A Story of Progress: Reclaiming the Runways | Proof That Change Is Possible

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Whenever Felix Koch heads to Berlin to see family and friends, or for work, there’s one place he’s sure to visit — Tempelhofer Feld, a 953-acre decommissioned airfield just 15 minutes from the city center that is now an expanse of urban parkland.

“You see groups of Indian and Pakistani folks playing cricket, and in my 40 years in Germany I’ve never seen anyone play cricket anywhere. You see groups of elderly women on rollerskates. There’s a fruit and vegetable garden at one end that the public can get involved in. And, of course, there are lots of cyclists and runners, and people with kites, as well as protected birds and trees,” says Koch, who lives near the city of Cologne, around six hours away from Berlin.

For Koch, Tempelhofer Feld, which is the German capital’s largest open space, is a place where he can get in the right headspace to do virtual sessions with his therapist. It’s also where he can sit down and map out client strategies for his corporate leadership consultancy.

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“It’s a powerful space. You can see for miles and you experience the city in a different way, because you are not blocked in by houses and cars and concrete […] And seeing other people use the space makes you more connected as a community.”

Yet perhaps the most powerful aspect of Tempelhofer Feld is its past. Its military connections date back to the 1700s, and in the 1800s it was the scene of aviation experiments that ended in tragedy, but its role in more recent times has ensured that the park will be etched in Berlin’s history forever.

Before World War Two, Tempelhofer Feld was the site of a prison camp run by senior Nazi officials and the regime’s Gestapo secret police. By 1940, with the war in full swing, thousands of laborers were forced to live on the site in makeshift barracks to assemble dive bomber planes.

In 1948, with the Cold War in its infancy, Tempelhofer became the center of the blockade of West Berlin, when Soviet troops blocked access routes, leaving over two million people cut off from supplies until Western Allies landed plans in Berlin airports — Tempelhofer being the main one. Then, in the 1950s, Eastern European refugees entering Berlin were flown out to West Germany via Tempelhofer.

The airfield was then closed from 1970 to 1985, and closed completely in 2008. While the land caught the eye of many developers, it was reopened in 2010 by the Berlin Senate as a city park. Residents petitioned and then voted in 2014 to preserve the space completely for public use, and not for state, residential or commercial purposes.

“Berlin isn’t famous for huge parks, so it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to say, ‘there’s a lot of historical significance — let’s not develop it. Let’s leave it as a space that people can reclaim and make their own, where people can connect, and not just feel like they’re rushing from one end to the next, but they’re actually going for a walk in a different kind of frame of mind,’” says Koch.

Tempelhofer Feld highlights a question that many urban governments and citizens are faced with: What happens to an airport once planes no longer fly out of it? There are thought to be more than 1,000 abandoned airports in the U.S., 750 abandoned, on-hold, or underutilized ones in Europe, and a significant number in Asia and South America, too.

Combine this with the decline in the presence of green spaces in urban areas and it’s clear why residents feel strongly about protecting such sites from commercial development. For example, 75 percent of the 344 cities analyzed by Husqvarna Group in 2024 have seen a reduction in green spaces, with a total loss of around 61 million square miles of green space recorded across those cities, largely due to construction and urban expansion.

Yet, according to the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, up to 43,000 premature deaths a year in Europe could be prevented if they achieved the World Health Organization recommendation that all residents should have at least 1.2 acres of green space at least 1,000 feet from their home.

That’s why success stories of spaces like Tempelhofer Feld being preserved for both the public and the environment are so significant. Other notable airport conversions include Floyd Bennett Field, New York City’s first municipal airport, which later became a World War Two air station. Today the area is home to over 1,300 acres of grassland, with visitors able to take part in activities like cycling, archery, gardening, fishing, bird watching, ice skating and hockey.

Meanwhile, Xuhui Runway Park in Shanghai stands on the site of the Chinese city’s only civilian airport until 1949, as part of an effort to increase its park network to 2,000 by 2035.

Over in London, Hanworth Air Park was a hub for aircraft manufacturing during World Wars One and Two, and became a public space in 1949. The 150-acre site through which the Longford River runs is now not only home to a number of local sports clubs and the Hanworth Air Park Model Flying Club, but is also a key nesting ground for skylarks.

In an effort to make the park appealing to more visitors, the local council has been consulting with residents on what facilities it should both implement and improve. Now, a cafe is in the works, alongside increased parking spaces (with space for electric vehicles) and improved lighting.

The key, says Councillor Tom Bruce from the London Borough of Hounslow, which is responsible for Hanworth Air Park, is how to retain the park’s current users while encouraging new and more diverse groups to make use of the park too.

“We have been talking to people in the local area, particularly people who don’t use it, to understand what could be there that isn’t,” says Bruce. “It needs to be a shared understanding of what is important to people, and seeing what is possible. You get a whole range of different ideas. People want fun and wacky and very expensive stuff, and while we want to do as much as possible, we have to bring that down into what’s realistic, what’s reasonable, and what’s going to deliver something to the majority.”

While new homes are at a premium in London — with more than 335,000 Londoners on waiting lists for social housing — Bruce is clear that it’s a priority to keep Hanworth Air Park as a green public space.

“This is very much a green space. [Property development] is not something we’d be entertaining. That’s not what we want to do with this area at all,” he says.

Yet converting defunct air fields into public spaces isn’t always straightforward, and can be expensive, especially on manufacturing and maintenance sites where oil and chemicals may have leaked into the ground.

Professor Lily Baum Pollans of City University New York has a PhD in city planning and has worked in brownfield redevelopment. While Pollans is an advocate of publicly managed redevelopments to meet cities’ needs for green spaces, she makes the point that the complexities of sites like airfields can benefit from private partners.

“These sites are often contaminated, and even a commercial redevelopment that’s just going to make market rate housing is going to have to remediate the soil, and so that in itself could be beneficial if the site is contaminated and spreading contaminants into other areas,” Pollans explains.

“Those are often cases where partnerships are a great option, where you can bring in some private capital, but you have accountability to a public body and a value system that moves beyond just profit. The sky’s the limit when you have the right set of partners.”

Back in Berlin, the city’s Senate has run a competition to unearth new ideas for the development of Tempelhofer Feld, with the winners including proposals for installing a water slide, a library and autonomous vehicles. Yet for Koch, one of the most important features of Tempelhofer Feld is its connection to Germany’s difficult and dark times, and the ability to visit the park with his three young children and bring that history to life.

“My wife is Jewish and Russian, so it’s an opportunity to talk to the kids about the Nazis and the Holocaust. The backdrop to all of this is that the [far-right political group] AfG is rising in Germany, and you have people forgetting about what happened, and the generation that experienced it all is dying out,” Koch says.

“So how do you keep those memories alive? How do you make sure people realize what happened and how it went? That’s the major battle.”

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