Sustainability

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Sustainability at the Forum is not a campaign but the sum of many decisions taken over fifty years. Things are repaired instead of demolished, and the land is permanently out of reach of the market.

That keeps people in place. Children grow up at the Forum whose parents were children here, and the founding generation still lives right in the middle of it, since 2016 also step-free. A building that gets new residents every twenty years because the old ones can no longer afford the rent is not a sustainable building, however well insulated it may be.

The most sustainable building material is the one already built in. The Forum’s buildings have stood since 1900 and 1902, and the site has been built on since 1799. Instead of demolishing, people refurbished over decades, often as self-build. Since 2016 the energy retrofit of the older stock has been under way, as far as heritage and neighbourhood protection allow, because the entrance hall of Köpenicker Straße 174 is a listed monument.

The new building of 2016 closes the last gap in the street, with a high insulation standard, a heat pump of its own and solar modules on the roof.

Social sustainability

The part that is hardest to measure is the most important one. The land belongs to the charitable Förderverein and is granted through heritable building rights for 99 years. Nobody can sell the buildings, because there is no owner who would be allowed to. The use charges cover costs; they do not produce a return.

Food from the neighbourhood

Since 2019 there has been the Vorratskammer, the self-organised organic shop on the ground floor of Köpenicker 172. Around 1,500 organic products, delivered once a week, open to neighbours from outside as well. Short distances, little packaging, no drive to the supermarket.

Heat from our own cellar

It started with a small photovoltaic installation a good twenty years ago. What grew out of it is a utility in miniature. The heat comes today from four combined heat and power units, which generate electricity at the same time and pass their engine heat into the hot water, from a hybrid heat pump of 40 kilowatts drawing on seven ground probes about a hundred metres deep, and from a heat pump that takes the remaining warmth out of the new building’s exhaust air before it leaves the house.

Two gas boilers stand ready for the cold days when the rest is not enough. Several buffer tanks decouple generation from consumption, so the plant can run when it makes sense and not only when somebody happens to be taking a shower. The aim is to buy in as little primary energy as possible.

Electricity from our own roof

Photovoltaic modules on four roof areas add up to 64.2 kilowatts peak: 16.3 and 11.2 kilowatts on Köpenicker 175, 21.2 on number 174 and 15.5 above 172, 173 and Eisenbahnstraße 23. A battery of 48 kilowatt hours pushes the solar electricity into the evening.

The electricity is not sold to the grid and bought back expensively but used in the house. The community sells its members the electricity it produces together.

Who owns the plant

This is perhaps the most unusual construction at the Forum. The energy installations belong to the people who use them: 94 partners hold shares in the Energiegesellschaft, alongside the Förderverein and the co-operative almost every household and commercial tenant. Technical operation is run by Forum Hauswirtschaft GmbH, supported technically by the voluntary energy working group. How it fits together legally is described under Organisation and legal entities.

Open to everyone

What the plant is doing right now can be looked up by anybody. A monitoring tool shows in real time how much heat the combined heat and power units deliver, what the photovoltaics are feeding in and what temperatures stand in the tanks. That transparency is no accident. A plant that belongs to the community should be one the community can understand.

Klaus Novy Prize 2022

In its anniversary year the Forum received the Klaus Novy Prize, awarded for the first time in 2022 by the association Wohnen in Genossenschaften under the motto of climate protection and participation. 33 co-operative projects had applied, and the finalists were decided, co-operatively, by the audience. The Forum was honoured for its village in the city, in which commercial space, culture and housing are organised together and in a climate-friendly way.