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Siemens is building the city district of the future in Berlin

For the ceremony on Wednesday, Siemens covered the walls of its old counter hall in Berlin-Spandau with screens the size of a swimming pool.

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Siemens is building the city district of the future in Berlin

For the ceremony on Wednesday, Siemens covered the walls of its old counter hall in Berlin-Spandau with screens the size of a swimming pool. It was 175 years ago on this day that the electrical engineer Werner von Siemens founded a telegraph construction company in the city. 220 invited guests now sat in the midst of a three-dimensional projection of an urban street scene. People recognizable as outlines in front of glass and clinker brick facades, sketched luminous objects, in the foreground a few children staring at their smartphones.

It was a projection of the future. In just a few years, people will be working, living and living here – in Siemensstadt.

When the starter was cleared, Atlantic lobster confit with braised watermelon, the top well-wisher, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, went to the microphone and tried to explain the vision. "Soon the name 'Siemensstadt' will not only evoke historical associations: because a new, real Siemensstadt will have a digital twin," said the Chancellor somewhat cryptically. "It's hard to imagine what opportunities this holds - for example for the resource-saving use of energy, for the planning of public infrastructure and services and ultimately for a knowledge-based, forward-looking policy."

What Scholz was talking about is the largest investment that Siemens has made in the company's history at the location where it was founded. In the next five to ten years, the company will spend 600 million euros on its old industrial site in western Berlin. Together with other builders, a district is to be created from the retort for around four billion euros. With residential buildings, office buildings, factories. With day care centers and a school. Streets and squares, restaurants and a train station.

A showcase district in which only the most modern of the modern should be built: the most intelligent buildings, the smartest energy solutions, the most advanced mobility concept - and the first real city in the metaverse, the digital space in which virtual and real reality are linked. A million square meters of future.

In a more than 100-year-old brick building next to the ticket hall where the ceremony took place, Stefan Kögl sits and sucks in annoyed breath. He has a laptop in front of him and two TVs in home cinema format connected to it. They are also intended to provide a glimpse of the city of the future, but right now they only show a circular waiting symbol. "Too much data," suspects the press spokesman present.

Kögl, 57, architect, is the project manager for the Siemensstadt. For five years he has been thinking with engineers from the company and external experts about how people will live and work. For Siemens, the whole thing is not primarily a real estate project. "It's about answering the questions of the future." The latest technologies would be used, solutions that weren't even on the market yet. 35,000 people will live and work here. A city as a showcase – even if he doesn't want to put it that way.

Kögl's laptop has finished calculating. It appears on the screens, Siemens' brave new world. A dozen large houses can be seen from a bird's-eye view. All have gardens on the roofs, over which solar panels stretch. But what catches the eye the most are the drones.

Delivery drones with packages buzz through the air. Other drones could carry surveillance cameras and record movement patterns. "We assume that there will be more aircraft," Kögl oracles and quickly turns to less dystopian aspects of his future vision. After all, this super digitization could also frighten some people.

As expected, the quarter is to be operated in a CO₂-neutral manner. In addition to the solar roofs and heat pumps, wastewater heat and cold are to be used to cover half of the energy requirement alone. Geothermal energy could be used. In addition, sealed areas are avoided as far as possible, the quarter should absorb rainwater like a sponge.

What is more surprising is how people at Siemens imagine everyday life in ten or 20 years. "Supermarkets, organic shops - that will no longer exist in its current form," believes Kögl. In his plans, distribution points should take the place of shops, where goods ordered online are delivered and then delivered. For food orders, refrigerated post boxes could be a solution. "Every answer raises new questions," he says.

The biggest problem with planning for the future seems to be the present. After all, the hyper-modern Siemensstadt has to somehow fit into the not so modern Berlin in many ways. "The world around it is already very traditional," says Kögl.

Best example: mobility. In the planning area there is an S-Bahn station that was shut down a long time ago and is to be put back into operation by the railways. In addition, autonomously driving minibuses based on the model of the "Moia" shared taxis in Hamburg are to be added. Siemens wants to link the various modes of transport as an intermodal mobility platform.

That all sounds fantastic. But in the real world, many of the 7,500 employees who work at the Siemens site come by car. From villages in Brandenburg, where there will probably still be no autonomous minibuses in ten or 20 years. That is why there will also be streets for cars in the new Siemensstadt. Even underground and multi-storey car parks are included in the plans. But they are called “mobility hubs” here.

There is said to have been a hard struggle behind the scenes with the city of Berlin for these parking spaces, which allegedly would like to see even fewer cars in the model district. Currently, 7000 parking spaces are planned, i.e. statistically one parking space for five residents or employees. This is much less than usual elsewhere. However, the number could still go down.

The actual idea of ​​the Siemensstadt goes far beyond banal parking issues. The highlight lies in the digital sphere. Kögl presses his laptop and the city skins itself on the screen. Suddenly the underground can be seen with all its cables and pipes. All data from the industrial area was recorded for a year and a half. They form the basis for the "digital twin".

At Siemens, “digital twins” are currently the big thing in all areas of the company. At Healthineers, they use MRI to create digital twins of the human body, and at the Munich-Allach locomotive plant, engineers use 3D glasses to look inside the bowels of locomotives. For industrial customers, Siemens plans factories as detailed digital models, which made it possible to build a Biontech plant in record time during the corona pandemic.

With Siemensstadt, an entire district is now to exist as a twin in the metaverse. That could not only speed up construction – the first building should be ready for occupancy in 2025, a Siemens research center within the walls of the old dynamo plant. The construction of the new Berlin Siemens headquarters is scheduled for 2026.

Data acquisition should also open up new possibilities in operation. "Artificial intelligence can evaluate how often which elevator was used and adjust the maintenance intervals," believes Kögl. “Rooms that are hardly used no longer have to be cleaned every day.” Of course, this has to be reconciled with data protection, says Kögl.

Otherwise surveillance drones in the air and the recording of movement profiles of Siemensstadt residents would create possibilities that, as Scholz said, can hardly be imagined. Or would like.

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