in Mehringplatz. We recently expanded our offices with space in Wilhelmstrasse – a room for the consultants, a coworking space for the cooperative members and a room for workshops. We are now part of a pan-European Smart network with offices in countries like France, Spain, ­Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria and Germany – with a total of over 95,000 members! In the beginning, Smart members were mainly self-employed dancers, musicians, authors and installation artists. Today, we have an influx of members from almost all professional fields of the cultural and creative industries, and especially from those who cannot be insured through the Künstlersozialkasse. These include producers, software developers, communications trainers, marketing consultants, sound engineers and many more.

We started small, we grew gradually, and that’s exactly what we want for our members: Our goal is to give creative professionals the opportunity to pursue their activities while enjoying a secure and socially sustainable status – and practice shows that over time our members become more successful and generate more revenue.

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We want to ­improve social security for the self-employed. After all, half of all solo self-­employed people do not even pay into the state pension insurance scheme.

Theater 64 Social

Speech is ­silver, payment is golden

The whole culture industry wants to go green and everyone is talking about sustainability. But are we also talking about equal pay for men and women?

Far too little. A plea for sustainable gender justice in culture.

by Nicola Bramkamp

Photo © Thilo Beu / save the world

When I became acting director at the Theater Bonn at the age of 35, I could hardly believe what I saw when I looked at the salary lists: women were basically paid less than men at my new place of work. The glaring gender pay gap affected both permanent employees and freelance artists. A 40-yearold actress earned almost 1,000 euros per month less than her male colleague of the same age – even though she did the same work. I started asking around. A similar picture emerged at other theaters. When the study ’Women in Culture and Media’ by the German Cultural Council appeared in 2014, a murmur went through the cultural landscape; a feeling became a number. According to the study, women in acting earn 42 percent less than their male colleagues. In a European comparison, we in the cultural sector bring up the rear in terms of the gender pension gap. These are the findings of the 2017 report “Gender Equality Policy in the Arts, Culture and Media.” How can it be that in Germany, with our well-funded cultural infrastructure, there are such glaring inequities in gender equality? The reasons are many. Although slightly more than half of the students in directing, acting, singing, dramaturgy, etc. at artistic universities are women, only 22 percent end up in management positions. Don’t the 78 percent of male colleagues in management positions notice that something is amiss here?

Since 2018, #MeToo, i.e. the rebellion against structural abuse of power in the cultural industry, has been a big topic. In a patriarchal system based on fear, dependencies, and precarious employment, it is difficult for us to defend ourselves individually against discrimination. Many artists – especially after the pandemic – are happy to be able to work at all. In this situation, a courageous rebellion against inequality is often damaging to one’s reputation. The study “Power and Structure in the Theater” and the abuse of power scandals of recent years have shown this impressively. Things cannot remain as they are. Action is needed now. Because action is like intention, only more blatant. In 2018, I co-founded the conference Burning Issues – Performing Arts & Equality with Lisa Jopt, the current president of the Cooperative of German Stage Owners and founder of the ensemble network. Together with many other initiatives such as Pro Quote Bühne, Diversity Arts Culture, the ensemble-netz­ werk and the German Stage Association, we are committed to a more equi­table theater landscape. In May 2022, we will again be cooperating with the renowned Berlin Theatertreffen. Yvonne Büdenhölzer, the festival’s director, has sent an important signal for more justice in the performing arts by introducing the quota.

So the analysis phase is now over, the facts are on the table. Now it is up to us to shape a sustainable society that functions in a socially, ecologically and economically just way. Culture creates the framework in which sustainable action can develop. After all, questioning and breaking up old thought patterns is our core business. If we put what we preach on stage into practice behind the scenes, we will come a big step closer to this utopia.

As a theater director, I have tried to eliminate the gender pay gap as far as possible, but with the consequence that I was able to fill one less position. This is also the experience of my colleagues in Mannheim, Oberhausen and Hanover, who have also introduced almost equal pay there.

Is theater folklore to blame? Are prejudices, stereotypical gender clichés, the so-called “unconscious bias” preventing the pay gap from being overcome? Stage designers, for example, still earn considerably more than costume designers. Why is that? Is scenography, traditionally masculine and technical, per se more socially valuable than dealing with costumes and dresses? There is not a single reasonable explanation for this discrepancy in salaries between the different branches of scenography. Or does it just come down to the oft-cited cliché that women are simply worse negotiators?

Nicola Bramkamp is dramaturge, curator and artistic director of Save the World. From 2013 to 2018, she was a theater director in Bonn. Save the World brings together artists and experts and develops innovative, unusual formats of knowledge transfer as well as artistic productions that deal with global future issues such as climate change. www.savetheworld.de

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When heads of state and government adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015, there was great jubilation. Progress at last. Finally more sustainability.

Something is happening. The 17 goals for sustainability developed there were celebrated as a brilliant roadmap for a fairer world. Goal number five even reads: gender justice. As artistic director of the Art meets Science initiative Save the World, I have been fighting for sustainable transformation in culture since 2014. The empowerment and participation of women and girls in shaping our world is a fundamental prerequisite for ending poverty, inequality and violence, and urgently needed for a peaceful, just and sustainable world. It also has a leverage effect on economic growth and development and is not only just, but is also indispensable in economic and social terms.

On Site

Text: Lino Knocke

Hey, buddy Tom Albrecht was the first environmental officer at TU Berlin in the 1990s.

Today he is a curator and runs the Gallery for Sustainable Art in the city.

What can art contribute to the sustainability debate? A visit to Berlin’s hotbed for sustainability issues.

Social

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Has a project space and a dream: Tom Albrecht in front of his gallery GG3. Photo © Jens Thomas

A piece of wood in the shape of a charred club dangles from the ceiling. “That’s the ’Fossil Club,’ you can easily bump your head on it,” says a tall man who could be ’Tatort’ actor Max Ballauf’s older brother. He found the charred log at a campfire in the children’s farm around the corner. Most of the art objects here are made of found or recycled materials. My interviewee has already passed the first sustainability test.

From No Future to Fridays for Future The man with the mottled gray hair is Tom Albrecht, curator and founder of the gallery. Tom Albrecht is no stranger to sustainability. In 1991 he became the first environmental officer at the TU Berlin. He came to Berlin as early as 1972, the very year that the Club of Rome, the first association globally of alarmed climate experts, warned us that resources were running out. In the 1970s and 1980s, Berlin was still a different city. Back then it wasn’t Fridays for Future, but No Future. New Wave and punks with a nihilistic worldview were the dominant youth cultures around Berlin’s SO36. No debates about curbing consumption and global warming, but empty highways because of the first oil price crisis in the Middle East and the first discussions about the future of the forest. The Greens were on their starting blocks, in sneakers that were not yet recyclable. There were vast numbers of squatted houses and plenty of vacant lots full of clay, stones and broken plates to the soundtrack of the band Ton Steine Scherben – not exactly sustainable either.

Tom gestures to me, inviting me to look around. Since 2012, he and a team have been running the Gallery for Sustainable Art on a volunteer basis: three exhibition rooms, a toilet, a kitchenette, and a chamber for exhibition supplies, hidden by a blind. “It’s a bit cramped here,” Tom admits. “But we can get 60 people in here.”

One of his exhibitions was called Artists for Future, and another was on Fossil Addiction. Exhibits hang on the walls and are placed around the room. The Fossil Club, for example, on which I constantly bump my head while walking through the space. The club bounces back like a boomerang. “Man believes that

what he leaves behind has no consequences,” Tom says. Coming into contact with the club, he says, is a reminder that we should live more ecologically.

Another exhibit by Lioba von den Driesch is the Confessional for Ecological Sins. It consists of two chairs placed back-to-back, next to which is a stool with a gum machine. “The Confessional for Ecological Sins is ready,” Tom says with a mischievous grin, offering himself to me as confessor. “The average carbon emission in Germany is 11.6 tons per capita per year. A transatlantic flight from Düsseldorf to New York alone produces 3.65 tons of CO2. We act as if we can go on like this forever,” says the confessor. At the Gallery for Sustainable Art, you can confess your airline sins and meat cravings – the worst environmental sins – be ashamed of them and apologize with a handshake, as if there were a tomorrow again. On top of that, for a symbolic two cents, you can pull a carbon certificate out of the gumball machine. And a small book contains psalms for absolution. For example, “My children and grandchildren sanctify the means.” Since each of us emits carbon, Tom says, humor is a good way to address our contradictions about sustainability without being like missionaries about it. Dialogue works better with humor.

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Strolling along Leuschnerdamm from Moritzplatz in Berlin, it’s hard to imagine that this is where the death strip separated the districts of Kreuzberg and Mitte until 32 years ago. On the Kreuzberg side of the street, house number 19, a sign immediately catches my eye.

“Group Global 3000” is written on it in thick red letters, along with “Galerie für nachhaltige Kunst” (Gallery for Sustainable Art). The deeply framed, whitewashed windows don’t let me see inside, and that makes me curious. What is there to see down there? Through a double door, a small staircase leads down to a basement brightly lit by fluorescent tubes – the gallery.

We know the facts and yet we still buy an SUV and fly to Thailand or Majorca twice a year.

For me, this is typical addictive behavior.

The project space as social sculpture But there’s nothing humorous about sustainability.

Tom recalls how the discourse has unfolded over the years. First there was the United Nations’ Brundtland Report in 1987, which is considered the beginning of the global discourse on sustainable development, then came the alarming Rio Conference in 1992, and currently it’s the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which are displayed everywhere in Tom’s gallery and are meant to give a scientific underpinning to art objects. Just like in the next room. Videos run here non-stop. In one video, artist Keeley Haftner looks into the camera with a deadpan expression. She picks up a

We continue through the gallery. Tom talks as if he were standing at a lectern. He seems at home as an imparter of knowledge. Originally from Düsseldorf, he grew up in close proximity to Joseph Beuys – Beuys is his great artist idol. He himself studied mechanical engineering and later completed a degree in social sciences. He only ever did art on the side. “To this day, I regret not having studied art,” says the curator.

Today, he uses objects, installations, photographs, videos, words and actions to express his ideas. For him, team-led project spaces – like his gallery – embody the concept of social sculpture. In keeping with Beuys’ concept of art, they pursued the aspiration of shaping and forming society through art. You could even call it social sustainability.

The project space Gallery for Sustainable Art is a novelty in the city. There are around 450 galleries in Berlin, plus 150 project spaces that have been struggling to survive for years because of the lack of space. But there is not one that deals exclusively with sustainability. Why is that, I ask Tom? And what else can art contribute to the current sustainability debate anyway that Fridays for Future or others can’t? “The sustain­ ability discourse is simply too fact-laden in many places,” says Tom. “There’s a lack of encounters and images.” That’s what art creates. Environmental activists like Extinction Rebellion, for example, have learned a lot from performance art. Art is always about staging, something environmental activists cleverly put to good use. “But the current discourse focuses on the ecological dimension,” says Tom. The gallery, on the other hand, is about the reality of people’s lives: about social sustainability in all its aspects.

The addiction to fossil treats The logo of the gallery depicts two globes one behind the other and ironically demonstrates his aspiration to think big. The name Group Global 3000, GG3 for short, is indeed an “allusion to global companies with big names”. But it’s meant seriously: “We live as if we had a second world.” Group Global 3000 is not primarily about selling art objects. It’s about artistic encounters and performative doing. As a non-profit association

and non-commercial gallery, financed by donations, he comes up with the rent himself every month, Tom says. He is now a pensioner. If he had to work a job as well, he would not be able to run the gallery with the same intensity. Another important financial injection, he says, was the project space award he won in 2016 from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe. “I’m still happy to be able to rent the space.

But there are desires and appetites that are becoming more and more apparent,” Tom says. A glance across the street is enough to see what else has changed besides the loud traffic: all the many new buildings with glass balcony railings that have sprung up there. Tom himself lives above the gallery in the old building.

1 1: “Windows of Consumption” by the Berlin artist Mona Lüders. Photo © Mona Lüders; 2: Father of sustainability Tom Albrecht preaches. Photo © Jens Thomas; 3: Who dares to damage nature gets beaten up. Photo © Jens Thomas

On Site 68 Social

bottle of water and fills it with colored glitter, shakes it vigorously and drinks. She bravely takes the first sips of the dark glittering swill. Then she has to burp, takes it from her lips, then drinks some more. The struggle with the glitter shows on her face, the martyr’s facial expression slips. Heroically, she continues to drink until the bitter end. After 5 minutes of self-torture, she holds an empty 1-liter bottle up to the camera. Done.

“The video visualizes the dominance of microplastic in our oceans, how living creatures consume it, and so how it enters our bodies through the food chain,” Tom interprets the video, which runs on continuous loop.

Creating art and making connections, commenting on the madness of growth, linking art with science and inviting the neighborhood to talk – that’s what Tom Albrecht is all about. One of the last subjects he tackled was “fossil addiction.” He says, “We know the facts, we know about our harmful behavior, and yet we buy an SUV and fly to Thailand or Majorca twice a year. To me, that’s typical addictive behavior. There’s an itching in our lungs, but hey, what the heck.” Tom’s analysis is matter-of-fact, dispassionate, and it’s easy to see how he worked at TU Berlin. Since its founding, well over 200 artists have exhibited in the gallery, and the address database contains over 1000 contacts.

But do project spaces in Berlin have a long-term future in the city? “That remains to be seen,” says Tom. The study ’Project spaces: vital but fragile heart of the art scene’ by sociologist Séverine Marguin a few years ago demonstrated that the existence of project spac-

The current discourse focuses on the ecologi­ cal dimension.

But it is also about the reality of people’s lives, about social sustaina­ bility. Project spaces are door openers here.

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es in Berlin is under threat. The findings showed that the majority of project spaces in Berlin have to get by on less than 5,000 euros a year. That is not sustain­ able. So Tom is worried about the future of the gallery, although he holds all the trump cards as far as themes are concerned. The subject of ecology, with all its social and economic implications, is far from exhausted.

And a Gallery for Future is just what this city needs.

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2

Living 70

Old becomes new – In Wiesenburg, Brandenburg, the Co-Village is being built near the train station with a connection to Berlin.

Photo © agmm Architekten + Stadtplaner

Social

Off to the ­Silicon Woods!

Build, build, build – that’s the motto for regulating the rental market. But do we want Berlin to become more and more densely built-up? Frederik Fischer, ­journalist and founder of the start-up Tame, has decided simply to set up a village in Brandenburg – the co-village. What does that have to do with sustainability?

A conversation with a man who is sitting on packed suitcases.

Interview: Jens Thomas

Frederik Fischer is Founder and managing director of Neulandia. He sits on the board of the VielLeben eG cooperative and is co-initiator of Futur Eins, a think and do tank for tomorrow’s society.

Photo © Manuela Clemens

CCB Magazine: Frederik, we already know each other from a number of meetups and projects.

In 2012, you founded Tame, a Twitter alternative for re-sorting the flood of news on the web. Now you’re setting up a village in Brandenburg. Was Berlin too boring for you, or did you get homesick?

Frederik Fischer: A bit of both. I come from the tech scene.

After university I went straight into business with my tech start-up. We grew quickly, had ten employees and made frequent trips to Silicon Valley. To get away from it all, I often cycled through Brandenburg with my wife on the weekends.

That brought peace into my life. Berlin was also becoming more and more crowded and expensive. On the other hand, there were whole swaths of rural areas that seemed empty and abandoned. So I asked myself how I could combine the two, how I could put the rural space with its existing buildings to new use without having to give up old ways. That’s where the idea of the co-village came from, a synthesis of one-horse village and cooperative. Now we are close to achieving our goal. And we are injecting momentum into a debate that is long overdue.

What debate?

What will life in the city and in the country look like in the future? How can we live and work in a socially just and ecologically-friendly way? For years we’ve been seeing a growing separation between work and city. A lot of people don’t live in the city now because it’s where they absolutely want to live, but because their job ties them to the city. But more and more people are longing for peace and quiet and somewhere to get away from it all, while still wanting to be part of cultural life.

Rents in Berlin have risen by 44 percent in the last five years alone, and real estate prices have risen by another 12 percent this year. On the other hand, there are entire villages and rural areas where the population feels left behind or actually has been left behind. The question is how we can strike a new balance here. The co-village can be a stimulus for this.

How do you go about setting up a village like this?

It’s a rocky road, and it’s not over yet. We have been dealing with building regulations for two years and are still waiting for the legally-binding development plan, but things are looking good. The village itself is based on a cooperative model. The idea came to me in the Netherlands. I was at a wedding where everyone was staying in a vacation village. These were cooperatively organized units, everyone had their own house, yet people were able to come together as a community. That was what convinced me. I then transferred this idea to a village construct. I didn’t know how to do that, though – I’m a journalist, not an architect. During my research phase, I then came across the vacation village in Meerleben on the Baltic Sea. I contacted the initiators, the architect Patric Meier and his partner Katrin Frische, and we quickly came to the conclusion that we were driven by a very similar vision. Patric also brought the necessary technical expertise. Now two projects are in the planning phase, one in Erndtebrück in North Rhine-Westphalia, the other in Wiesenburg in Brandenburg, a hundred kilometers from Berlin.

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The question is: How can we live and work in a socially just and ecologically-­ friendly way in the future? The Co-Village is meant to show the way forward.

Living 72 Social

What does the co-village look like? What will be there? And who can move in and under what conditions?

The village consists of four hectares of land and 40 households organized as a cooperative. The heart of the village is an old sawmill that covers about 40,000 square meters. The idea here was to repurpose the old. We will be setting up a coworking space here and organizing event opportunities, and there will also be a café, a bookstore and a co-village open-all-hours grocery store that will become the place to go for organic, sustainable products from the region. The goal is to work closely with local producers. Otherwise, we are using the infrastructure of the community. We are not building a new supermarket here. We are approaching the community.

And vice versa, we also invite the people of Wiesenburg to join us. The co-village itself is made up of three freely select­ able house types, houses of 30, 60 and 80 square meters. As a larger family, you can of course add smaller units – or give them back, for example, when the children have left home.

But you don’t buy the houses. They remain the property of the cooperative. To do this, you become a member and buy shares in the amount of your contribution. If you want to move out again at some point, you sell your shares to the new members who are on the waiting list. Our approach is to make living conditions more flexible, because working and living patterns are always changing.

Who is the village open to and who actually gets to move into it? Plumbers, IT specialists, creative professionals?

We aren’t setting any particular requirements, but we do have a definite focus on the digital and creative milieu which we ourselves come from. But there are also some people who have jobs at universities, research institutions or insurance companies. Even a few Wiesenburger locals will be living in the co-village. You have to apply to live there. Of course, we look closely at the applications, because we want to know who we’re living next door to. We selected the first ten households ourselves. Since then it is the group that decides who moves in or is put on the reserve list. For this purpose, there are profiles and rounds of interviews. Up to a hundred people in total can move in. The group always has the option of vetoing candidates if they have a bad gut feeling about them. That happens sometimes, too, but in most cases the right people are found.

Somehow this sounds like an exclusive club for life in the country. Isn’t that the next stage of gentrification? Now the educated capitalists are coming and conquering the Silicon Woods because they’re sick of the city?

No, not at all. We are neither an exclusive club nor self-sufficient. The ages range from toddlers to retirees. Musicians rub shoulders with IT managers or local craftsmen. After all, we are looking for contact with the region. The procedure is atypical, it’s true, because you have to apply; you don’t have to do that in any other village or city. But in the city, it’s the landlord who decides who moves in, and in the end, it usually

depends on their wallet. And more and more people are being forced to move because they can no longer afford to stay in their apartments. With us, it’s the other way around: people move in on favorable terms, and the places are limited. So it’s not supposed to stop an just one co-village – the idea is supposed to set a precedent.

How did the people of Wiesenburg react when you showed up with construction plans and open laptops? Do they even want you to come?

They reacted very well. They were involved in the process right from the start. What’s important is that it’s not us who apply to the municipalities, the municipalities apply to us. That was one of the important preconditions for the project, to avoid conflicts in advance. After all, if the municipalities themselves apply, they are generally open to change. In return, of course, we pay attention to who comes: the co-village residents have to want to put down roots in the village. A prerequisite for living in the co-village is that you register it as your main place of residence – so we’re practically banning houses in the co-village being used as weekend or vacation homes. At the same time, everyone needs to be clear that they cannot commute to Berlin every day. Home office needs to be part of the deal.

For ecological reasons, too.

What does it cost to live in the village? And what does the project as a whole cost?

We can’t say for certain yet, because that depends on future planning procedures further down the road. What we can say, though, is that the houses will cost between 135,000 and 330,000 euros. But this includes all costs, including planning and development costs, the purchase price for the land and a cost estimate for the communal areas. We are planning on around two million for the sawmill, which will be divided among all the members of the cooperative. In total, it probably comes out to 20 million. Of course, the project involves a certain risk. That’s why we asked for an initial contribution of just under 6,000 euros from all cooperative members. This en­ abled us to finance the procurement of planning permission.

In addition, we received subsidies from the state of Brandenburg, and as a co-village resident you only need 30 percent equity capital anyway. This is because there is the possibility of financing the mandatory share up to the amount of 50,000 euros via the KfW134 program. The cooperative takes over the remaining financing. This loan is paid off over many years in small amounts as part of the communal charge. This makes it much easier to get started. Just consider that a property in Berlin and its affluent suburbs now costs almost a million.

And there is no commercial developer behind our project who is ultimately lining his pockets. We are creating something that is truly sustainable and available to the community.

Keyword sustainability – are the houses also built sustainably?

Yes, they are ecological houses. The facades are clad with visible real wood. Wood was important to us, because we find conventional new-build housing developments abhorrent.

The small houses will also have green roofs so that rainwater can be collected and used for watering the garden. But we’re

not so much concerned with fixed eco-DIN standards. We’re looking at sustainability across the board – ecologically and socially. It’s about energy efficiency and healthy living. The existing tree population will be integrated into the planning. The residential courtyards will be used communally. In addition, we aim to have our own heat and energy supply. In the next planning step, we are investigating the feasibility of a combined heat and power plant, woodchip heating and photovoltaic systems. And by revitalizing the sawmill, which has stood empty since reunification, we are giving the brick building a second life – that in itself is sustainable.

Frederik, in 1950 not even a third of the world’s population lived in cities. Since 2007, it’s been more than half. According to UN calculations, by 2050 it will be two-thirds, with urban areas accounting for 75 percent of energy consumption.

If you were to make a prediction, how much can model projects like yours change the overall situa­ tion? Are we witnessing a change in society that will see a renaissance of the village?

I’m not so sure that urbanization will continue forever. Berlin, for example, shrank again last year. But the question will be how we can rediscover rural areas and at the same time make cities more climate-friendly and livable. In the minds of many people, the village has long since become an idealized site of longing. This can be proven with surveys from before the pandemic, according to which more than half of the people in Germany would prefer to live in villages and small towns.

Only about a third still see the center of large cities as an ­ideal place to live. The reason for the growth of large cities was simply that until now very few people have been able to just take their jobs with them. That has changed thanks to gen-

erous home office rules. This development makes new life models possible and opens up opportunities for rural areas.

It is important to take advantage of these – in a way that is oriented toward the common good, both ecologically and socially. Because interest in rural areas could also turn out to be a poisoned chalice, namely if city dwellers merely buy vacation properties or build drawing board overflow estates on the outskirts of the cities. The places we are concerned with are an investment in quality of life and ecological compatibility.

We are developing a new social coexistence as neighbors. I am sure that we will be seeing a lot more housing innovations like this in the coming years.

You might also be interested in this: Berlin architect Verena von Becke­ rath has developed a CoHouse in Kreuzberg – ecological, social. What’s behind it?

Photo © Gitty Darugar

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Could be cozy – The Co-Village as a model. Photo © agmm Architekten + Stadtplaner

Health 74

Some­ thing is off kilter

Social

Helmet or condom?

We’re not quite sure. But whichever it is, the object is called The Bell.

Photo © Marie Jacob

New ecological standards and demands for social compatibility – that is one side of the modern working world. The other is that more and more people are being lost to the workforce due to mental stress. The Berlin communications agency SHITSHOW – Agency for Mental Health advises on resilience, gives workshops and has developed a pop-up exhibition on the subject of depression and anxiety disorders. How can art and communication design draw attention to something that is a social taboo?

Interview: Jens Thomas

The SHITSHOW team (from left to right): Nele Groeger, Johanna Dreyer, Luisa Weyrich, Benthe Untiedt Photo © Shitshow

CCB Magazine: Hello Nele, Johanna and Luisa.

The number of days of absence from work and of cases of occupational invalidity caused by mental illness have risen rapidly in recent years – the health insurer DAK talks about an increase of almost 140 percent between 2000 and 2019. 8.7 million people in Germany suffer from depression and anxiety disorders. You have developed a “psychoeducational” exhibition on this. What exactly is that and who does it help?

SHITSHOW: Our exhibition is an interactive pop-up exhibition in which visitors can try out four design objects, the MOODSUITS ®. The objects were created on the basis of interviews with sufferers. They give form to psychosomatic symptoms associated with depression or anxiety disorder. The exhibition is called The SHITSHOW – an exhibition about feeling shitty. Feeling shitty is something we all know all too well. In the longer term, it can become a chronic condition. With the MOODSUITS ® we make it easier for non-sufferers to develop empathy with sufferers.

Who does it mostly affect?

Depression and anxiety disorders are now one of the major causes of life impairment worldwide. There are no reli­able figures on whether mental illnesses have increased over time, as awareness and recognition of them have improved and they are more frequently diagnosed. But it affects all age groups, and women suffer from depression more frequently than men. Younger people mostly seek help when the illness is on the way to becoming chronic. This is also where our exhibition comes in – and all in an aesthetic environment that makes it accessible without the ponderousness that usually accompanies it.

Can people wear your MOODSUITS ®? They don’t look as if you could get around the city center without any problems.

It’s not about wearing them in everyday life. The design is deliberately oversized. Take DIE GLOCKE (The Bell) for example, a design object that you can put on like a helmet. It makes the feeling of depressive isolation, numbness and loneliness physically tangible. Or THE CHOKER, a kind of heavy chain that you hang back-to-front around your neck with a small wooden ball embedded in it that presses down on your throat. It evinces the feeling of a lump in your throat – doctors call it globus sensation – that often accompanies an anxiety disorder. MOODSUITS ® are based on the embodi­ ment concept developed in cognitive science and psychological research, which, in simple terms, examines the interaction between mind and body. According to this concept, feelings and perceptions always have physical effects – with a depression or anxiety disorder we feel sluggish, depressed or constricted or as if we were behind a frosted glass wall, cut off from the world. It was important to us to free mental illness of the stigma of affliction and to make it clear that it can affect anyone.

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Depression and anxiety disorders are now one of the major causes of life impairment worldwide.

Young people in ­particular are ­affected, but most do not seek help until the condition is already on the way to be­ coming chronic.

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Mental illnesses How did the idea come about? May I ask if you are affected yourselves?

Of course you can ask. The idea initially came about in a dia­ log between the three of us. Johanna has experience with anxiety disorders, Nele has experience with depression, and Luisa has experience with Johanna and Nele. We dealt a lot with the question of how to make it easier for non-sufferers to perceive mental illnesses as real illnesses. Although society’s awareness of mental illness has increased over the years, many people still don’t dare to go public with it. The MOODSUITS ® serve as a bridge here. They are intended to facilitate understanding between the different groups.

Your objects were developed together with product designers from the University of the Arts. Your aim, as you say, is to give visitors a physical experience. What do people experience in the exhibition? And how has the project been received?

We show that you’re not alone with the problem or that you don’t have to be alone – and that’s exactly what visitors experience. So far, the reactions have been consistently positive.

Those affected often give feedback that they feel empowered by our approach. We have now become a consulting agency for mental health in the workplace. We even have a psychologist on board – our target group is organizations and companies. In the past, however, we have also enjoyed working with children and young people. At an exhibition in a day clinic, for example, a daughter who was affected once came with her mother and, after trying it out, said, “See, Mom, that’s how it feels when Dad always says, ‘Now don’t hang your head like that!’ – I’m trying, but I just can’t do it because it weighs me down so much.” The mother then insisted on bringing the father to visit the exhibition. These are the sort of amazing experiences that encourage us in our work.

Studies have shown that the modern working world, its fast pace and increasing uncertainties can cause mental illness. The risk of suffering an accident at work has fallen to a historic low in Germany. In contrast, the number of workers who are absent from work due to mental ailments and behavioral disorders has more than doubled in the past decade. Is your exhibition a critique of today’s working world, which many people find overwhelming?

That’s an interesting question – and it’s not so easy to answer.

When it comes to the causes of mental illness, public opinion is still divided into two camps: those who see them as being primarily rooted in human biology, and those who focus on the world we live in as the cause. We do not want to give simple answers to this, because there are no simple answers.

There are always many factors that combine to cause mental illness – biological factors play a role as well as our modern living environment, being constantly available, constant self-motivation and the pressure to perform. In our opinion, we make it too easy for ourselves if we regard mentally ill people either as the sum of dysfunctional biological processes or as individuals unable to cope with the demands of the mod-

The object The Bell. Photo © Marie Jacob

137 % was the increase in days of absence due to mental illness in the period from 2000 to 2019, according to the DAK. At the same time, depression, burnout and other mental illnesses are now better recognized and thus diagnosed more frequently.

40 % increase was recorded in burnout, depression, anxiety disorders and other mental illnesses as a reason for occupational invalidity. According to the Swiss Life occupational invalidity report, this makes them the most common cause.

17 % of days of absence from work due to illness from 2014 to 2020 were caused by mental illnesses, according to DAK. This makes them the second most common cause.

28 % of occupational invalidity cases among men are due to a mental illness, according to Swiss Life.

44 % of cases of occupational invalidity among women are due to a mental illness.

Women are more likely to become mentally ill at an early age. In men, these diagnoses usually only occur in the second half of life, from about age 50.

What would a society have to look like so that a project like yours would not be needed at all?

Such a society would protect against the development of serious mental crises at both individual and community level.

It would need a working world that counteracts psychosocial pressure and fear of loss of social status. And, at a very basic level, basic psychotherapeutic care for those seeking help would have to be improved and expanded. Help servi­ ces would be quicker to find and easier to access. In addition, knowledge about maintaining and restoring our own mental health should start with the school curriculum – the United Kingdom introduced “mental health” as a school subject two years ago already, an example that should be followed. A resilient society – especially in times of technological progress – is one that guarantees everyone a life in dignity and with the necessary material security. Poverty and precarious living conditions are among the greatest risk factors for the development of mental illness – and creative professionals are not immune to this.

ern labor market. It is precisely this distinction that we would like to break down with our body-centered approach. It is important to us that mental illness should be taken seriously in all its complexity. It’s a sign that something is out of kilter, on the inside and on the outside. External circumstances influence the inner, psychological balance, and vice versa.

You are designers and consultants. One trend in recent years is for designers increasingly to produce sustainably, i.e. ecologically or in a socially fair way. Research on the sociology of work into the “subjectification of sustainability,” on the other hand, is focusing on a completely different form of sustainability, asking how human resources can be conserved. The central question is how the working subject can be protected in the modern world of work – from social inequality, from permanent availability, etc. Do we need a new view of sustainability that puts the concerns of the work subject at the center?

Absolutely! A system that defines people solely as interchangeable workers promotes psychosocial pressure, fosters insecurity and thus vulnerability to psychological crises.

After all, we live in a working society in which, on the one hand, the desire for self-realization and creativity is increasing, but in which, on the other hand, the fear of downward social mobility and loss of social status is gaining dominance.

Responses to the growth of psychological ills can therefore never be solely an individual matter. We need to look at the social structure as a whole.

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The object The Choker. Photo © Marie Jacob

You might also be interested in this: Christoph Harrach, transformation researcher and winner of the German Sustainability Award, suffered burnout at a very early age – since then he has pursued a dual approach to sustainability, a psychological-spiritual and a social-ecological one. Find out what this is all about in CCB Magazine.

Photo © Thomas Kierok

Economy

What does it take to make a s ­ ustainable society? In conversation with Niko Paech About us: What Kreativ Kultur Berlin has to offer What do sustainable funding and ­financing methods look like? An overview Small up against big: Do alternative business models stand a chance?

Big finances small: Are ­sustainable investments in the creative ­industries the future?

How sustainable is crowdfunding?

Expert Shai Hoffmann explains

79 Photo © Ingo Tesch / glanz&krawall

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“We have to say goodbye to growth”

Economy

Likes to get to the heart of things: Niko Paech. Photo © Jens Volle

How do economics, sustainability and cultural production fit together?

For sustainability researcher Niko Paech, one thing is certain: we need a reduction in consumption and production. What would that mean for cultural workers, and would such a scenario be realistic? A conversation about decluttering society, new work models and the question of whether the circular economy will end up staying as just science fiction.

Interview: Jens Thomas

Niko Paech is an economist, sustainability researcher and founder of post-growth economics. He teaches and conducts research at the University of Siegen as an adjunct professor in the field of Plural Economics. His book “Befreiung vom Überfluss” – Liberation from Excess (oekom, 2012) is still influential in German sustainability research today.

CCB Magazine: Mr. Paech, for some you are a rock star of the post-growth economy. Others call you a utopian. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung has written that you like to make a clown of yourself. Does that annoy you?

Niko Paech: Oh, you know, we live in an attention economy, and criticism often says more about the critic than the person being criticized. I think the NZZ has laid it on a bit thick here, or misunderstood.

You are considered the founder of post-growth economics and advocate a radical limitation of growth. Is that a social ideal or do you believe it really works in reality?

Of course I believe it works. The most pressing of all ecological challenges, namely climate change, alone calls for a downsized economy that does not keep on growing. To achieve the 1.5- or 2-degree climate protection target, each person would have to get by with about one ton of carbon emissions per year. In Germany this figure is currently around 11 tons. And in my opinion, the necessary reduction can only be achieved within the framework of a post-growth economy, firstly by reducing mobility and consumption, i.e., more sufficiency, secondly by means of gradual self-sufficiency, for example, by repairing things, making things ourselves and community use, thirdly by emphasizing regional economy, and fourthly by restructuring the albeit greatly reduced industry that’s left.

Many nations are trying to link the ecological issue with growth and digital progress.

But all attempts to restore our ecological ability to survive by technological means have failed. They were driven by the hope of not having to impose reductions on people. And they were counterproductive. The German energy transition is a disaster. First, it has produced virtually no significant reductions in greenhouse gases. Instead, it has disfigured entire landscapes through industrial post-densification. Technical solutions to environmental problems are based not on eliminating damage, but only on shifting it temporally or geographically or in terms of materials or systemically.

Many cultural and creative workers, the subject of this issue, have internalized the post-growth idea, but they earn little or no money. Are these yesterday’s reality deniers or tomorrow’s pioneers?

Quality of life, self-esteem and social recognition are not a question of money, but of a meaningful existence. I do not deny that a sufficient monetary income is necessary for this, but in a viable economy this can only be lower on average than at present. That is why we need the complementary subsistence activities in the form of repair, community use and making things ourselves. And those who already practice these are ahead of their time. Social niches and real laboratories can serve as role models here. But this requires a reduction and redistribution of working hours.

And that means?

If we assume a 20-hour week, then the time gained can be used to contribute to the food supply or in other ways to alle-

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If we want to achieve the 1.5- or 2-degree climate ­protection target, each person would have to get by with one ton of carbon emis­ sions per year. In Germany this figure is currently 11 tons. That alone calls for a down­ sized economy.

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viate the pressure to generate a high monetary income, also, for example, by doubling the useful life of products. This implies looking after, maintaining and, if necessary, repairing consumer goods. This halves the financial burden required for us to be adequately provided with these things. And if, in addition, some goods no longer have to be purchased at all because they are shared with three other people, the corresponding financial requirement drops by another two-thirds.

This principle can be supported by community resource centers and learning sites.

Representatives of the liberal FDP party would say that it is not worth it. Even left-wing economists like Heiner Flassbeck argue that we need a high rate of consumption so that fair wage structures can develop. And that’s why many of the sustainability labels don’t make enough money, because they don’t focus on volume and consumption.

But on a physically limited planet, it is not possible to distri­ bute equitably what in a just world should not have been created in the first place. Our system has been based on irreversible plundering for years. In addition, a consumer society of Central European character is not compatible with resilience and robustness in crisis. The corona crisis has mercilessly exposed the undesirable developments of recent years. The supply of essential goods such as respiratory masks or respirators was suddenly endangered because its global interconnections makes the supply system uncontrollable. Added to this are psychological limits to growth. More and more people suffer from sensory overload and consumption stress because they can buy more goods than they are able to enjoy without stress. We need not only a reduction in consumption, but shorter value chains that can be made more democratic and ecologically sound.

But how can this be achieved? Many agree with you that we need to do without more things, but warn, according to taz business journalist Ulrike Herrmann, that we would slip into a severe economic crisis if we made this change abruptly. What we would need is a transition to a circular economy that consumes only what can be recycled. Mr. Paech, is that the solution?

The C2C idea is based on magical thinking; it could come from a maudlin science fiction novel. And it has not been thought through to the end, because its widespread implementation is based on preconditions that are not available at zero ecological cost – take for instance infrastructures, special production sites and additional transports to keep resources in the cycle. The proponents of this conception, if they were consistent, would have to radically declutter society of the product designs that have emerged over the past three decades that can never be recyclable. And these are the very things on which our current prosperity is based. In the 1950s, products were more circular than they are today.

People could take cars apart on their own. The individual parts could all be replaced. It wasn’t until we started getting into highly innovative, smart electronics and digitization, and

globalizing and standardizing mass production, that we said goodbye to any circularity. Regaining it has come at a price: less choice, less digitization, less convenience and less technical performance. And we haven’t even mentioned the price of C2C products or the services based on them yet, especially where the energy needed for them will come from. The C2C utopians are keeping all this from us.

Mr. Paech, let’s conclude with a little cinematic look at the future. If your model of reducing working hours doesn’t prevail because the majority don’t support it, will AI take care of it in the end?

Philosophers like Richard David Precht warn of the transhumanist age because machines could replace human work, but on the other hand believe that artificial intelligence can free humans from boring work. In the future, will we only do work that is meaningful and sustainable?

That would be nice, but digitization is proving to be the accelerant of virtually every contemporary crisis. Affordable direct flights that ruin the climate would not even be possible without digitization. In my view of the future, a new wave of luddites would come on the scene to fight for a return to controllable and repairable technologies. Small production units and meaningful work in workshops and manufactories where goods are produced by hand. Digitization could be used for this purpose. I myself exchange ideas with someone in Augsburg who has set up a production lab where digitization is being used to free manufacturing from mass production. Only in this way will we arrive at an economy that does not resemble a digitally controlled Titanic, but rather a fleet of elegant, agile and independently steered boats. This requires reductive countercultures that challenge society and politics from within the niches. Creative artists can lead the way here by setting an example. They are the ones who can become the loudspeakers of a new post-growth society – ideally right away.

Sustainability is not only about ecology and social compatibility. It also depends on long-term support services and funding structures. That’s why we would like to intro­ duce you to the consulting services offered by our colleagues at Kreativ Kultur Berlin.

Analog and now digital: Since 2016, Kreativ Kultur Berlin, Berlin’s consultation center for cultural and creative professio­ nals, has been the first point of contact and central guide to funding and financing issues in the capital – and, like Creative City Berlin, it is run by Kulturprojekte Berlin. Our advisors provide information, support and networking, informally and free of charge, and across all sectors and industries. Individual and group consultations are offered on the promotion and financing of projects. Your questions about professionalization and development of business models will be answered.

A new website has just been launched. The centerpiece is the funding database, which lists funding and financing programs in the cultural and creative sectors in Berlin, Germany and throughout Europe. The extensive database contains nearly 400 entries and is constantly updated. Another new feature is the resource center, which digitally brings toge­ther advisory knowledge and supplements the expert consultations, info sessions, application checks and the large number of workshops. Take a look or drop by and get an overview.

But how sustainable are the individual programs? And what funding and financing pots are even available? Sabrina Apitz and Melanie Seifart, project coordinators at Kreativ Kultur Berlin, write about this on the following pages – and they give you tips on how and where you can get more information.

You can find more information at: www.kreativkultur.berlin

Photo © Alexander Rentsch

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On our own behalf

We open the doors and advise you

Promotion & Funding Cultural funding is a top priority in Germany.

But does it also aim for sustainability?

Economy

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by Sabrina Apitz, Kulturförderberatung Photo © Marcelina Wellmer We at the Kulturförderberatung (cultural promotion consultancy) have been advising artists and cultural workers on funding and financing issues for years. And we are noticing that the issue of sustainability is becoming increasingly important. But there is a discrepancy between funding instruments and needs. The arts and culture scene has made a kind of voluntary commitment to becoming more sustainable. But there is a lack of funding instruments that meet these demands. In this context, the arts contribute to the invention and establishment of comprehensive sustainable structures by combining discourse and practice. So far, though, it has been a case of being financially able to afford to act in an ecologically responsible manner. There is a lack of appropriate support programs.

In concrete terms, this means that in addition to new funding instruments for sustainability, we need above all further training and process support in order to learn how ecological action can be implemented in our own context.

This includes new forms of cooperation as well as sustainable touring. Through further training, exchange formats, additional jobs and general forums on the subject of sustainability, ecological production and carbon literacy, the players must be supported in order to be able to actively transform their production methods. After all, sustain­ ability has definitely arrived as a subject of importance in the arts and culture. Some funding programs already take sustainable production into account, and some even require it, but unfortunately provide financial support for it only rarely if at all. That’s why we’re giving you an overview of the programs that already exist.

Initiatives at a glance Kreatives Europa KULTUR lists promoting cooperation in the fields of innovation, sustainability and competitiveness as one of the program’s goals.

Foundations in the sustainability field are opening up and are no longer only looking for technical innovations, but also for educational or cultural projects. There are also some exciting initiatives and pilot projects in the arts and culture scene.

In the pilot project Climate Balances in Cultural Institutions, the German Federal Cultural Foundation has supported 19 cultural institutions in determining their emissions. (see p. 40).

The Aktionsnetzwerk Nachhaltigkeit (Sustainability Action Network) is a cross-sector point of contact for operational ecology in the field of culture and media. Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, it initiates, supports, documents and communicates pilot projects. Work is currently underway on a freely available carbon footprint calculator for culture (see p. 54).

The Netzwerk Kultur und Agenda 2030 has published an extensive collection of materials on contributions, publications and guides.

From 2018 to 2020, the project office based at the German Council for Culture, which was launched with the support of the German Council for Sustainable Development and in cooperation with the Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland, pursued the goal of building a bridge between the sustainability discourse of the nature and environment sector and cultural policy debates.

by Melanie Seifart, Kreativwirtschaftsberatung Photo © Marcelina Wellmer For five years now, we have been advising independent cultural workers and creative entrepreneurs in Berlin on finan­ cing and support opportunities. Since we began consulting, we have noticed that there are two sides to the way cultural and creative professionals work. On the one hand, they are passionate about creative work, on the other hand, they use that creativity for finding entrepreneurial solutions and products for a more sustainable economy and society. This makes the cultural and creative industries an important component of the social economy in Berlin. However, sustainability goals and creative economy interests seem to be mutually exclusive a lot of the time. Many creative professionals advocate social and ecological concerns, thus moving away from the conventional growth paradigm of the economy. On the other hand, they have to pursue economic interests if they want to build their self-employed livelihoods. The central question is: How do orientation to the common good, ecological compatibility and economic viability fit together? And what about options for financing them?

What we have observed is that many economic development funding pots have so far focused on economic sustainability; the emphasis is on market placement and the corresponding growth of companies. This contrasts – ironically – with traditional non-profit cultural funding, which only supports those artists and projects that do not work commercially. Thus, current funding programs do not cover the hybrid work realities of cultural workers and creative entrepreneurs. The goal should be to find new ways of financing. And what about the corresponding funding programs? In addition to the many prizes for sustainability that have been in existence for years, there are now several funding opportunities with a sustainability focus in Berlin and at the federal level. We’ve made a summary of them for you here.

Support programs at a glance Coaching BONUS Since July 1, 2021, companies in the social economy in Berlin can take advantage of the support program for building inhouse competencies.

Design Transfer Bonus Berlin The program of the state of Berlin also focuses on social economy and grants companies a subsidy for developing innovative design solutions for expanding and developing their businesses.

GründungsBONUS Berlin The program of the Investitionsbank des Landes Berlin also focuses on social economy and provides a start-up grant to young companies to help with expenditures to give their growth a secure footing.

Micromezzanine Fund Germany The target group this fund focuses on especially are commercial social and environmental enterprises, providing companies with sufficient equity through silent participation to en­ able them to access credit financing.

Sustainable business and impact investing In the area of private investors, too, a lot has changed in recent years. In addition to a profitable and scalable business idea, investors are increasingly focusing on sustainability criteria.

FASE – Financing Agency for Social Enterprises The agency advises on suitable financing solutions and on suitable investors and partners.

Phineo – Pioneer of Impact Investing in Germany Through years of experience and the development of a large network, Phineo can support young companies in finding private and public financiers and building partnerships across sectors.

Purpose Ventures This is a cooperative that helps companies remain independent and purpose-driven by providing knowledge, resources, advice and capital. It advocates for new forms of ownership and responsibility.

Are you looking for funding programs and finan­cing opportunities? The funding database on Kreativ Kultur Berlin will help you: www.kreativkultur.berlin

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The idea of sustainability is gaining in importance in the creative industries.

But are the demands matched by corresponding funding programs? And what funding pots are out there?

Economy

86

Make the ­Planet Great Again

Digitalization has turned the world economy upside down. A few global players in the tech industry reaping vast rewards, while many small providers are earning very little. But are the small providers powerless? Do they even want to keep up? We venture into Berlin’s jungle of platform alternatives.

by Felicia Holtkamp

Photo © Ecosia

Volker Oppmann, yourbook.shop

Volker Oppmann: In 2017 he created mojoreads, today he runs yourbook.shop. You can read his story in CCB Magazine.

Photo © Tobias Tanzyna

Early September in front of the Amazon warehouse in Berlin-­ Mariendorf. A gathering of protesters is blowing whistles against capitalism. For years, Amazon has been criticized for paying its employees poorly and outcompeting its rivals. ­Under the hashtag #ausgeliefert, the United Services Union ­ver.di drew attention to precarious employment conditions at Amazon in its nationwide days of action in September 2021.

This focused on improving working conditions for subcontractors transporting and delivering Amazon packages. The company is also criticized for its systematic destruction of new goods – this is not what conservation of resources looks like.

Are there alternatives? We set off on a search in Berlin. Our journey took us first to yourbook.shop. This is a social enterprise that wants to strengthen the local book trade. Behind the platform is Berlin-based Volker Oppmann, a self-styled “serial entrepreneur.” His intention is to create “a genuine social and democratic platform that is free of advertising and independent of large corporations” to counter Amazon’s long dominance of the book trade. Discontent first came to a head in 2014 when a report came out revealing the overwhelming dominance of the online book trade. It’s true that in August 2021 the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers and Booksellers Association) issued a report to smooth the waters, showing that at 27.2 percent the growth rate of booksellers’ web stores was almost four times higher than Amazon’s 7.2 percent. But despite this, Amazon’s share of the online book trade in Germany is still estimated at around 50 percent – the tech giant does not release exact figures. The group is now one of the top 10 publishers in the U.S.; in 2019, more than a thousand titles were published via Amazon Publishing. This means that the group is also putting German publishers under pressure. During the corona crisis in 2020, there were also delays in the delivery of books ordered from Amazon, which claimed that other products had priority. Critics claim that this was the group abusing its market power to push sales of its Kindle e-books; after all, the bookstores were closed and there were no alternatives. ­Volker Oppmann of yourbook.shop knows a thing or two about this.

“The big platforms are focus points where market reach can be bought and the attention of customers can be manipu­ lated. That’s not something that we do.” Oppmann has therefore been trying his hand at alternatives for years. In 2013, he founded Log.os, a book store and community platform in one, which became Mojoreads in 2017, and now the online platform is called yourbook.shop. But even yourbook.shop won’t be able to change Amazon’s brutal exercise of raw power any time soon. But customers can, however, use the platform to buy books online from their favorite local bookstores, which receive at least 15 percent for each purchase. yourbook.shop combines community and store elements and has deliberately eschewed venture capital in order to lend credence to its model of a common good economy. Each partner bookstore builds its own community on the platform. People can join literary groups here, just like in the old days, and recommend books to each other. In this way local bookstores can be kept

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We want to create a real social and democratic platform, free of advertising and independent of large corporations.

Economy

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connected to the literary community. Authors can find their readers by selling books directly to them and in the process earning a bigger share of the profits.

Change of platform. We meet Peter Harris, who wants Reso­ nate to be an alternative to Spotify. With 360 million users each month, Spotify is the largest music streaming service in the world. The company has a market share of 44 percent, followed by Apple Music with 18 percent and Amazon with 14 percent. More than 70 million songs and around 2.9 million podcasts are available to users on Spotify – and all for a paltry ten euros a month (depending on the subscription model). For the artists who contribute music content to the platform, however, this is an indecent proposal, since they are hardly able to earn a living wage from it at all. Spotify pays out the money earned from subscriptions based on the number of clicks, $ 0.0038 per click to be exact. On average, artists receive 2,739 euros for a million streams. This means that the majority of subscription fees are distributed to a few big stars while the rest of the artists can’t live from it. Peter Harris thought this was unfair – and founded Resonate in 2015 as a music streaming cooperative model. The platform now has 17,000 members. Resonate combines streaming and downloading, also called #stream2own. The principle consists of nine levels. The more often a song is listened to, the more credits users pay, until on the ninth listen the whole song ends up in the purchase package for 1,022 credits. Converted, that’s about 1.25 euros. At Resonate, artists without a label receive 70 percent of the revenue, and the remaining 30 percent goes to the platform, which is no different than with Spotify. But to earn a few euros there, the song would have to be clicked thousands of times. At Resonate, users don’t just buy the songs. With their shares in the cooperative, they also get a share of profits. Peter Harris says, “With Resonate, we’re trying to establish a culture that perceives and presents music as art, not just as something for setting the mood or as an audio tape.”

He searched for the meaning of life on a trip around the world. Today he runs a search engine that plants trees: Christian Kroll. We accompanied him as he worked.

Photo © Ecosia

“I have a stream”: Peter Harris wanted to create a platform that belongs to the musicians. So that’s what he did. We talked to him about his journey.

Photo © Resonate

Next platform. We have an appointment with Christian Kroll, founder of the Ecosia platform, which aims to be an alternative to Google, by far the biggest tech monopoly. Its search engine market share for mobile searching is over 97 percent, according to SEO Summary. The next largest search engine – Bing – has a market share of less than two percent. Nobody these days is able to ignore Google. And Google eats up a whole lot of electricity. By its own calculations, a search query on its platform emits 0.2 grams of CO2. In June 2021, Google received almost 12 billion search queries in the USA alone – the equivalent of 2,400 tons of CO2 emissions. Although Internet use is not one of the biggest climate killers, it does contribute a large share to CO2 pollution – and the trend is rising.

Christian Kroll wants to change that with Ecosia. He founded the platform in 2009. The basic idea is to plant trees all over the world with the revenues from the advertising business.

Ecosia’s search engine algorithm is based on Bing. Using their model, Kroll’s team have been able to plant more than 140 million trees to date – for example in Indonesia, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Kenya and Colombia. And Ecosia is strengthening local communities in the process. In addition, the search engine offsets its own CO2 emissions from search queries with self-financed solar power. This even makes the company CO2-negative, since it feeds its green electricity into the public grid.

Our brief survey shows that yourbook.shop, Resonate and Ecosia all offer a fair alternative to the big digital corporations.

They are not being forced to their knees. But no-one really wants to do that. But it’s hard to make a living from your own business model. That’s why people join forces. That’s why people set up cooperatives or improve their carbon footprint.

In the end, it’s not just the consumer who decides, but also the producer. May the clicks be with them.

You might also be interested in this: How to found a cooperative in the field of culture? Moritz Malsch from Lettrétage explains.

What is the best legal form for solidarity-based, public welfare-oriented and sustainable business projects?

Economist Elisabeth Voß and lawyer Rupay Dahm provide tips and information in CCB Magazine.

Photos © Jens Thomas

Find workspaces, studios, project partners, equipment and knowhow on Creative City Berlin‘s marketplace!

www.creativecity.berlin

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Quick bucks or sustainable ­investment?

Economy

Creative professionals and investors in discussion at the Investors Lab of the Berlin Kreativwirtschaftsberatung.

Photo © Alexander Rentsch

How and under what circumstances is venture capital worthwhile for sustainable entrepreneurship? Is this the end of sustainability or the beginning of a new era?

We talked about this with Juliane Schulze from Media Deals, who has been researching venture capital in the creative industries for years.

Interview: Jens Thomas

Juliane Schulze is the initiator of create.sustain.invest and a board member of Media Deals, a European investor network that also conducts studies on key topics in venture financing. She has also provided expert support for the Invest in Creativity – Investors Lab Berlin program run by Kreativ­ wirtschaftsberatung, which brings together investors and creative companies.

Photo © Alexander Rentsch

CCB Magazine: Ms. Schulze, many creative companies grow slowly. How do fast venture capital and moderate, “sustainable” growth fit together?

Juliane Schulze: Not very well! Most venture capitalists (VCs) are more interested in investing in companies with high growth potential. They are looking for exponential growth.

This type of investor expects an enormously high return in a short period of time, which creative companies often can’t generate at all – even if they wanted to.

You published a study on VC entitled ’Taking the pulse of investors. Traditional and alternative finance sources in financing the creative industries’. What are its findings?

The key findings for creative professionals are that private and venture capital do flow into the creative industries. However, investors’ investment goals vary widely. For example, private investors preferred software and computer services first and foremost, followed by video and online games, with advertising in third place. For lenders, such as banks, software and computer services also ranked high, followed by the film industry and publishing. Among crowdfunders, preferences were somewhat different, with donation, lending and investment platforms identifying the best investment prospects for video, games and software companies in particular. Basically, it can be said that new technologies are key to investors’ interest in the creative industries.

What do creative entrepreneurs need to keep in mind when they apply for VC? One of the most important questions every entrepreneur should ask themselves from the beginning is which investors are right for them: Is it crowdfunders, with whose help I can finance my products through clever pre-sales and retain them as fans or even a community? Or is it business angels, who tend to invest smaller sums from their own pockets in young companies, but who then want to get involved and work with the management team? Or is it venture capital funds that collect money from other investors and put large sums into scalable companies from a purely capital investment point of view? These VCs create enormous growth pressure through their profit expectations, which can also be problematic for companies.

To what extent do investors have an interest in investing in sustainable, i.e. ecological or fair-social, corporate concepts? Or does the post-growth thinking of many creative thinkers put the brakes on their willingness to invest?

More and more investors are showing an interest in sustainable business ideas. We are now even seeing the first few investors to specialize in green entrepreneurship – including VNT Management, eCapital and Sirius. However, the focus here is clearly on renewable energies, power electronics, energy saving or resource-saving processes, which are measured in terms of quick exit proceeds. At the same time, this shows that investors do care about what companies they invest in. Movements such as MeToo, Fridays for Future or the Paris Climate Agreement as well as the European Green Deal

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Currently, the desire for co-­ determination on the part of investors and the creative’s fear of losing control are at odds with each other.

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have contributed to a new social climate in which investors also operate now. On the other hand, many investors still believe that the creative industry is a high-risk zone and that only creative lifestyle companies exist. It is true that many companies in the creative industries have limited growth or aspirations, but they often act in a more entrepreneurial way than they think. Investors simply lack the knowledge of the value and exploitation chains within the creative industries, so they miss out on interesting investment opportunities. That’s why we also need to address the expectations of both sides. At the moment, the desire for co-determination on the part of investors and the creative’s fear of losing control are at odds with each other.

But that means that VC is not the right thing for sustainable creative companies.

Let’s put it like this. The majority of VCs are about blockbuster successes that only occur – if at all – at a late stage of a company’s maturity. But the bulk of people in the creative industry are freelancers and micro-entrepreneurs – and in many cases people with a sustainable business idea who have little interest in scaling up. However, smaller companies with solid growth and a focus on the core business or, ideally, sustainable business concepts can be very interesting for angel investors who invest their private capital, know-how and professional networks in young companies, helping them to become successful in the market. If this success later translates into company growth that becomes attractive to VCs, angel investors can sell their shares to these funds. The traditional investment steps adapt to the maturity phases of the companies, so to speak: Platform financing especially in the important test phase before market launch can be the best choice for testing the validity of the products or projects and, if necessary, for developing them as closely as possible to the market and with feedback from users. The key is to find capital providers who are actually a fit for you at each stage in the company’s development.

Where do you find venture capitalists who are fit for a sustainable business project?

Angel investors are primarily organized in local, national and European associations. Every metropolis has its business angels clubs, including Berlin. These clubs invite interesting companies to pitches where the entrepreneurs can give presentations of themselves and their companies. VCs have also organized themselves in a similar way, nationally and also across Europe. So there is no getting around thorough research. Besides, the best way to find suitable investors is through recommendations, by researching comparable companies in which investments have already been made – or, of course, at industry events such as trade fairs, markets and festivals.

Can you give an example where a sustainable company from the creative industries has successfully raised private capital?

Let’s take the Hamburg-based start-up Tutaka. Tutaka offers sustainably produced alternatives to many plastic products, such as in hotels and restaurants, or other disposable items

in the events sector – great design meets sustainable pro­ ducts, from felt slippers in hotel rooms to cardboard tents for festivals. In the spring of 2019, Tutaka launched a digital marketplace prototype that quickly generated huge demand.

To make sustainable shopping even easier for their business customers, the company developed the marketplace including product testing in mid-2020 and started implementing an e-commerce system. The founders successfully raised a six-figure sum for this in a seed investment round. But so far there have been very few stories like this.

To what extent is there a danger that the belief in permanent growth will undermine the idea of sustainability? Economists like Niko Paech are arguing for a new understanding of economics that focuses on reducing consumption. Many creative people are resisting commercialization. Zarah Bruhn, founder of Social-Bee, is calling for a new measurement formula for green investments based on “impact maximization” rather than profit maximization.

Of course, you have to ask how much more growth our planet can take. That is a fundamental question. But the business model of investors is still based on companies they have invested in generating an attractive return, which they can reinvest in other interesting companies. This return is achieved not least through strong growth. Resolving this systemic conflict may take some time. But investors are already often aware of their responsibility in shaping our future. I suspect, though, that in the coming years we will, to begin with, fall for the fallacy that growth can be perpetually green or sustainable. At some point, rebound effects will set in and we will

The VCs are all about blockbuster successes. But most creatives are free­ lancers and micro-­ entrepreneurs who have little interest in scaling up.

realize – stop! We’re going to lose the emissions savings we have gained if we carry on clinging to our belief in permanent growth, even if it now looks a bit different.

What role can policymakers play? Should they be promoting and supporting sustainable entrepreneurship? The new German government wants to strengthen sustainable companies. Do we need new programs or funds, and if so, which?

Yes, policymakers must promote a sustainable society, that’s for sure. That could take the form of tax breaks for sustain­ able business performance. But there also need to be special funds that invest in sustainable, creative-economy projects.

As you know, sustainable funds are still a niche. So far, they have a market share of around three percent of total assets in mutual funds. But here, too, something is happening. In the area of film financing, for example, the Gender Equality and Diversity Media Fund is investing in a fund for gender equality and diversity in the cinema industry. It is also creating a new quality label to ensure that all minorities in the media industry are protected at the various stages of a film’s production.

Other funds that invest in sustainable business ideas tend to be sectoral or environmental. There is still a lot of room for improvement here. At Media Deals we are trying to build solid bridges between the various sides for this. There needs to be clarity about where investment opportunities are on offer.

Let’s not forget that the policy of punitive interest rates is leading to greater openness on the part of many financiers. We need to take advantage of that. Industry and investors are still largely unaware of the many success stories in the creative industries. That’s why we need to collect reliable data and make it available to everyone. We can only make progress by talking together. We need to build trust.

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More and more investors are ­showing interest in sustainable business ideas. Investors care about what companies they invest in. ­Movements like MeToo and Fridays for Future or the Paris Climate ­Agreement have contributed to a new social climate.

You might also be interested in this: The coalition has cleared the way for a new legal form for responsibly owned companies – the Purpose Foundation from Basle and Berlin has been working on this for years: It wants to prevent concentrations of power and advises companies on alternative ownership concepts. Find out what it’s all about in CCB Magazine.

Photo © Purpose

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Is crowdfunding the solution?

Economy

© Svenja Kopyciok

Shai Hoffmann has been running one crowdfunding campaign after another for years to develop sustainable concepts for society. But is crowdfunding also sustainable as a form of financing? We take stock.

by Shai Hoffmann, crowdfunding coach and democracy activist

So crowdfunding has a lot to do with sustainability. On platforms like Startnext, it feels like every second project has a sustainable impact – and that’s because the creators don’t just want to sell people something; it’s about finding supporters for a cause. That doesn’t mean that crowdfunding is sustainable per se. For example, there was once a campaign in which a car lobbyist wanted to use crowdfunding to campaign against 30 km/h speed limits. As a rule, however, these are isolated examples; in the end, the good ideas usually prevail.

There are plenty of examples. The zero-waste grocery stores, which make shopping plastic-packaging-free, achieved their growth through crowdfunding. Instead of the targeted 45,000 euros, 108,915 euros were collected in the end – and now there are many zero-waste grocery stores nationwide. The problem underlying this is clear. With 220.5 kg of packaging waste produced per capita, Germany is at the top of the league in Europe. The European average is “only” 167.3 kg. 63 percent of fruit and vegetables are sold pre-packaged, and a total of over 18 million tons of packaging waste is produced in Germany each year. Another example are the companies einhorn and Soulbottles. Both were able to use crowdfunding to build their businesses. einhorn reignited the asset-ownership debate and raised the question of how companies need to be positioned in the future so that people in the companies work well and enjoy their work. Soulbottles produce sustainable, customized bottles made of glass to prevent plastic waste –

as more than 250,000 tons of plastic waste are estimated to be floating in the oceans worldwide. And consumers help decide the design during production. This means that crowdfunding isn’t just bringing sustainable ideas to the world but you can also get an idea of who likes your idea and who is getting involved and contributing. And I am convinced that something you are passionate about is ultimately going to be the most convincing. You don’t need a marketing department for that. All it takes is you, your courage, your determination and your will to change things.

But is crowdfunding also sustainable as a form of financing?

Under certain circumstances, yes. First of all, it has to be said that only very few people can make a living from a crowdfunding campaign: The average value of a successful campaign in Germany is around 8,000 euros. That’s not enough to pay either yourself or any staff. You might even say that this is where self-exploitation begins. But I think that a change in awareness is taking place here. Many people are now making sure that their own campaign work is financed. Take me for example. I’ve been able to raise more than 100,000 euros from some of my campaigns and from that I could pay for the project as well as paying myself and the campaign staff.

But crowdfunding shouldn’t be reduced to purely a form of financing. Crowdfunding gives projects a push start. It is also often used to supplement existing financing structures – for example, it can be used to finance new magazine series, individual festivals or individual film productions. And one trend gives me hope – foundations and the larger banks have now also recognized the potential of crowdfunding. They say we think it’s good, we’ll give you a loan without business plans and all that bureaucracy. This is where things need to move forward. Funding structures could also be adapted to this, because successful crowdfunding proves that the idea resonates. For the future, I would like to see more courage, including in the institutions. And I am firmly convinced that you can achieve a lot with good, creative ideas and a gripping story.

Dare to do new things, it’s like a love affair! Let’s make Berlin and the world greener, more colorful and more tolerant. This will make not only the city more livable, but life as well.

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Let me introduce myself. I am Shai Hoffmann, social entrepreneur, speaker, moderator and activist. I’m active in promoting social issues and set up projects in sustainability, digitalization, politics and society – and there’s one thing I use more than anything, and that’s crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is a way for me to realize my ideas. You set up a campaign and don’t need to fill out annoying application forms or stand in line somewhere, you just do it. And once you’ve done one or two crowdfunding campaigns, you know how it goes. I now have over ten campaigns behind me. For example, I launched Karma Classics, a sustainable, fairly produced alternative to Converse Chucks that you can also make yourself. Then, two weeks before the 2017 federal election, I travelled across Germany with what I called the “Meeting Bus” so that I could get into conversation with people on the ground. Armed with just coffee and snacks, a few chairs, tables and a whole lot of courage and energy, we set ourselves up in local market squares and asked people about the things that concerned them. At the moment I am also producing Israeli-Palestinian educational videos to break down binary thinking about the Middle East conflict and help people learn to live with contradictions.

Because ignorance often leads to anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim resentment – not infrequently even among teachers. For me, encouraging discourse here has something to do with a sustainable and democratic society. And you can’t separate the two. A functioning democracy begins with exchange and coexistence. There can only be a sustainable society if our goals are socially and ecologically sustainable, if people, nature and the environment are not harmed.

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“It’s nonsense to digitalize everything”

© Felix Noak

Tilman Santarius is Professor of Digitalization and Socio-Ecological Transformation at the Technical University of Berlin (TU). He has been researching digitalization and sustainability for years. We wanted to know from him how ecological, social and digital sustainability are interrelated and what role creative professionals play in this process.

Interview: Jens Thomas

Tilman Santarius has been Professor of Socio-Ecological Transformation and Sustainable Digitalization at Techni­sche Universität Berlin and the Einstein Center Digital Futures since 2017. He is a volunteer member of the supervisory board of Greenpeace Germany. His most recent book is “Smarte grüne Welt? Digitalisierung zwischen Überwachung, Konsum und Nachhaltigkeit”.

CCB Magazine: Mr. Santarius, we have a new federal government. Sustainability and digitalization are at the top of the agenda. In which area do you place more hope, in digitalization or in sustainability?

Tilman Santarius: We’ll see what the new coalition does with this. In general, I’m hoping for more in the area of sustain­ ability. We can’t go on living the way we have been, as all the scientific reports and now even common sense are telling us.

Digitalization, on the other hand, is not a must. It’s something we can afford as a society because it makes a lot of things easier. But whether we will be able to survive on this planet in the future does not depend on digitalization. That is for us to decide as people, through our lifestyle.

It is striking that all parties agree that digitalization and sustainability are linked to a belief in growth. Isn’t there a contradiction there?

Absolutely. Hardly any party, not even the Greens, is saying that we need to slow down and can’t just keep growing. But if we want to achieve the 1.5-degree target of the Paris Climate Agreement, we need a different economic model. And digitization is pretty much fueling the misconception that we can keep on growing. But the focus must not be on increasing efficiency. We need a smarter and reduced use of resources.

And that means?

Stefan Lange and I talk in our book ’Smarte grüne Welt?’ about “soft digitalization,” and what that means is that it’s nonsense to digitize or digitalize everything. Artificial intelligence is not needed everywhere. We need to slow down in many areas, with soft, smart, selective digitalization in those areas where it makes sense and where it benefits society. Ten percent of global electricity consumption is already attributable to the Internet. And it won’t stop at the power problem. For example, the ten billion smartphones produced worldwide since the introduction of the first ­i­Phone in 2007 consume around 260,000 tons of aluminium. The good thing is that the Internet and digitalization are enabling greater networking and thus more efficient work processes and cooperation. In the future, the production of goods could be located much closer to consumers, thus eliminating transport routes and reducing emissions of climate-damaging gases. But that won’t happen automatically. The goal must now be to use active political measures to make digitalization useful for the climate.

Now let’s get specific. How can we do that?

At the national level, we first need a home office law to enable more flexible working and a reduction in traffic. The Berlin Institute for Future Studies and Technology Assessment, for example, has calculated that just one home office day in Germany can save 1.6 million tons of CO2 emissions per year.

Secondly, we need EU design guidelines for information and communications technology products, i.e. for smartphones, laptops, cell phones, etc., but also for data centers. These must stipulate that certain energy standards must be met – here, attention must be paid to generating as little data as possible. Third, the devices must be manufactured sustainably. They must be repairable, more durable and fairly

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Digitalization is not a must, sustain­ability is.

Whether we will be able to survive on this planet in the future does not depend on digitalization. We decide that through our lifestyle.

Special Digitalization

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Cultural actors are and will ­remain the impulse generators.

They just have to make sure that they don’t lose out in the end. And we can only achieve ecological and social transformation if everyone pulls together.

manufactured. So it’s also about hardware sufficiency. This also includes longer warranty obligations for products, takeback obligations and a “right to repair” from suppliers to reduce excess consumption, but also – very importantly – an additional software sufficiency. Companies must regularly provide free updates to extend the service life of their products and the services they offer to the maxi­mum. And fourth, policymakers should flank all of this with general framework conditions, such as raising eco-taxes or, for example, reforming monopoly law, so that tomorrow’s digital solutions do not come from Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Many of the sustainable solutions come from the cultural and creative industries. How do digitalization and sustainability interact here? Are the two mutually dependent or ultimately mutually exclusive?

You have to look at the individual industries to find out. Let’s take the events sector. As far as the sustainability impact is concerned, the journey to and from the event is the most important factor. There’s little you can do about that at first, unless you cancel all the concerts, which no one can want to do. But you can ask how many events need to have live attendance, given the abundance of events. The corona crisis has showed vividly how cutting down road traffic by holding meetings on Zoom benefits the climate. At the peak of the corona crisis, emissions in Germany were down by 26 percent, largely due to a 50 to 80 percent drop in traffic. True, there was also a 120 percent increase in videoconferencing. But on balance, that causes far fewer emissions than airplanes or other forms of mobility: Just zooming once instead of taking

the train from Munich to Hamburg makes a 90 percent saving in greenhouse gases. Another example is the book trade, where many believe that switching from paper to digital is inherently more sustainable. This is a misconception. Building and operating Kindles or iPads consumes so much energy and raw materials that it only pays off after around 50 books have been downloaded. On top of reading online come book sales, which have barely declined for years – so it’s not as if digital publications are simply replacing print products. And the main problem remains streaming. Again, people think that by eliminating physical products – such as the CD, sales of which plummeted 80 percent between 2001 and 2020 – something is gained ecologically. But we are streaming more and more. Streaming movies is one of the most energy-intensive digital services of all. It now already accounts for 60 to 70 percent of global data streams.

What solutions do you see here?

We need to give an edge to small, sustainable providers and make them more discoverable on the web. For example, we are currently working on a new Green Assumption Assistant, which is created on the Ecosia platform and suggests alternative, sustainable products.

But you can’t compete with the big corporations and platforms. Platforms like Google, Amazon or Facebook work so well because everything is so efficient, convenient and simple. In the end, isn’t the problem one of social sustainability? Isn’t it a question of justice?

It’s about both, an ecological problem and a social one. The big platforms not only disregard ecological standards. They

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are also unsustainable in social terms. It’s well known that artists earn hardly anything on Spotify. They would only get more money if click-through rates increased a thousandfold – which in turn is highly unecological. Data capitalism today is based on the multiplication of data, which is not exhaustible, in contrast to the old industrial capitalism, which was based on the wearing out of physical products – oil, coal, steel.

In their book “Das Digital”, authors Thomas Ramge and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger call for a new “progressive data-sharing obligation.” What they mean by this is that data giants like Google should share their data with competitors when they reach a certain market share, for example ten percent. Is that the solution?

In social terms, yes. Data sharing can be a way to break the market power of the few. I also welcome the fact that the Digital Markets Act is currently being negotiated at EU level to curb the power of large digital corporations. On the other hand, not every form of data decentralization is sustain­ able from an environmental perspective. Take the example of blockchain and Bitcoin. It is a completely insane idea of some hardcore blockchain fans that we could create a sustainable economy with the broad application of blockchain technology. Bitcoin provides an extreme example of this. A single calculation of a Bitcoin block is about 10,000 times as energy intensive as a credit card transaction. It would be the ruin of the planet if the entire economy were based on Bitcoin-like blockchain applications. Another example is the application of Artificial Intelligence. AI-based systems can help better coordinate distributed energy system components – power generators, consumers, storage – in smart grids and optimize grid utilization through pattern recognition on plant control data. But the best AI-based optimization of the energy system is of little use if we don’t at the same time make rapid advances in the expansion of renewable energies. Combining the ecologi­cal with the social remains a Herculean task.

Mr. Santarius, if we were to conduct this interview ten years from now, will the German government have achieved the 1.5-degree target set by the ­Paris Agreement? And what contribution can cultural players make to a sustainable and digital society?

Achieving the 1.5-degree target will require a courageous policy in the long term and so depends not only on the new German government – which, it has to be said, urgently needs to set a different course if it is to succeed at all. Cultural actors are and will remain the driving force. They sometimes have groundbreaking ideas. They just have to make sure that they don’t ultimately fall by the wayside. And we can only achieve ecological and social transformation if everyone pulls together. Policymakers set the guidelines. And users need to be careful with data-intensive applications, especially video streaming. Streaming video on the streetcar uses so much energy that there’s no benefit anymore to not taking your car.

But who knows, maybe in ten years we’ll have car-free city centers. That would be the good news.

You might also be interested in this: From analog to digital: You want to know how to plan and implement a festival sustainably? Read the interview with Fuchs & Hirsch.

Avatarization, across the m ­ eta-verse, and flying only on the net – how sustain­able is the new digital post-­ corona world?

Streaming is generally regarded as an ecological alternative, but that’s a mistake. How damaging to the ­ limate is streaming? Is it the new smoking? c

Photos © Fuchs & Hirsch / © Jens Thomas / © Most Wanted

What does a sustainable ­society look like?

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This is the city talking.

Statements

For me, a sus­ tainable society is about inclusion.

I developed the app Greta so that blind and deaf people can go to the movie theater too. I call it ‘movies for all’. My goal is to find an entrepreneurial solution to social problems.”

Seneit Debese, Greta & Starks

© Philip Nürnberger

For me, sustain­ ability means that we have to think of the economy and society in a completely new way. © Jan Pries

The economy is not limited to production and sca­ ling up. It’s about the question of what goes into creating a ‘we’. And I have been working on this ‘we’ for years. I put free building instructions for creating furniture for people on social welfare online. I am building the smallest apartment in Germany, one that everyone can afford. We have to leave this world in a condition for our descendants to be able to live in it too.”

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Van Bo Le-Mentzel, architect and activist

For me, sustain­ ability means an ecological and socially just world.

That’s why I petitioned for a new supply chain law in 2018 to get a legal framework for protecting the environment and human rights along global supply chains. Now there is such a law. It does have some loopholes. But things are moving.”

Lisa Jaspers, fashion activist and CEO of Folkdays

© Jens Thomas

For me, sustain­ ability starts with an awareness of values.

© Kristoffer Schwetje

© Plan A

Anna Theil, Studio Für Morgen

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We develop archi­ tecture and design concepts for humani­ tarian and social ­purposes.

Our goal is to create a decarbon­ ized and sustainable economy by digital means.

Statements

We advise creatives on this and hold what we call values workshops. The thing is, founders and crea­ tives often develop products that are sustainable, but they talk far too little about the values associated with them and their own needs. This is where we come in and advise those who are working on a sustainable society for tomorrow.”

That’s why, together with Nathan Bonnisseau I founded the start-up Plan A. We were the first to have developed software that allows companies to monitor and reduce their emissions while improving their ESG performance at the same time. With this they become pioneers of sustainable transformation. Because there is no plan B.” Lubomila Jordanova, Plan A

Because tomorrow’s world urgently needs new solutions, especially products, services and places that are socially, ecologically and economically sustainable. To this end, we support UN organizations, NGOs, municipalities, foundations and companies in their innovation and transformation projects – directly in crisis regions and often in challenging situations.”

Daniel Kerber, Morethanshelters

© Christian Klant

© Studio Good

Berlin needs ­affordable produc­ tion and presentation space.

We work with ­companies that do good, whose ethical principles we share, value and want to support.

Many of our clients are not for-profit companies. We mostly work for cultural or scientific organizations – and for aid organizations. This is the only way to advance a sustainable society.”

That’s what we look after. We operate with an interdisciplinary team at the interface between the administration, the independent scene and the public good oriented real estate industry. We acquire spaces, rent them out and develop locations, from conception to building and cultural inspection right through to the involvement of scene representatives and public relations. The goal is to create an infrastructure for Berlin’s art and culture scene that will last.”

Tatjana Kaube, Kulturraum Berlin

Linnart Unger, Studio GOOD

© Kristoffer Schwetje

If we want a ­sustainable ­society, we must ­support those who are working to achieve it.

As a social entrepreneurship organization, we give social entrepreneurs a voice. Our network already has over 800 members. We operate at the interface of social entrepreneurship and policymaking. We want everyone to benefit equally from progress.”

Markus Sauerhammer, Send e. V.

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© privat

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And to finish, a big thank you to all our ­participants and partners!

Aktionsnetzwerk Nachhaltigkeit • C2C NGO • circular.fashion • clubliebe e. V. • futurestrategy • Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC) • Green Future Club • greenlab • Internationales Design Zentrum Berlin (IDZ) • Kulturstiftung des Bundes • Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes in Berlin GmbH • media:net berlinbrandenburg • Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg • Netzwerk Nachhaltigkeit in Kunst und Kultur e. V. (2N2K) • Potsdam-Institut für Klimafolgenforschung (PIK) • Projekt Zukunft • Rat für Nachhaltige Entwicklung • Senats­verwaltung für Kultur und Europa • Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz • sustainable natives • weißensee kunsthochschule berlin • As well as all the labels, networks and cultural actors whose stories you can read on Creative City Berlin.

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We provide expert advice, information and networking opportunities for cultural and creative professionals in Berlin across all sectors and creative industries – supporting everyone from artists to start-ups.

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