Organicist concepts of city landscape in German planning after the second world war

The debates surrounding post-war reconstruction of Germany centred around three planning strategies as described in: the books Organische Stadtbaukunst (The Organic Art of Building Towns) (1948) by Hans Bernhard Reichow and Die Raumstadt (The Spatial City) (1949) by Walter Schwagenscheidt, as well as the 1946 exhibition Berlin plant—Erster Bericht (Berlin Plans—First Report) organized under the direction of Hans Scharoun. Despite the different political attitudes of their authors, these three planning strategies seem to be connected by the same goal: the big city was to be radically broken apart and a new green city landscape created. In order to plan and build this new city as a complex system integrated with the native landscape, the planners conceived the city to be like an organism in relation to its environment. Their shared organic conception reveals traces of natural science and nature-oriented philosophies. This investigation traces the origin of this new city landscape concept back to the intellectual-historical context at the beginning of the 20th century.