GoKawiilIn 1914 Hamburg built a park for people to use rather than admire, and more than a century later that is still what it is.
When I moved to Hamburg in 2018, I bought a bike in my first week. After that, almost every day after work, I was just jumping on it and cycling around the city without any direction. That is how I discovered places like Niendorfer Gehege, Haynspark and the Stadtpark.
The first time I ended up in the Stadtpark, the thing that struck me was the amount of trees. I was cycling through the city and suddenly I found myself in a wood. Then came the Planetarium with its red bricks, and the huge lawn in front of it, and I was amazed by the size of the whole park.
Every big city has its own city park. Central Park in New York, Hyde Park in London, the Englischer Garten in Munich, the Tiergarten in Berlin. Those are the ones that come to mind. The Stadtpark is smaller than all of them and almost nobody outside Hamburg knows about it. But it was planned from the start around what people would do in it, rather than only around how it would look, and more than a hundred years later it still works that way. After living next to it for years, I think that matters more than any ranking by hectares.
The park is not really that far from the city centre. So a lot of people live close enough to just walk in. A year later, when I needed to move out of my loud neighbourhood, the park had a big impact on my decision about where to go. And living there also showed me that the park was not just a huge lawn and a Planetarium. It is a giant complex for recreational activities.
The lawn
The Stadtpark opened in 1914 and was designed by Fritz Schumacher, with the main purpose of active use instead of quiet strolling. It was built on 149 hectares, close to the districts where the working class was crowded in. Small flats, not much free time. The park was supposed to be the place they actually did things.
The numbers also show it worked. On a sunny weekend more than 200.000 people come to the park, which is around 10 percent of the whole city.
That intention is still there when you look at the lawn. It is a huge open space that gives people room to do whatever they want. A couple of sections of it are marked as grill areas, with special bins for the used coals.
If you visit this area on a sunny weekend, you see how diverse this space is. And when I say diverse, I do not only mean the activities. It is also the people. Sometimes I joke with my friends that there are so many nationalities on this lawn that it looks like the United Nations assembly. In most cases a group takes some space on the lawn, bringing their own mat and their own food. Some have already started grilling while the others are playing games. There were games I saw for the first time in this park, like Spikeball, Flunkyball, Boule and Kubb.
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