Densification

With the space for housing in Freiburg becoming increasingly scanty - many persons want to move into the Green City - there is one trick to increase the number of inhabitants per square meter: densification.
People who happen to have a nice view from their balcony into a neighbor's garden wake up one morning staring into a deep hole for underground parking.

This is followed by a year of noise and dust. Walls are thrown up, and one morning, they look out onto their new neighbor's balcony and table when this is all over. Soon they know whether he/she takes müsli or croissants for breakfast. I have not heard about handshakes between neighbors across balconies so far.

The problem of handshakes definitely does not exist at the Westfriedhof (west cemetery) in Cologne, where Elisabeth and I usually visit my parents-in-law's gravesite. This time we could not readily find the site. The environment where trees and shrubs had guided us in the past had changed entirely. Soon the reason became clear: densification. I took the photo with my parents-in-law's tombstone in the foreground, showing a plot of land in the back in preparation for packing corpses into a higher surface density.
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