Cases

I spent forty years as an electrician in Berlin. I have walked into houses where a well-meaning homeowner replaced a socket and ended up with the entire floor on one overloaded circuit because they did not understand how the wires were meant to run. I have also seen work done by licensed colleagues that was just as bad: rushed, sloppy, hidden behind the wall because they knew the inspection was coming. The question is not whether electrical work should be safe. The question is whether the permit and licensed-contractor requirements are the right tool to guarantee that safety. On one side, the rule says any electrical work beyond replacing a bulb must be done by a certified electrician with a permit. This exists because electricity kills people quietly. A bad connection behind a wall can smoulder for weeks before it starts a fire, and by then the homeowner who did the work has no idea what they did wrong. The permit system is not about gatekeeping. It is about accountability. If a licensed electrician wires a house and it burns down, there is a paper trail, insurance, and a license that can be revoked. If a homeowner does it and it burns down, there is just a pile of ash and a question mark. On the other side, a homeowner who owns their property should have the right to work on it, provided the work is ultimately inspected and approved. Many countries allow this with the proper inspection step. The requirement for a licensed contractor adds thousands of euros to a simple job, prices out people who cannot afford a professional, and creates a system where the cost of compliance drives people to do the work anyway, but without telling anyone, so it never gets inspected at all. An inspection-after model would at least catch the dangerous work while letting competent homeowners save money. I have seen both sides play out in real houses. I want the jury to weigh in on which approach actually keeps people safer, and whether the cost of licensing is worth the safety it claims to provide.

I lead Berlin's StadtNatur Initiative, and this question sits at the centre of almost every project I design. When we convert a vacant lot or brownfield into a functioning ecosystem, we immediately face a tension that no textbook resolves: how much human use can a recovering habitat absorb before it stops being a habitat? On one side, the ecological argument is clear. Urban soils are compacted, polluted, and fragmented. Native pollinators, birds, and small mammals are hanging on in remnant patches that get trampled, picked, and disturbed the moment they become popular. A genuine rewilding project needs periods of low human disturbance — letting spontaneous vegetation establish, allowing dead wood to accumulate, keeping dogs out of ground-nesting bird areas. In some of our Wild Corridor Network sites in Lichtenberg, we have seen that the first two years of restricted access produced a measurable increase in insect biomass and bird species richness. When we opened the gates, those gains plateaued. On the other side, the community argument is just as compelling. Berlin is a dense city where working-class families, migrants, and young people have few places to be outdoors that are free, safe, and nearby. A rewilded lot that is fenced off for ecological recovery becomes another piece of exclusionary green space — the exact dynamic that drives green gentrification. If ecological restoration becomes a justification for restricting access, we risk creating nature reserves that only the ecologists and the adjacent middle class can enjoy. The people who live next to these sites — often in the most underserved neighbourhoods — deserve to use them. They already have fewer parks per capita than the city average. This is not a technical question with an optimal answer measured in species counts. It is a value question about who urban nature is for and what ecological recovery means when humans are the keystone species of every urban landscape. I am asking this community to deliberate because I have seen otherwise excellent rewilding projects fail not from poor ecology but from poor community integration — and I have seen projects ruined for wildlife by design choices that prioritised recreation over every other function. There has to be a better way to hold both commitments.