Hobrecht-Plan

The Hobrecht-Plan inspired new urban plans after 1990 by construction senator Hans Stimmann and his colleagues, so that the formerly-divided Berlin would grow together and become denser and livelier.

Hobrecht's plan is often compared to Baron Haussmann's restructuring of Paris, as it also resulted in wide metropolitan avenues, large urban parks and squares, sewers and other modernisation projects of the infrastructure.

Hobrecht was instead a geodesist (professional land surveyor) who had just extended his formation with a civil engineer examination on transportation planning ("Wasser-, Wege- und Eisenbahnbaumeisterprüfung") in 1858.

In effect, speculative builders took over with densely packed architectural designs to allow a maximum number of rooms – the foundation of the Mietskaserne tenement housing estates rings.

The Hobrecht-plan was criticized for decades as given the foundation for social problems, possibly even nurturing the street fights in the 1920s between red (communists) and brown (fascists) thugs in the crowded lower class quarters.

Schusters Wilhelm aus der Mansarde und die alte bettlägerige Frau Schulz im Hinterhaus, deren Tochter durch Nähen oder Putzarbeiten den notdürftigen Lebensunterhalt besorgt, werden in dem ersten Stock bekannte Persönlichkeiten.

Hier ist ein Teller Suppe zur Stärkung bei Krankheit, da ein Kleidungsstück, dort die wirksame Hilfe zur Erlangung freien Unterrichts oder dergleichen und alles das, was sich als das Resultat der gemütlichen Beziehungen zwischen den gleichgearteten und wenn auch noch so verschiedenen situierten Bewohner herausstellt, eine Hilfe, welche ihren veredelnden Einfluss auf den Geber ausübt.

Shoemaker Wilhelm in the attic and the bedridden old Mistress Schulz in the backyard tenement with her daughter running a meager seamstress business they will be the best-known persons on the first floor.

In between the extremes of the social classes the poor from the second to fourth story will be nurtured by the cultural life of the civil servants, artists, professors and teachers.

This will come out as beneficial to the society even when it would only be that the latter would have a daily silent example in their sight of those which were mixed among them.This also indicates that he had no real intention to prevent the housing conditions of the lower class which he might have seen as normal in his times.