Foreword: While the character Emilia is fictional, this vision of life in Berlin in 2050 is shaped by current scientific insights and modelled projections for urban development.
Emilia wakes to a brilliant glare bouncing off her neighbor’s solar panels. She only moved to Treptow, a neighborhood in the southeast of last week and still needs curtains. She makes a mental note to check the nearest secondhand shop.
She gets up and slips into a shirt she picked up at a clothes swap store and a skirt she inherited from her mother. It’s a bit worn in places, but that’s just an opportunity to patch it and make it hers. Like most people she knows, she enjoys .
It’s hard for her to imagine the fast-fashion days her mom sometimes talks about, when people used to buy clothes they might only wear once before discarding them. Or sometimes not at all. A lot of that ended up being transported across oceans to be dumped.
Emilia shakes her head at the thought of it, puts on rented earrings and takes a selfie to send to her girlfriend Sophia, who has already left for work. She is a , a profession that is in high demand.
Emilia is likely to find work easily once she’s finished her studies in sustainable fashion.
Green spaces, trains and city river swimming
It’s warm outside, but not as bad as the July heat wave when people often stayed indoors within reach of cooling systems — small window heat pumps for older apartment buildings and low-energy designs and insulation in new blocks.
Emilia often gets up at sunrise for a quick dip in the Spree River. Much to her parents’ dismay. They still remember what it was like when they were children, before extensive sewage prevention, enhanced filtration and UV treatment improved the water quality.
It’s not the only difference of opinion on water use. Waiting for her train, Emilia recalls how many conversations it took to convince her parents to start harvesting rain — more than she can count. But during the recent , her dad proudly announced how everyone in their block on the other side of the city was using stored rainwater to do their laundry, flush their toilets and water the plants that cover their building.
Residents feel a shared sense of responsibility to take care of the plants, understanding how important they are in helping to keep the city cool and reduce CO2 emissions.
Emilia’s parents are in their early 50s and most people of their generation agree that the city is a better place to live in now, despite the that have increased with rising temperatures. There’s a sense of owning the progress they have all helped to make.
Emila finds a seat on the underground, which is busy but spacious enough not to feel crowded. Berlin’s transport system has become more efficient in the last few years, with a mix of e-scooters, trams, subways, trains and bikes. People once had to pay to stand in hot, cramped trains, but nowadays, they can get around for free in temperature-controlled carriages. Or bike along designated tree-lined lanes.
The underground emerges from a tunnel and Emilia looks out of the window at a long stretch of greenery that used to be roads. In the past decades, one third of the city’s roads have been unsealed to help when it rains. It’s hard to imagine that there used to be a million cars driving where there are now parks and community gardens.
Growing mangoes in city offices
Equipped with doors that close automatically, reflective walls, shutters and good insulation, the university, like many public buildings, is cool. Even the canteen where Emilia tucks into the leftovers of her 3D-printed steak and veggies from the meal she cooked her parents last night.
Like most people, her mom switched to a largely a long time ago, but her dad has been harder to convert. He still eats meat or fish once a week, but has come around to the idea of making sure it is always sourced locally.
Last night, he ate his high-tech steak made from without even realizing it wasn’t from an actual cow. And much to Emilia’s amusement, he couldn’t taste the difference. Neither can she. Not that she remembers the last time she ate a conventional steak.
She dips it into the sauce she made from mangoes that are now grown in Berlin. Weird to think of a piece of fruit traveling half-way around the world to be eaten. Especially since Emilia has never been on a plane herself. And she can’t imagine she ever will, not in a world where she can travel the 1,500 km (930 miles) by high-speed train direct from Berlin to Helsinki in five hours.
When her dad was her age, that journey took a whole day by road or train with plenty of stops along the way. So planes were a popular choice. Nowadays, if people do fly, it is on or electricity, and largely only when they leave the continent.
But back to the mangoes. They’re grown in containers in old offices converted for food production. In the last two decades, urban agriculture has blossomed with rooftop farms, vertical systems, and community greenhouses all over the city.
Being invested in the food they grow has made people less wasteful, as has the zero-waste movement and tips on how to use things like crusts of bread, old fruit and imperfect vegetables. And any waste is largely fed to animals.
Empowered by innovation
When Emilia gets back from university in the late afternoon, her flat is the perfect temperature. Her smart home system is programmed to cool the space in the summer and heat it in the winter with a geothermal for the entire building. The city’s energy system works efficiently. What’s more, Berlin’s expanded rollout of solar panels and windparks and regional energy sharing means it now runs on 100% renewables.
She remembers when she was little, how there would sometimes be lights on when they weren’t needed. But now people have become more aware of energy consumption and the resource use. She takes a shower, remembering how she used to have a bath instead.
Even her grandmother has had the tub taken out of her bathroom and now keeps it in her garden to collect rainwater. Necessity is the motor for change, she’d said at the time.
Showered and dressed, she flops onto the secondhand sofa and reads a message from Sophia, who is stopping off to get some beer brewed from recycled bread. Emilia sends a heart. Not just because her partner is on her way back to their shared home with her favorite drink, but because she understands that the city could just as easily not have become what it is today.
She has heard enough to know that when she was born 25 years ago, there was an urgent need to act on climate change. She feels a surge of gratitude for the activists, policy advocates, journalists and entrepreneurs who refused to stop pushing for change.
She has often thought about how hard it must have been to swim against the tide, but also how satisfying it was when governments began to support initiatives and to legislate on decarbonizing economies. And how exciting it must have been back then to see mindsets and then the city itself shift to become something new.
And not just Berlin, in fact, but the whole world. As countries experimented with and drew inspiration from each other, community action spread, gradually translating to a collective and dramatic global turnaround.
Emilia looks out of the window to where the sun is slowly sinking on the day, feeding the last of its rays into the solar panels and she smiles at what she sees.
Afterword: This is just one possible version of 2050 if the world acts to slow climate change.
Edited by: Tamsin Walker, Jennifer Collins, Anke Rasper
The post Welcome to 2050: Could Berlin’s future look like this? appeared first on Deutsche Welle.
