Leberecht Migge (March 30, 1881 in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) – May 30, 1935 in Worpswede) was a German landscape architect, regional planner and polemical writer, best known for the incorporation of social gardening principles in the Siedlungswesen (settlement) movement during the Weimar Republic.
His tenure with Ochs primarily involved designing private gardens and estates for wealthy clients, as well as outdoor furniture and the peculiarly-German style of arbors or bowers known as Lauben.
The influential 1911 publication Amerikanische Parkanlangen by Werner Hegemann contains numerous contemporary German gardens modeled in the American style—all designed by Migge.
He rejected the grandiose prototypes for war memorials in favor of designs in which every grave acted as an individual flower bed, the totality of the scheme forming a garden.
Influenced by the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, Migge's communal, grass-roots socialism led to his involvement with the Siedlungswesen movement after the First World War.
Working with leading architects of the Weimar Republic (Ernst May in Frankfurt, Martin Wagner and Bruno Taut in Berlin, Otto Haessler in Celle), Migge's designs for the Siedlungen (settlements) characteristically comprised low-lying small flats or row houses, with adjacent or nearby garden plots.
In the new housing developments of the 1920s, the Schutzmauer (protective walls) were active functional elements, not merely separating plots, the geometric lines of the Siedlung blocks extending into the garden as part of an overall rational ordering system.
Even during the progressive era of the Weimar Republic, Migge's designs were often criticized for being too functional and for ignoring the simple fact that many people would be unwilling to maintain the individual garden plots that were so crucial to his theoretical ideas.
Migge's political leanings were rather ambiguous, his interest in getting back to the land being considered reactionary by some, while his dedication to the improvement of workers’ living conditions were attributed by others as Communism.