3 Years of Happy Pigeons - Part II
INTRODUCTION
In the first part of this blog post we took a look at our available data to get to know more about ourselves as Happy Pigeons and to see the Coliving scene in Berlin through our lenses. We got to know the profiles of people applying to colive and checked our Prices to the market prices.
Looking back at this data, our interaction with the applicants through the past couple of years and our own community feedback, we realized that we need to change our website a bit to be more transparent. We added separate pages for every Nest as a start.
In this part we try to look back at our efforts in building bridges between our coliving Pigeons and the local community. One of our main goals is to build a diverse community that is integrated and can play an active role in our little neighborhood.
We understand the image of coliving is getting lately linked directly to UFOs international digital nomads that parachute in inner city neighborhoods without any interest in connecting with the local community, even in some cases taking part in gentrifying the neighborhood. However as a small player in this market we try to do the opposite.
This is not an easy task but we know that it is an incremental process and we are paving our way towards achieving it.
COMMUNITY SPACE
Our community space serves several functions. It is a hybrid space that acts as a proxy in between our “inner” Pigeons community and the “outer” local community.
Space usage can be summed up in 4 main categories:
Coworking space during weekdays ( from 9 to 5 )
The space is not exclusive for our coliving pigeons, but it is open for all.
On average we have around 9-11 coworking members and 2 of our pigeons use it as an office. ( daily average usage ranges is around 5-7 people )
Coworkers are either living nearby and /or prefer a small office space where you have your own kitchen and this cozy feeling of knowing your coworkers.
Event space after working hours
Events are organized on Donation basis mainly or on a fair arrangement with the organizers depending on the type of the activity.
All events are open for everyone.
Community use
Usually the space acts as a community space for the coliving “pigeons”, they have access 24/7 and can use the space for their own gatherings, events, workshops.
We tend to host our monthly gatherings in the space as well.
Space rental / Private events
Max 3 days a month, we rent out the space for private events / workshops.
This is a way to keep the space financially sustainable and keep offering low/fair fees for the coworking ( 75 € for a fixed desk per month )
TYPES OF HOSTED ACTIVITIES
Our community space hosts all sorts of activities.
Lately, we have weekly regular events like Stretching, singing classes and Yoga on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays respectively. The yoga and stretching are hosted by Mari participation is on donation basis or via the urban sports club platform. Usually people from the neighborhood and our community attend such events. The singing is hosted by Jared and a group called “Simply Tuning in” . They also host an open mic night every last Friday of the month.
For the regular events, they are completely self organized by now, the organizers have their own keys and they take care of the space, prepare for their events and reorganize the space after they finish.
Other than this, we host a wide range of workshops/events from business related to fun social gatherings. Some of our hosted events were startup development monthly workshops, Fun drama writing nights, panel discussions and meetups about coliving, Networking events, natural cosmetics workshop, dancing, breakfast meetups, cooking and our own community gatherings.
Mostly these events are co-hosted by external groups/individuals. However, some events are proposed and hosted by some of our “Pigeons” ( coworking or coliving ) such as Dance classes, the fun drama writing nights, time management workshop and some take part as mentors for the start up monthly meetups.
LOCAL COLLABORATIONS
The flexible use of the space is strategic for us to connect with the local community and to build connections with other groups.
Besides co-hosting different events that are open to everyone in the neighborhood. The space is also used by other groups to do their own meetups/ workshops.
Lately the space was used by an animal rights activist group to have their community meetups and by a neighbor who is living in the same building to host her own (church) community meeting.
This way we are building some bridges between the local community and our own in an incremental process. One of our members also proposed hosting a dinner to get to know the neighbors, which we will probably host this year.
Other collaboration happens outside of the space as well. We took part in the Zelterstraßenfest last year, that is happening in the nearby Zelterstr. and is organized by the social project Zelterpate. We try to support other local happenings as much as possible even with small stuff like hanging their posters and inviting our community to participate.
GLOBAL COLLABORATION
It is obvious that we have a very local-focused approach. However, we try to connect with like-minded partners in order to exchange experiences, learn and collaborate on potential projects.
We are not against growth, we are just trying to do it incrementally, consciously and with the right partners in order not to lose our initial spirit.
Last year we started to communicate and build partnerships with other potential partners. We started an initial partnership with Coconat, we could see that we have similar goals in terms of local participation and will probably try to connect both communities in the coming year.
We started building bridges as well with Conscious Coliving, they already have a lot of knowledge in the coliving field and could probably work on a potential project together. Same as edgeryders were Kai took part in one of their workshops on building a community based coliving in Brussels.
HOW TO MOVE FORWARD?
This is what we are trying to figure out. There is no clear plan yet, we have more questions than answers. We are trying to move towards a better integrated living between the local neighborhood and the newcomers and strengthen the bonds between them. At the same time we need to reduce our environmental impact and explore more in sustainable ways of living.
It is a journey and we are trying to consciously move forward towards a better model of coliving which is suitable to Berlin’s local context.
You are welcomed to join us, If you have an idea or want to collaborate on a project with a local social impact, or even if you just want to have a coffee and chat.
3 Years of Happy Pigeons- Part I
A glance on our data
Happy Pigeons started humbly with one apartment in 2017. Currently we have 5 apartments in 2 locations (14 coliving members) and a community/ coworking space with an active coworking community of around 11 coworking members from the neighborhood. Besides some other regular members who join some of our weekly events.
We are staying consciously small, not looking to drastically scale up at the moment. Our aim is to build a small tight community in Berlin and to live and work in a sustainable way while being on the lookout for the right partners/ collaborators.
While we are approaching the end of 2019, we decided to look back at our data in order to understand our community better and to help us see our next steps.
Happy Pigeons’s number of Coliving Apartments Timeline.
As shown in the “Timeline” Happy Pigeons had 2 Appartements in 2017, adding another 2 in 2018 and one in 2019.
Applications
Since we started, we received more than 800 applications. In 2019 alone we received 447 till now (mid October) with an average of 47 applications per month.
The numbers are rapidly increasing as shown in the graph, even for a relatively small coliving space. One can see that the demand for such spaces is increasing rapidly.
Accumulated numbers of coliving applications
Who are the applicants?
People come from all over the world, doing all sorts of things.
It is a reminder that people are different; all have their own journey that they are embarking and for some reason, those who applied, had one thing in common, the need to live in a community and share their life and living space with others in Berlin.
All nationalities of the coliving Applicants in %
Top 12 nationalities of applicants in numbers
Surprisingly the number one nationality is German, followed by Americans, Indians, Italiens, British and Spanish.
Coliving applicants age distribution
However, our applicants are not that diverse in terms of age or marital status, they are mostly young people in their twenties.
The average age is 27, although we had applicants from 18 till 50 years. Most of them are single or not living with their partner.
In a nutshell, our applicants are international, young, and single.
Applications for a “Single room” vs for a “Couples room”
Who are our Coliving-Pigeons?
Our maximum Capacity until now is 14 Coliving-Pigeons. In total since we started we hosted 28 (including the current members)
Our ex-pigeons (Alumni) stayed an average of 7.5 months in house, ranging from 3 to 18 months.
One Pigeon left us to travel then life brought him back again to his nest while 2 of the oldest Pigeons are still staying in their nests. So we have kind of a core stable community with a mix of different individuals, staying mid- and long-term.
As for Coworking, our space is not exclusive to our coliving community members. It is also open for the people in the neighborhood serving as our proxy to get integrated and to build bridges between our small international community and the local community of the neighborhood (more on this in Part 2 of this blog post series).
Currently we have 11 coworkers and hosted already another 23 other coworkers since we started. Our coworkers are mainly freelancers who live nearby and/ or prefer the cozy space where they can have a personal relationship with their coworkers.
Analysis of rents in the neighborhood (Prenzlauer Berg)
We took a look at Data of WG-gesucht, extracting 153 entries on the 23rd of October.
Methodology: The data was scraped out of the available date on the website on that date, manually deleted the short term entries-less than one month- of course this includes all kind of ads, furnished, unfurnished, temporary/ permanent, also scams and other possible fault entries)
The average monthly rent was 520€ (ranging from 250€ To 1100€) and the average size is 20 m2.
According to an old report from the Guardian, Berlin Miete map, analyzing Immobielienscout24 data, average monthly rents for a one Bedroom apartment near Prenzlauer Allee S-bahn station reaches 672€.
Pigeons‘ coliving price breakdown
Our average room is 22 m2 and our average rent in Prenzlauer Berg is 655€. All rents include all bills and utilities, such as operating, heating, electricity and wifi, as well as a weekly cleaning service for the communal areas and a 24 hours access to the coworking space*, located on the ground floor of the same building. Not to mention the “intangible side effects” of living in a welcoming community with different events, gathering, outings...etc.
Our average prices are still within the logical market range and we are trying to cut down our costs to be able to provide better services and build an actual community that is not isolated from the neighborhood.
Summary
There is an increasing demand in coliving of mainly people in their 20s and early 30s from all around the world. However a big part of our applicants are from within Germany.
Happy Pigeons has 14 coliving pigeons with an average stay of 7.5 months. The wider community including coworkers and neighbors reaches +30 persons.
Our average room in Prenzlauer Berg is 22 m2 and costs 655€ with all bills and coworking space included.
In the next part of this blog post series we will discuss in detail how we are trying to connect our small community with the local neighboring community, how our community space is used by different parties and share some of our ideas on how to move forward with Happy Pigeons.
Written by : Hazem, Kai and Marc
*average cost for a coworking (flex) desk in Berlin is 220€ https://coworkingguide.de/coworking/coworking-preise/
Communal Living Panel Discussion
Recently we hosted a Panel discussion on the different forms of communal living in Berlin; with speakers from various projects in Berlin; Our aim was to hear different perspective and to learn from one another.
Our Panel speakers were :
- Naima Ritter, co-founder of Conscious Coliving Consultancy
- Natalia Irina Roman, city researcher / curator / installation artist, from Projekthaus Potsdam: www.nataliairinaroman.eu & www.facebook.com/sitespecificideas
- Rabea, woodworker building Tiny Houses. Part of Tiny House Community in Berlin Weißensee.
- Tobias Brockmann, co-founder of Happy Pigeons coliving and Forever Day one
Moderated by Thomas Hohmeier- Bauingenieur/civil engineer, Architect student and board memeber “ORWOhaus e.V.”
Plus a lovely audience from other communal living projects, neighbors, and interested people in general.
Obviously this is a diverse Panel, each project/ community has different, yet similar, intentions, reasons and challenges, However all of them agree on choosing communal living as a way of life whether for long or short term and exchanging views was very interesting to see.
Below is a summary for the long discussion, special thanks for Juan Ortiz and Katrin Häuser for sharing their notes on the discussion which helped me in compiling this post.
Brief Introductions
Tobias from Happy Pigeons :
Tobi started Happy Pigeons focusing on putting the community first, Happy Pigeons are staying consciously small to build an actual community where relationships are being formed organically and then could scale gradually.
On the other hand, He works also as a consultant on the future of living working and from his side he can see that a lot of investors and big companies are getting interested in “coliving”, for profitability reasons normally, However they are slowly understanding the importance of the community.For him having a job that combines both sides helps him seeing different perspectives.
Naima from Conscious coliving:
Conscious Coliving began with a lot of research out of the concern of our disconnection from ourselves, from others, and from nature. They developed a manifesto with “connection” at its center with 3 main sectors ( oneself – wellbeing, Others – Community, and Nature – Environmental sustainability ), then started supporting others and offering other services as well; Currently they are running meetups on the various aspects on conscious coliving while listening and learning from others as well.
Natalia from Projekthaus Potsdam:
Natalia is a city researcher / curator / installation artist, she lives in between two cohousing projects, or in other words in the S-bahn, one in Moabit and another in Potsdam or in “Berlin zone C”, both are self organized and designed for long term living.
Both are cohousing projects with a bit of a contrast with Moabit being more private and Potsdam being more open to the public and aims more to integrate in the neighborhood.
Rabea from Tiny House community in Weißensee
Rabea builds Tiny houses and is one of the Tiny House community in Weißensee; The community is located near Mirbachplatzt where they are allowed to use the space till 2020 for now, Currently there are 4 Tiny houses, a public kitchen and a communal Eco Toilet, They open their doors to the public during several events and festivals.
Main Reasons for living Communally
According to Naima, main reasons/ motives for people to live communally are:
Crises of loneliness
Housing crises where many people can't afford paying the rising rent in Cities; Looking for solutions where sharing is cheaper.
Late Marriage; people getting married and having kids later, so looking for this “family model” outside of the family, [ Also the modern model of relationships are based on the premise of finding one person to meet all your needs for the rest of your life while some of these different needs were filled by the social interactions in communities ]
Sharing economy, and valuing experience much more materialistic gains
Natalia mentioned that,based on her experience, this is happening across a very wide spectrum; people who live communally come from very diverse backgrounds, However it is always misrepresented some how, that they are all artists or students or political-left oriented, but in reality this is not true.
Naima summed it up into the 3 Cs; Connection, Convenience and Collaboration.
Connection:
As humans we are social animals, we are wired for connections, for most of the human evolution ( 99%) we lived in tribes, only recently we started living individually and working with people you don't share values with.
Collaboration :
Without romanticizing the past, but historically people used to make stuff together, build houses, make food, work on shared interest and project together. Nowadays we are mostly consumers; paying for everything that was formally a collaborative effort.
Convenience:
Which is needed in our daily life, from finding people to help with the kids, or borrowing some sugar or eggs for cooking, to the different utilities needed for modern urban life, whether being provided by a self-organized community or with a management body/ company
Tobi added that for him building the frame for this to happen is what he finds interesting; putting people in the same space, People who normally don't get a chance to meet, and sparking this friction for creativity, collaboration and building meaningful relationships is a big part of his personal motivation.
He added that sometimes in special projects, coliving comes as a side effect, in innovative Projects like H-Farm or the Camp focusing on solving the worlds challenging problems, located in a bit remote areas, coliving comes as side effect from bringing different people to live and work together for a period of time, and this brings the experience to another level, to something more than just work.
Moving on to a bit open discussion in between the 4 speakers, where they discussed the different scales, potential, common praxis in self organizing, and challenges.
Tobi explained that usually in a small community like Happy Pigeons, they are trying to set the bar for everyone to contribute, although as a company they take care of all utilities they are still leaving space for the community to add their own activities. One strategy is to include part of current community in the selection process of new members, this way the new ones get easily onboard and the old ones get more involved in shaping the whole community.
Natalia explained that in Moabit cohousing which is more stable, they meet once a month but in Project Potsdam, the community meets twice a month as there are more work to be done. In Moabit it is mandatory for every individual to work 3 hours a month for the community, and In Potsdam it is of course more than this but people are all engaged in the community.
For Rabea living in a small Tiny houses community doesn't require a lot of organizational rules, people seem to get a long and they have no need for writing rules. They face some normal struggle though because of the water and toilet situation but people get used to it, Sometimes people don't respect the privacy of a Tiny house but this is also manageable. It is just like living on an urban island.
Natalia mentioned that her struggle is different, usually there are individual challenges and collective ones. Individually, one needs to find a balance between their usual daily life and the cohousing community work. Collectively, making decisions is hard one and needs long discussions from everyone in order to get out with a decision that is fine with everyone.
Challenges vary in scale as well, a group can take a year to decide on a colour for the Kitchen walls but fixing the roof before winter needs a quick decision.
They all agreed that there is no recipe for self organization and collective decision making, However Project House Potsdam follows a nice strategy in collective decision making which includes dividing the objections/ commentaries into degrees and asking people to voice them out loud to the group, starting from having a veto ( completely against this decision ) to having harsh comments or bad worries, to middle and light worries. This helps the group to reflect, compromise and reach a decision easily.
Naima added some Macro-scale challenges that faces communal living projects such as :
Finding Land; finding or building the right buildings in urban areas is extremely difficult, finding remote spaces is nice to connect with nature but not convenient for city work life.
Policy regulations; some cities have harsh zoning rules which was not designed to serve communal living to begin with. Building Public- Private partnership could be a way to go to solve such a challenge.
Gentrification; it is very tricky issue and needs not to be ignored, solving these conflicts within different neighborhoods is needed.
[Lack of] Public engagement; ecosystem mapping and participatory planning are ways to ensure the public good and to create cultural value.
Conflict management; this differs from a space to another but generally having better communication and clearly defined roles always helps in resolving conflicts.
To sum up, Communal living is getting much attraction nowadays, also big investments are pouring in especially in the coliving market, but the question is still open, how we can live consciously together in a communal way.
Some answers were given during the discussion, some more questions appeared, whether we invest our time and effort in designing the frame or infrastructure for human interaction and collaboration, or use different self organizing techniques in our decision making processes, or being open to the public and contribute to the public good, or going for a public private partnership to bring social and cultural value to different neighborhoods, or just work it out with a small community for a temporary basis, or build an environmentally sustainable community without gentrifying the hosting neighborhood, all are bits and pieces from the way which we are discovering together.
As Happy Pigeons we are learning, we are starting new approaches for our own self-organization process based on the last discussion, we will join the next meetups by conscious coliving to learn more from others and share our experience and we are open to collaborate with others in order to enrich ourselves and our community.
Conscious coliving meet up – Personal Reflections
Last week conscious coliving organized a meet up discussing the question of wellbeing in coliving and how can coliving foster wellbeing; The meet up was hosted by the Fizz Berlin. Hazem, our newest team member, joined the meet up and here are his personal thoughts/ reflections.
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The meet up took place during one hot summer day, However people from various coliving spaces and other interested people joined with enthusiasm to share their thoughts, lessons learned, and ideas in an open way during the meet up. It was a small diverse group of people, different age groups and experiences but all interested/ working/ living in shared living spaces in general.
Although the words “coliving” and “community” have different definitions depending on your own perception, but lets just say that sharing a living space with people is defined as coliving or living with a community, so sharing a flat with 3-4 people, or living communally with 30-40 people are included in this broad definition.
Naima and Juan, from Conscious coliving, prepared a very nice structure for us to follow that day; after small conversations, each person introduced the one sitting next to him/her, then a small presentation on what are we going to discuss, another small talk from the host, The Fizz, explaining their projects and concepts, then we dove into the topic of Wellbeing.
We discussed 3 main issues, vitality, positive relationships, and emotional stability, after a general brainstorm on the 3 topics we were divided into 3 groups to discuss them in detail, I went for emotional stability group with Bettina and Nicolas, if I remember the names correctly, the community manager at the Fizz and a psychology students who is living there. I choose the emotional stability topic as I am not an expert on the topic and wanted to learn and hear different approaches.
Personally, I found this structure extremely helpful, as wellbeing is a very complicated subject and clustering the interconnected issues under just 3 categories makes the discussion easier and helps in the end to see a bigger picture.
Although we might seem to come from different “coliving” projects, we might have slightly different definition of what is coliving, who is a community manager or what is a community; but it seems that we are all facing the same challenges and we are all trying to find several recipes for wellbeing.
It was nice to see that we are actively trying to build communities that can live and prosper together, not forgetting the different types of individuals, we discussed how to build a community that is welcoming introverts as well as extroverts, how to find the sweet spot in between private space/ life and communal space, not forgetting the wellbeing of the people building this such as :community managers/ facilitators/ coordinators or relatively central people living in the community.
Living communally is definitely one solution to loneliness, but still it could be very intense and sometimes people need their own private time, wellbeing is also a very complicated and relative subject and each person has his/her own way in reaching mindfulness. Being aware of this is one step, getting to hear from other communities is another, and working together in reaching several recipes in relation to our own communities is the goal.
Personally speaking, I have been always sharing my living space- in other words, never lived alone- either with family or with friends / flat mates, or living temporary in a coliving space with 11 core people and many visitors, I can understand that this can be an intense experience and having a some kind of system/ self organized structure/ community guidelines/ ...etc not only helps in living harmoniously but also shapes the community as it develops and helps in attracting the people who can easily fit in.
Happy Pigeons is a relatively small community, and was interesting to get to know the scene from the lenses of bigger coliving communities, as well as smaller ones, This helps us in creating better communities and also prepare us in foreseeing the challenges of scaling up or growing our community.
My last general impression is that nowadays, coliving as a concept is apparently needed and could be a solution for some of our current challenges due to different reasons and changes that are happening in our societies ( speaking mainly about Europe ) discussing this with people who are building the scene in Berlin- a city where the shared flats is kinda embedded in the culture as well as cooperatives, bau-groups, cohousing and other intentional communities- is very interesting and could help all of us learn how to build better communities.
That's why, in the spirit of learning and searching for other praxis, we are hosting a discussion next week on Sept 12th on different forms of communal living to broaden the dialogue and hear different voices from Berlin, Naima Ritter from conscious coliving is joining the panel along side with our very own Tobias, Natalia from Projekthaus Potsdam and Max from Tiny House community in Weissensee.
To read more about the conscious coliving meetup, here is a nice summary published on their blog.
Berlin Mmm...(Stadt Land) Food - Show social responsibility with right food!
A life full of choices and decisions.
Every day we eat food and drink all kinds of beverages next to water. But do we all really know what we are eating or drinking? Where does it come from? What routes did it take to come into your stomach? What kind of additives does it contain? How much money is left for the people in the first part of the industrial-chain? Only the minority of people in the “first world” really has a clue about what they consume. Most of the times, price matters a lot. Nevertheless, more and more people invest their time to gain knowledge about the life demanding supplies they consume. In this movement many small companies were created with the goal to have a product with a social impact. As a matter of fact, there are many reasons why we should be more aware of what to eat and drink.
Experience: Food
If you go into your supermarket next door, many everyday products are either distributed by no name companies, in that case you might ask yourself what they have done to their product to be that cheap; or big names, where you just think their product must be good according to the price. In other words, many of us (I hope I’m right if I use “us” if not, sorry for that) have no idea about everyday products, their quality, and if the price is justified. In addition, many people lack the luxury to buy expensive products due to their living status. Is it possible to combine quality and price to make the experience of good food possible for everyone? The “Stadt Land Food” festival, which took part around the Markthalle Neun in Berlin, Kreuzberg from the 1st -3rd of October, was a place where questions like these were asked and answered. Furthermore, it was a great chance to gain more knowledge about essential food supplies and become inspired by the passion and tasty foods from the vendors.
The Festival
From Saturday till Monday, about 150 different local producers, distributors, or organizations gathered around the market hall. Being hosted by the Markthalle for the second time after 2014, the food festival attracted many people onto the streets nearby the Görlitzer Park. Next to the vendors that you find at the weekly farmers market from Tuesday till Saturday (for more information scroll a bit down), different vendors displayed and sold their goods and showed that food is not just food for them. It’s a big part of their life, locally produced and distributed, out of eco-sensitive goods. Furthermore, many experts also offered workshops in different “food-labs” in order for the customer to improve their knowledge of the product and the process of making it. Next to workshops for drinks like spirits, wine, beer and coffee, the food-labs for cheese, different kinds of vegetables, sausages, fish, and bread were very interesting. For example, we never knew how easy and cheap it was to make your own “sauerkraut”. Another thing we learned was how the production of honey works and that there are two different types of methods: pressed and hurled honey. → FLo filz Oh honey soundcloud link
Another spot at the market hall where inspiration hit us, was the stand of Slow Food Berlin. “Slow Food” is a movement with a growing community out of Italy which tries to “prevent the disappearance of local food cultures and traditions, counteract the rise of fast life and combat people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat” (www.slowfood.com). Furthermore, they offer skill-sharing events or information evenings where you can enlarge your own knowledge about food and everything around it. All in all, the Stadt Land Food festival was an experience that was very inspirational. It demonstrated that with a bit of practice you can make everyday products by yourselves and therefore control what you eat. Nevertheless, there are other goods which you can’t make by yourself but to whom companies were founded in the last years to ensure you fair traded, high quality products.
Companies with Social Impact
The Berlin-based company Coffee Circle portrays one of these companies which create a quality product with a social impact. Coffee is an example where you can only create the end-product but to grow a coffee-plant in Germany is not possible. Often times farmers of coffee plantations have to work under inhuman conditions or even kids have to work so that the coffee-beans can be offered for a low price in the supermarket. There are many companies with a fair-trade seal on it, but fair trade does not directly mean that it has a positive, long-lasting effect on the farmers and their lives. What it definitely means is that the companies pay for a third party that the farmers earn the minimum amount of money they deserve. Coffee Circle ensures a fair traded coffee without a seal, as they only roast high-quality coffee which they buy directly from plantations they visited. Their goal is to have a greater impact and directly help the people with important problems like their lack of education or clean water.
Coffee circle only portrays one of many companies which were created in the last couple of years. Others which need to be mentioned are lemonaid, soli-mate, or viva con aqua. The last one is a subsidiary of the non-profit organization that tries to improve water quality in developing countries. The goal of the growing company is to socialize water, which is mostly under control of huge companies like Nestlé, as they want to donate 60 percent of their profit to drinking water projects.
It is nice to see that more and more cafés become aware of what products they buy and sell in their store. A growing amount has local roasted coffee (damn we have nice Coffee roasters in Berlin; check the bottom list) and other social food and beverages like the ones mentioned above. As a consequence, people get to know these companies and maybe also think about what they consume.
Maybe you can also have an impact on the world with only a small effort. In the end, we in Europe have the great luck to decide what to drink or eat. In other parts of the world this is not the case.
Food and Coffee Starter Kit:
Markthalle Neun
Ancient market hall (first opened in 1891) in the Eisenbahnstrasse 42/43
Weekly farmers market opened Tuesday-Friday 12-18 pm , Saturday 10 am -18 pm
Streetfood Thursday with, like the names says, tasty street foodà Thursday 17-22 pm
For workshops and other dates visit the website à www.markthalleneun.de
Berlin Roasters (https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1ryJ07RkbND-EASyLaI_0nrM4f3c&hl=en_US) Map with all the Third Wave Coffee Roaster in world
Berlin Coffee Roasters
It started very small, but now we are here. It is hard to count all the roasters in Berlin. Every year there are new openings and a serious coffee culture with focus on high quality and perfection has developed. Here are a bunch of classic suggestions of very established ones:
For a full list, just have a look at this Google Map created by guys of Third Wave Wichteln! Or can also just buy some beans online at Coffee Circle - they are also roasting in Berlin-Wedding.
So it's up to you to decide, what kind of food do you want eat and what do you want to change in the world. Every single meal, cup or drink counts!
Modern Loneliness - Problems of being a Newbie in modern cities
Urbanization and internationalism.
Two words that are not only bringing positive aspects for individuals and the society. When you are trying to find a flat nowadays, for example in Berlin, you will realize pretty fast how complicated this could get. When you also want to live in a flat together with like-minded people, then you will come to the conclusion that this is close to impossible.
Coming to a new cityand culture means a lot of bureaucratic processes and new terms and conditions to learn. Newbies often don’t know where to go, whom to ask or what to do. They are wasting more time on getting their life going then starting to experience the new place! They have less or no time to get to know the culture or the people. That's awful.
And even in the unlikely case that they well find some time during the on-boarding process, they won’t have the city knowledge and expertise at all. A guided city exploration is either very expensive or depends on flatmates or other third parties. Newbies are in a weak position and this caused already negative consequences such as criminal offenses.
Besides the functional problems newbies have to face, there are also emotional challenges. Even though we are more and more connected through digital technology and social media, we have an increasing feeling of loneliness. It’s hard to build meaningful relationships in these fast paced and overcrowded times. People and societies are coming closer and closer physically together, but at the same time we are all moving emotionally away from each other.
During the last two thousand years there have been institutions like the church, which offered a home and a safe harbor for a lot of people. Nowadays the impact of the church is rapidly decreasing at least in Europe, but which community is going to replace that? People are feeling lost and disorientated in the oversupply of information. What helps people to get to know a new city and it’s inhabitants without staying trapped in an “expat” bubble?
Well educated international people, so called Young Professionals, are realizing that they have a big impact on gentrification processes. This means a big struggle for a lot of them and leads to a social segmentation of locals and expats.
We realized this global problem through different experiences. One of our founders learned it in Grenoble during his stay there for his masters degree. Another one discovered itduring his time at the HPI Potsdam while studying Design Thinking and working on innovation projects. Both had very positive experiences and were realizing the importance of a strong community!
We are now ready to come up with solutions for both problems - gentrification and the “being a newbie” - pain. We think there are possibilities to solve that. If you interested in our concept - follow our journey and contact us!
The Happy Pigeons Team