If you're working on improving care and maintenance, you're drilling into a thick board.

The decline in skilled personnel and budgetary resources for this area began, at least in the West, as early as the 1970s and increased significantly in the 1990s and 2000s. For West Berlin, for example, Förster calculated a decline of 8% in nursing staff from 1976 to 1985; especially among trained specialists.

Around 2000, the reduction in some Berlin districts then amounted to up to 50% compared with the required personnel; the trend is continuing to fall. This happened nationwide sometimes more, sometimes less (Förster, Ulrich 1985: Pflege und Unterhaltung öffentlicher Grünanlagen. In: Das Gartenamt 34, H. 4, p.301 ff.). This has not changed much until today.

At the same time, the number of green spaces is constantly increasing, as are the demands on them. The discrepancy between the demands on the performance of green spaces and the willingness to provide the necessary personnel and budgetary resources is great, as is the lack of understanding of the connections.

This cannot only be due to cost-cutting constraints; the causes are to be sought deeper. One significant factor is the low regard in which gardening is held. For many years it was a popular means of replacing skilled workers with ABM workers. All those who could not be placed elsewhere were sent to the green spaces. According to the motto: Exercise in the fresh air is good for you, and a little gardening goes by itself (says my employment office). But it's not for nothing that gardening and landscaping is a three-year apprenticeship that consists of more than picking up trash and sweeping leaves. It was not uncommon for unskilled workers to cause serious damage, for example when pruning trees.

After this path was abandoned for many reasons, maintenance was then often, and to this day increasingly, contracted out. However, often with only one-year contracts, although it is actually known that it takes at least one vegetation period to really get to know a green space. And also in the companies, especially the low-priced ones, which are then taken, there is a lack of skilled workers, in the offices in turn of personnel who could control. In the end, one often heard that the citizens should fix it by helping out. Anyone can do that...

It's probably also because the gardening profession is old-fashioned. It can only be rationalised and modernised to a limited extent. The potential for this has usually long been exhausted by the authorities. Even machines only help to a certain extent. Much of the work remains painstaking manual labour, coupled with practical experience. And much is experiential knowledge that has to be acquired in practice over years and cannot be taught in crash courses. According to Richard Sennett, the demands on today's employees are completely different, the flexible person is in demand. Local and professional mobility, constant new beginnings and thus the worthlessness of experience are characteristic (Sennett, Richard 1998: Der flexible Mensch. The Culture of the New Capitalism. Berlin).

Good gardeners are therefore completely "unfashionable". Yet they have knowledge that has grown out of many years of experience and observation, and a precise knowledge of local conditions, of "their" park, in which they have been working for many years. Where this is still the case, as in Munich, in the Düsseldorf Hofgarten and in the grounds of the various foundations, the added value that results is clearly visible.

And our profession itself is not entirely innocent of the plight. Those who were trained in the 1970s and 1980s wanted to save the world with the help of landscape planning. Building it was more important than the staffing shortages in nursing, which were largely arrogantly ignored. They were just the old-fashioned gardeners . . .

It is only in recent years that there is a better understanding that planning and design end up in objects that need to be maintained, i.e. care is needed to achieve the desired effect for the population as well as for the natural balance.

In the GALK this was of course quite different, again and again reminded. Argumentation aids were worked out, which sometimes even fell on fertile ground. At the beginning of the 2010s, it was a glimmer of hope for me in the dark Berlin valley when Frankfurt/M. succeeded in getting one(!) new employee approved for the new harbor park, while elsewhere cutbacks continued.

Even when the White Paper "Green in the City" was being drafted, the importance of maintenance had to be promoted again and again. It should be obvious that all investments are a waste of money if the object decays immediately after completion. Fortunately, the German Association of Cities has got the message. The first signs of hope are also visible on the horizon.

Now ways still have to be found how the federal government can provide the municipalities, especially the distressed ones, with the necessary funds earmarked (!) for this purpose. If this requires another constitutional amendment, as in education, then it's worth it. In this way, the incompetent politicians, who unfortunately still often exist, could then also be forced to their happiness for the benefit of the urban population.

Author: Almut Jirku, member of the bdla. The text appeared in the bdla association magazine "Landschaftsarchitekten" 2/2019.

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