As a freelancer, one of my jobs includes writing about tours available around the world. Part of this entails some basic SEO, and since so many of these tours include visits to UNESCO World Heritage Sites (an important keyword), I have started becoming more interested in visiting some of these places. Of course I don’t have the time and money to do a two-year trip around the world and visit them all, but thus far, here are the ones I have been to, although I didn’t necessarily know it at the time.
Now of course I also want to visit the ones in and around Berlin, and a good place to start seemed to be the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates. The site actually consists of six sites throughout the city, but my goal this summer is to go to all of them. And after Slow Travel Berlin posted last month about Gartenstadt Falkenberg, I decided that would be the first on the list.
So on a warm and sunny Sunday, M. and I set off on a 35-kilometer round-trip bike ride from our place out to this site. And while it wasn’t entirely remarkable, it was still interesting to walk around and see the different colors and facades and note how simple the design was, but how nice it all looked. An unfortunate aspect of this neighborhood, as someone I know mentioned later, is that these homes were originally designed for the working class, but now it is highly unlikely that those same people the homes were targeted to could afford to live in them.
Even so, it was a nice way to spend an hour, just walking through the quiet pathways behind homes and taking in the beauty, as the entire area balances nature and living space in an idyllic setting.
