In 1980, Erhard Mahler (born 1938) took over the management of the Division of Green Space and Horticulture/ Landscape Gardening. In 1981, the department, which had by then been renamed the Landscape Development and Open-Space Planning Division, was subordinated to the newly created Senate Department for Urban Development and Environmental Protection. The Plant Protection Agency (in German) and the Berlin State Forestry Agency were subordinated to the Division.
A considerable change had taken place over the preceding ten years in urban-development planning. The population increase to 2.6 million predicted in 1965 had to be corrected to 1.7 million. Public criticism of the large-scale residential estates at the outskirts, the “bulldozer redevelopment” in the city center, an excessively large-scaled traffic system (the “automobile-appropriate city”) as well as the rediscovery of urbanity led in 1984 to a complete overhaul and new version of the land-use plan.
In 1984, in addition to the land-use plan, the landscape program with a species-protection program was also drafted, and introduced as an additional planning instrument, based on the Berlin Nature-Conservation Law (in German). The landscape program is binding on government agencies as the basis for stipulations, measures and projects required for the realization of the goals and principles of nature conservation, landscape care and the general urban green space planning. At the local level, the landscape plan is established by ordinance analogously to the development plan, and is thus generally binding.
Between 1983 and 1997, a city-sponsored program for courtyard, roof, and façade greening was implemented to improve residential quality, particularly in the inner courtyards of imperial-era apartment blocks.
In the context of the German Federal Garden Show in 1985, the construction of the 90 ha Erholungspark in Britz, (Recreation Park in Britz, today Britzer Garten) was realized. It was the first new large-scale park since the Berlin Public Parks of the ’20s. It was designed to provide recreational possibilities to some 600,000 Berliners in the boroughs of Neukölln, Tempelhof and Kreuzberg, who had been cut off from their traditional recreational areas in Treptow and Köpenick since the construction of the Wall in 1961.
Between 1984 and 1987, a 14 ha neighborhood park was built on the grounds of the former Görlitzer Bahnhof (Görlitz Station) in Kreuzberg.
After 1979, the city created the financial prerequisites for garden-monument-appropriate care and restoration of public and private historic parks, city squares, gardens and cemeteries. Particularly the 750-year anniversary of the founding of Berlin in 1987 saw the restoration of the Pleasure Ground in Klein-Glienicke, of parts of the Großer Tiergarten, of the Schustherus-Park, and of the Gutspark Britz (Britz Manor Park). Into the following years, these projects were followed by measures in the Schlosspark Charlottenburg (Charlottenburg Palace Park) and the Viktoriapark.
