Exploring Darmstadt
I love exploring towns and cities in trams or regular buses, as you see the city from an intimate and personal angle. If like I did this in Darmstadt, alighting when I saw something that took my interest. These pictures show a history of my short visit to the city.
I started by going to the main square called Luisenplatz with its column and statue of Ludwig 1. I finally found a cappuccino in a rather pleasant Italian cafe.
I then walked to the castle and then back to another main square by the old town hall. On a better day, it would have been a pleasant walk and there were a couple of museums that seemed to be closed because of rebuilding. At least I found a very good tourist map of the city, which was magnitudes better than anything found in Frankfurt.
I also came across a BT phone-box, which appeared to enclose a working German telephone. Does anybody use them any more? And especially in a smaller city in Germany!
I then went to see Waldspirale, which is one of Friedensreich Hundertwasser amazingly mad buildings. Another in this blog is at Spittelau in Vienna. One other work of his, I must see is the station at Uelzen in Germany. Some might think Hundertwasser completely bonkers, but he certainly created buildings that entertain.
I wonder what it’s like to live in one of those eccentric flats in Darmstadt.
Spittelau
In Vienna if there is one place I had to see, it is Spittelau.
You walk out of the station of the same name and it’s there, only a kilometre or so from the centre of Vienna.
When you first see it, you think it is some weird work of art or even a chemical plant designed by a benign Devil.
It’s actually a waste incineration plant, which provides district heating and to be fair it’s more beautiful than SELCHP.
The world needs a lot more Spittelaus. As they often do, the Japanese are copying the ideas in Osaka.
It is a superb example that shows the close relationship between art, engineering and architecture.
Can you imagine the fuss, if they decided to build a plant like this at say Silvertown in East London? On the other hand, the plant shows that refuse incinerators can be good neighbours.
Every large city should have it’s Spittelau!
The Waste Incinerator at Edmonton
Whilst I was in IKEA, I took this picture of the waste incinerator at Edmonton.
The Waste Incinerator at Edmonton
To some the incinerator is controversial and some such as Greenpeace want it shut down.
The solution to a lot of rubbish is recycling, but then the proportion recycled in London is lower than in many other parts of the country. It is probably easier to get people to sort their rubbish in larger sizes of dwelling, as they have more space for the various bins. So at the end of the day, there will be either a lot of waste for landfill or incineration. Hackney tries hard and the recyclers are a sensible bunch, but are all of the residents.
So whether people like it or not, there will always be a need for incineration.
Perhaps we should follow the Austrian solution.
Fridenreich Hundertwasser was a controversial Austrian artist and architect.
I remember seeing somewhere that he didn’t like incinerators, so Vienna asked him to see if he could do better. He came up with the waste powered heating system at Spittelau powered by waste.
District Heating System at Spittelau
It certainly looks better than Edmonton.
So perhaps we should get the best artists and architects to design incinerators and other buildings like power stations and sewage works so we can be proud of them. Isn’t that what Joseph Bazalgette did with Abbey Mills? Obviously, we must also get the technology right, so the only things that emerge from the plant is energy and clean air and water.
A properly designed plant would be so much better than the alternative of landfill.
The other technology we need is an automatic system that sorts rubbish into the various types of recyclables and what must be buried or burnt. But that will come in the next few years!
I’m also very much in favour of rewarding councils that recycle a high proportion of their waste. trucks are easily weighed on leaving and return from the depots, so it is easy to work out how much rubbish is recycled overall. You could even work it out on a round-by-round basis and reward the operatives and residents appropriately.
But I am against weighing individual bins, as that is unpopular on the one hand and could lead to all sorts of unsavoury practices on the other.
I do think though, that it might be possible to incentivise people to recycle bottles and akuminium cans, by paying a collective bounty to the area round the recycling points. I laid out my thoughts here.
The Anonymous Widower 