Gieß den Kiez – water your neighborhood – gives engaged citizens as well as public officials a tool in which they can coordinate their tree watering and tree care and thus save (some of) the city trees from drying out. The web-based app was born in May 2020 as one of the very first big projects of the CityLAB Berlin (a project of the Technologiestiftung Berlin), is entirely built on open source code and solely uses open data such as the city's tree data and crowd-sourced citizen data.
The app visualises over 840,000 city trees of Berlin on an interactive map. By clicking on every single tree, users can not just explore the tree population of the city and get information about each tree’s species, its age, and water needs, they furthermore can also take care and water their favorite trees within the app. Thus, users can create an account, adopt trees, and water trees within the app to show others that they’re in charge.
The years 2017 and 2019 were particularly dry for Berlin's residents – and trees. Berlin's city trees increasingly developed drought stress symptoms and had to be felled due to prolonged drought damage, so Berlin's cityscape increasingly resembled a wasteland as its green infrastructure suffered from ongoing climate change effects. Gieß den Kiez aims to mitigate the climate change effects, namely rising temperatures and changing precipitation patterns, that have endangered Berlin’s tree population within recent years until today. Furthermore, it supports the local administration by facilitating voluntary work and promoting innovation capability and digital competence for the city.
Gieß den Kiez's main target is to prevent as many trees as possible from drying out and connect existing volunteering communities of Berlin's neighborhoods by providing them with an application and knowledge. The project invites all citizens to participate in the irrigation of our endangered tree population and is meant to be an educational tool that raises awareness for the topic of city trees. Thus, the project is accompanied by several on-site events, where citizens, as well as associations and authorities could connect with each other.
And indeed, it works. After almost three years, we see a rising number of people (more than 3,200) who want to engage, take action and care about the city trees – voluntarily. In Berlin alone, more than 10.000 different trees were watered with more than 51.000 waterings and 1.600.000 litre of water. This connects people, keeps our city green and sometimes even reduces the workload for the city's green space authorities.
Gieß den Kiez not only inspired communities in Berlin but served as a blueprint for the launch of two similar initiatives named ‘Leipzig gießt’ and ‘Magdeburg gießt’. Both cities used the Open Source Code on GitHub and developed their own educational formats and are now contributors of the open source as well as the ‘tree watering’ community. In that sense, Gieß den Kiez, is more than just an app but rather a (small) movement.
