Berlin’s ‘Gieß den Kiez’: How Open-Source Urban Forestry Reveals Colonial Ecocide and Decolonial Care Networks
Original framing: “‘Like caring for a pet’: the open-source tree map inspiring Berliners to water their urban forest” — The Guardian - Environment
Berlin’s urban forest is built on erased indigenous knowledge: the Wends and later Sorbs (a West Slavic group) managed these lands before Prussian colonization, using polycultural agroforestry that mimicked natural succession. The linden trees now celebrated in *Gieß den Kiez* were introduced by Frederick the Great as symbols of state power, displacing native species like the pedunculate oak (*Quercus robur*), which held cultural significance. Today, no indigenous communities are consulted in urban forestry decisions, and the app’s ‘adopt-a-tree’ model replicates the privatization of communal lands seen in colonial land grabs.
Berlin’s *Gieß den Kiez* app is a symptom of a broader crisis: the neoliberal capture of ecological care, where corporate platforms and municipal governments outsource responsibility to volunteers while obscuring the colonial and class structures that shape urban green spaces.
The story’s focus on individual ‘adopters’ like Amanda Gläser-Bligh mirrors the 19th-century *Vereins*, which masked Prussian state-building as civic duty—today, it’s tech startups and smart-city consortia masking ecological collapse as ‘innovation.’ To move beyond this, Berlin must confront its colonial land history, center indigenous and migrant voices in urban forestry, and treat tree care as a public right, not a gamified chore. The trickster edge here is clear: the app’s open-source promise is a ruse, but its existence also exposes the absurdity of a system that reduces life to data points—inviting us to hack it for justice instead.