City Of Berlin Research Articles

Analysis of Energy Consumption in Different European Cities: The Adaptive Comfort Control Implemented Model (ACCIM) Considering Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) Scenarios

Reports of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have set various greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, through which the evolution of the temperature of the planet can be estimated throughout the 21st century. The reduction of the emissions from the different activities carried out by mankind is crucial to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. One of the most significant activities is users’ behaviour within buildings, particularly the use of Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning systems. Modifying users’ behaviour patterns to guarantee acceptable thermal conditions inside buildings could lead to considerable energy saving percentages, and adaptive thermal comfort models could be an opportunity to achieve important savings. For this reason, this study analyzes the potential to apply adaptive thermal comfort models to use artificial air-conditioning systems by modifying setpoint temperatures. The analysis was conducted in five major European cities (Barcelona, Berlin, Bern, Rome, and Vienna) and in five climate change scenarios in the year 2050. The results showed that, in general, the energy saving achieved by adaptive strategies was larger in the cities with a greater cooling demand. Also, in both Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) considered, the energy saving were decreased in the cities of Barcelona and Rome, with values lower than those of the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) scenarios considered, whereas in the cities of Berlin, Bern, and Vienna, the saving in the RCP scenarios is greater than those in the other scenarios.

Combining analytics and simulation methods to assess the impact of shared, autonomous electric vehicles on sustainable urban mobility

Urban mobility is currently undergoing three fundamental transformations with the sharing economy, electrification, and autonomous vehicles changing how people and goods move across cities. In this paper, we demonstrate the valuable contribution of decision support systems that combine data-driven analytics and simulation techniques in understanding complex systems such as urban transportation. Using the city of Berlin as a case study, we show that shared, autonomous electric vehicles can substantially reduce resource investments while keeping service levels stable. Our findings inform stakeholders on the trade-off between economic and sustainability-related considerations when fostering the transition to sustainable urban mobility.

Endangered Plants in Novel Urban Ecosystems Are Filtered by Strategy Type and Dispersal Syndrome, Not by Spatial Dependence on Natural Remnants

Understanding the contribution of cities to nature conservation is gaining increasing importance with a globally accelerating urbanization and requires insights into the mechanisms that underlie urban distribution patterns. While a considerable number of endangered plant species have been reported for cities, the spatial dependence of populations of these species on natural remnants versus anthropogenic ecosystems is critically understudied due to deficiencies in population distribution data. To which extent endangered species in anthropogenic ecosystems spatially rely on natural remnants is thus an open question. We used a unique dataset of 1,742 precisely mapped populations of 213 endangered plant species in the city of Berlin and related these point data to habitat patches that had been assigned to natural remnants, hybrid ecosystems and novel ecosystems according to the novel ecosystem approach. By applying recent techniques in point pattern analysis (Ripley's K function, cross K function, cross pair correlation function) we unraveled the spatial dependence of the populations towards the different ecosystem types. Moreover, we tested how plant traits related to plant strategy and dispersal filter for species assemblages across ecosystems. Differentiating populations on anthropogenic sites revealed that populations in hybrid ecosystems spatially depended on natural remnants, but populations in novel ecosystems (i.e. more than a third of all populations) surprisingly didn’t. A conditional inference tree showed that endangered plant species in novel ecosystems are filtered for ruderal strategy type and wind dispersal syndrome, while competitive and stress-tolerant species were assigned to natural remnants. Our results highlight the importance of conserving natural remnants as habitats and seed sources of endangered plants. Yet novel urban ecosystems can support many populations of endangered plant species beyond the adjacency to natural remnants, with hybrid ecosystems likely acting as stepping stones. This indicates a specific contribution of urban ecosystems to biodiversity conservation. Since different filters modulate the species assemblages of different ecosystem types, novel urban ecosystems are not supposed to substitute fully the habitat functions of natural remnants. Our study thus highlights promising opportunities for involving the total range of urban ecosystem types into urban conservation approaches.

Communities of struggle: the making of a protest movement around housing, migration and racism beyond identity politics in Berlin

ABSTRACT After the initial moments of political protest have passed, urban protest movements and neighbourhood initiatives often face the challenge of establishing a sustainable organizing structure in their neighbourhoods and of creating long-lasting collaborations, including maintaining relations among various participants and heterogeneous political actors in the city. This paper analyses the political practice of Kotti & Co, an urban neighbourhood initiative that has been active in political struggles pertaining to social housing and displacement and working against racism and neoliberal urban politics in the super-diverse city of Berlin. In the larger context of urban protest movements since 2011, the initiative managed to overcome a series of political challenges and to build a long-lasting organizing practice. The authors identify Kotti & Co as a ‘community of struggle’ that was able to foster a lasting movement through three elements of sustainability. The protest first managed to build bridges across and beyond its members’ differences (class, migration background, sexual orientation) by finding a common set of political demands and social practices as well as by establishing collective place-based subjectivities. These place-based subjectivities have contributed to overcoming conventional identity politics by forming a new kind of political identity through the struggle itself.

Beyond the landscape: Resistance modelling infers physical and behavioural gene flow barriers to a mobile carnivore across a metropolitan area.

Urbanization affects key aspects of wildlife ecology. Dispersal in urban wildlife species may be impacted by geographical barriers but also by a species' inherent behavioural variability. There are no functional connectivity analyses using continuous individual-based sampling across an urban-rural continuum that would allow a thorough assessment of the relative importance of physical and behavioural dispersal barriers. We used 16 microsatellite loci to genotype 374 red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) from the city of Berlin and surrounding rural regions in Brandenburg in order to study genetic structure and dispersal behaviour of a mobile carnivore across the urban-rural landscape. We assessed functional connectivity by applying an individual-based landscape genetic optimization procedure. Three commonly used genetic distance measures yielded different model selection results, with only the results of an eigenvector-based multivariate analysis reasonably explaining genetic differentiation patterns. Genetic clustering methods and landscape resistance modelling supported the presence of an urban population with reduced dispersal across the city border. Artificial structures (railways, motorways) served as main dispersal corridors within the cityscape, yet urban foxes avoided densely built-up areas. We show that despite their ubiquitous presence in urban areas, their mobility and behavioural plasticity, foxes were affected in their dispersal by anthropogenic presence. Distinguishing between man-made structures and sites of human activity, rather than between natural and artificial structures, is thus essential for better understanding urban fox dispersal. This differentiation may also help to understand dispersal of other urban wildlife and to predict how behaviour can shape population genetic structure beyond physical barriers.

Electrification of Urban Freight Transport - a Case Study of the Food Retailing Industry

Abstract Decarbonisation is a major challenge for the coming decades, for all industries, including the transport sector. Battery electric vehicles are a potential solution for the transport sector to reduce its carbon impact. Asides from the question whether there is sufficient supply of electric vehicles for freight transport, it is also unclear whether battery-powered trucks meet the practical requirements, especially in terms of their driving range. To investigate this, synthetic tours were generated by solving a Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). This also generates the fleet size and composition depending on a set of different vehicle types. The network with underlying traffic conditions comes from an publicly available transport model. The generated tours are then simulated with an open-source transport simulation (MATSim), for both diesel and battery electric vehicles (BEVs). In a sensitivity study, two different purchase prices were considered for calculating vehicle costs. The case study uses a model of the food retailing industry for the city of Berlin. 56% of the tours can be driven without recharging. When recharged one time, 90% of the tours are suitable for BEVs. The costs for transporting the goods will increase by 17 to 23% depending on the assumption for the purchase prices for the BEVs. Using a well-to-wheel calculation, the electrification of all tours leads to a reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 26 to 96% depending on the assumed electricity production.

Depicting Berlin’s Atmospheres: Phenomenographic Sketches

This article proposes an ethno-phenomenographic record combining writing and drawing. It examines a few contemporary atmospheres of the city of Berlin. We describe a selection of specific situations from the angle of sensorial experience and contextualize them with sociological, geographical and historical elements. Tackling some atmospheres characteristic of a city at a certain period of its history is not the same as trying to grasp the ways of living in it; therefore, our approach is neither sociological nor geographical per se. Elaborating on four specific cases and reflecting from our own perspectives, we will examine the hypothesis of a fragmentation of Berlin’s atmospheres, exploring the ambivalent meanings of such assessment. The method is ethnographic: we base our descriptions on direct observation and we confront our respective experiences in places physically circumscribed by architecture and urban forms, interspersed with multiple presences and interactions during the observed time sequences. The overall objective is also cooperative and interdisciplinary: the sharing of our own points of view and perceptions through drawing, speaking and writing as processes of building an account of urban phenomena, without erasing differences in perspective. Through this very partial selection of seemingly representative atmospheres over one Berlin summer, we sketch a nuanced portrait of the city that does not exclude criticism.

Detectability of CO<sub>2</sub> emission plumes of cities and power plants with the Copernicus Anthropogenic CO<sub>2</sub> Monitoring (CO2M) mission

Abstract. High-resolution atmospheric transport simulations were used to investigate the potential for detecting carbon dioxide (CO2) plumes of the city of Berlin and neighboring power stations with the Copernicus Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide Monitoring (CO2M) mission, which is a proposed constellation of CO2 satellites with imaging capabilities. The potential for detecting plumes was studied for satellite images of CO2 alone or in combination with images of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and carbon monoxide (CO) to investigate the added value of measurements of other gases coemitted with CO2 that have better signal-to-noise ratios. The additional NO2 and CO images were either generated for instruments on the same CO2M satellites (2 km× 2 km resolution) or for the Sentinel-5 instrument (7.5 km× 7.5 km) assumed to fly 2 h earlier than CO2M. Realistic CO2, CO and NOX(=NO+NO2) fields were simulated at 1 km× 1 km horizontal resolution with the Consortium for Small-scale Modeling model extended with a module for the simulation of greenhouse gases (COSMO-GHG) for the year 2015, and they were used as input for an orbit simulator to generate synthetic observations of columns of CO2, CO and NO2 for constellations of up to six satellites. A simple plume detection algorithm was applied to detect coherent structures in the images of CO2, NO2 or CO against instrument noise and variability in background levels. Although six satellites with an assumed swath of 250 km were sufficient to overpass Berlin on a daily basis, only about 50 out of 365 plumes per year could be observed in conditions suitable for emission estimation due to frequent cloud cover. With the CO2 instrument only 6 and 16 of these 50 plumes could be detected assuming a high-noise (σVEG50=1.0 ppm) and low-noise (σVEG50=0.5 ppm) scenario, respectively, because the CO2 signals were often too weak. A CO instrument with specifications similar to the Sentinel-5 mission performed worse than the CO2 instrument, while the number of detectable plumes could be significantly increased to about 35 plumes with an NO2 instrument. CO2 and NO2 plumes were found to overlap to a large extent, although NOX had a limited lifetime (assumed to be 4 h) and although CO2 and NOX were emitted with different NOX:CO2 emission ratios by different source types with different temporal and vertical emission profiles. Using NO2 observations from the Sentinel-5 platform instead resulted in a significant spatial mismatch between NO2 and CO2 plumes due to the 2 h time difference between Sentinel-5 and CO2M. The plumes of the coal-fired power plant Jänschwalde were easier to detect with the CO2 instrument (about 40–45 plumes per year), but, again, an NO2 instrument could detect significantly more plumes (about 70). Auxiliary measurements of NO2 were thus found to greatly enhance the capability of detecting the location of CO2 plumes, which will be invaluable for the quantification of CO2 emissions from large point sources.

From guests to political subjects:

This article analises how the field of protests of applicants for refuge at the Oranienplatz, in Berlim, from 2012 to 2014, challenged the logic of domopolitic, the “govern of the house” which, in excluding the foreigner, regulate and contain them in a space and present time of waiting, sustains the political belonging of the nation-State. By abandoning the dorms in which they were regulated by the State, traversing the country and occupying a square in the center of the german capital, they rejected the idea of hospitality in favor of a demand for justice. This movement supported itself through the visibility of the political bodies, even if not as a demand for spatial fixation, but of mobility, the possibility of not-being always watched. For that, it was fundamental the relation with the city of Berlin, in a neighborhood with a history of immigration and political agitation.

Contested Health Care System in Berlin: Are Illegalized Migrants Becoming Urban Citizens?

This article argues for an urban citizenship perspective which explores the struggle for rights and the everyday practices of illegalized migrants. Analyzing the concept of Anonymized Health Certificates as a result of such a struggle allows for examination of urban citizenship in this context. The implementation of the Anonymized Health Certificates program would facilitate access to medical care for people who live in the city of Berlin but are excluded from this right due to their lack of residency status. However, such a perspective also makes it possible to examine the limitation of the Anonymized Health Certificates, which would allow illegalized migrants in Berlin to circumvent access barriers, while at the same time the exclusion mechanisms of these barriers would remain uncontested at the national level. Whilst Anonymize Health Certificates will greatly improve access to medical care, illegalized migrants have by no means been passive subjects and have been actively rejecting their exclusion from health care: Practices include sharing health insurance cards with friends, visiting doctors who help for free as a form of solidarity, and sharing information about these doctors within their social networks. Even if they do not contest the social order visibly, they refuse to passively accept their social exclusion. Illegalized migrants perform such practices of urban citizenship in their everyday life as they actively take ownership of their rights to participate in urban life, even whilst being formally denied these rights.

Cool but dirty food? – Estimating the impact of grocery home delivery on transport and CO2 emissions including cooling

Recent studies have found that grocery home deliveries are partially replacing consumers’ private shopping trips thereby decreasing total vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT) and CO2 emissions. To our knowledge, such studies do not explicitly consider emissions caused by cooling. To assess the impact of home deliveries, we applied a framework consisting of passenger travel demand and delivery tour generation. Applying the models to the city of Berlin, Germany, we compare impacts in scenarios with home delivery from points of sale in the year 2030, assuming two different market shares for e-food and hot and mild air temperatures. The results show that home delivery decreases VKT and emissions, but total CO2 emissions are much higher when food cooling is included in hot scenarios and moderately higher or decreasing in mild scenarios as refrigerator units increase fuel consumption and, thus, freight transport emissions by factor two to five as compared to driving. Urban areas are more affected by adverse effects while remote and less dense areas benefit. These findings show the need for considering cooling in analyses of the effects of grocery home delivery and call for the use of more energy-efficient and less polluting technologies in delivery vehicles for driving and chilling.

Effect of cold and hot water injection on the chemical and microbial composition of an aquifer and implication for its use as an aquifer thermal energy storage

A Triassic, siliciclastic aquifer was hydraulically tested for its suitability as aquifer thermal energy storage in the city of Berlin (Germany). This study investigates the effects of groundwater mixing, change of temperature, and water-rock interactions on the chemical and microbial water composition. The water chemistry was monitored during a step rate test and two subsequent tracer push pull tests (one conducted with aquifer water and the second with heated aquifer water). Apart of the main ions and physicochemical parameters, the microbial community were determined. In addition, molecular size distribution of dissolved organic carbon as well as the stable isotope compositions of strontium and water were measured in selected samples. This comprehensive monitoring resulted in the following main findings:The chemical water composition of all analysed samples was similar to seawater with main cations and anions correlating well with each other. Although the total element content varied over time, the produced water was homogenously mixed as evidenced by constant ratios of stable water isotopes. The most remarkable observation was an extremely high aluminium concentration (up to 4.7 mM) measured in the flowback after cold water injection. This can be explained by a hydraulic connection between the Triassic Formation and an overlaying Tertiary sand. Water-rock interactions between oxygen dissolved in the injected water and the pyrite-containing Tertiary sand eventually mobilized the aluminum.The measured effect of injecting hot water into the aquifer on the chemical and microbial composition was relatively small. However, temperature-dependent reactions might still be of relevance due to (I) the generally high microbial cell numbers that could trigger microbial enhanced reactions and (II) a calculated oversaturation of calcite that might result in mineral precipitation.

Urban climate scenario data for European cities

Climate change and the urban heat effect are expected to have a large influence on the energy consumption and thermal comfort of buildings. However, using meteorological data which incorporates effects of climate change and characteristics of cities is not currently a standard practice in building simulation. By default, data of nearby meteorological stations often outside cities are used. This may lead to important discrepancies between simulation results and actual energy consumption and/or indoor climate data for buildings in urban areas. These effects are analysed within building energy part of H2020 climate-fit.city project. First, adapted urban and future meteorological data modelled using the UrbClim model and standard meteorological data were compared. Second, these data were included within the Meteonorm software (version 7.3.2). This was carried out for current climates as well as for future scenarios (RCP 4.5 and 8.5, 2050) for the cities of Barcelona, Bern, Berlin, Bremen, Prague, Rome and Vienna. Like this Meteonorm includes a combination of urban and future climates accessible in a user friendly tool.In a third step the urbanized TMY data sets generated by Meteonorm were used to simulate energy consumption, peak loads and indoor climate conditions with models of several typical buildings. In this comparison we show a simulation for a multi-family house for current and future climates. The whole-year simulation runs were compared to the reference scenario – the standard TMY (available in Bern and Vienna).For current climates heating energy consumption is 10-25% lower within cities and cooling energy up to 60% higher (Barcelona). Even bigger changes are seen for future climates: Heating loads drop by up to 30% and cooling loads rise more than 100% (they are 2-3 times higher than heating loads in Barcelona by 2050).

Integrated and Participatory Design of Sustainable Development Strategies on Multiple Governance Levels

An increasing number of sustainable development strategies (SDS) is being developed for cities, municipalities and countries. The design of such strategies is inherently complex. This is a result from intricate relationships between different SDS on different levels, and a large number of requirements that need to be addressed in strategy implementation. A particular challenge is the integration of strategies across different governance levels (e.g., city, federal, and national levels). Methodologies are currently lacking to systematically design SDS which take the full complexity of the dependencies of the strategies into account. In this article, we propose a participatory requirements analyses approach to support strategy building across governance levels. Experience from systems engineering (SE) has shown, that requirements are the basis for designing systems or strategies. We elicit requirements by applying a participatory modeling approach with causal-loop diagrams in an individual interview setting. To illustrate our approach, we test the developed design approach and focus on the interdependencies between SDS at the city level (i.e., the cities of Berlin and Hamburg) and the German national SDS. The design process reveals critical factors which are needed for the overall success of the strategies. The resulting causal models reveal that despite coordination activities of the regional objectives with the national targets, trade-offs exist between the strategies regarding the underlying conditions for their implementation (e.g., national law, federal and state law). In addition, the level of detail of requirements for certain objectives at the national level and across sectors is too general. This hinders the emergence of system-wide co-benefits of possible solution strategies. Requirements analysis can highlight interdependencies, such as trade-offs and synergies, between strategies at multiple governance levels and, based upon this, can support a more coherent strategy design.

Risk assessment concerning urban ecosystem disservices: The example of street trees in Berlin, Germany

Urban green infrastructure, including street trees, is thought to play an important role in providing urban ecosystem services (UES) such as carbon sequestration and air quality improvement. The concept of urban ecosystem disservices (UEDS) is comparably new in landscape ecology. Research into UEDS assessment is low compared to that of UES. This paper demonstrates an approach to assess the distribution of UEDS risks caused by street trees within the city of Berlin. The approach adapts concepts from urban ecosystem service and natural hazard and risk research to demonstrate the importance of including context-specific vulnerability indicators as additional information in the assessment of UEDS risks. A cluster analysis is carried out to recognize patterns in UEDS risk distribution throughout the city. The paper demonstrates, that using context indicators in addition to biophysical indicators supports the assessment of UEDS as part of the relationship between humans and the environment.

Urban natural environments and motor development in early life

An emerging body of evidence has associated natural environments with improved brain development in children; however, these studies have mainly focused on cognition and available evidence for motor development is still scarce. This study aimed to evaluate the protective association of neighbourhood greenspace with motor development deficits in children. We obtained data on motor development deficits (separately for fine and gross motor developments) at sub-district level from routine medical check-up of children prior to enrolment into primary schools in the city of Berlin (2015–2016). Neighbourhood natural environments across the sub-districts were measured with three different metrics: the average of satellite-based normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), the share of public green spaces, and the share of both public blue and green spaces (composite nature) across the sub-district. We applied negative binominal models to estimate the association between neighbourhood natural environments and fine and gross motor development deficits (one at a time), controlled for relevant sociodemographic indicators. Higher neighbourhood public green space and composite nature were significantly associated with lower risk of motor development deficits; however, the association were not statistically significant when using NDVI. Our findings, if confirmed by future studies, could provide evidence for implementing targeted interventions to enhance motor development in urban children.

Methane emissions from contrasting urban freshwaters: Rates, drivers, and a whole‐city footprint

Global urbanization trends impose major alterations on surface waters. This includes impacts on ecosystem functioning that can involve feedbacks on climate through changes in rates of greenhouse gas emissions. The combination of high nutrient supply and shallow depth typical of urban freshwaters is particularly conducive to high rates of methane (CH4 ) production and emission, suggesting a potentially important role in the global CH4 cycle. However, there is a lack of comprehensive flux data from diverse urban water bodies, of information on the underlying drivers, and of estimates for whole cities. Based on measurements over four seasons in a total of 32 water bodies in the city of Berlin, Germany, we calculate the total CH4 emission from various types of surface waters of a large city in temperate climate at 2.6±1.7GgCH4 /year. The average total emission was 219±490mgCH4 m-2 day-1 . Water chemical variables were surprisingly poor predictors of total CH4 emissions, and proxies of productivity and oxygen conditions had low explanatory power as well, suggesting a complex combination of factors governing CH4 fluxes from urban surface waters. However, small water bodies (area <1ha) typically located in urban green spaces were identified as emission hotspots. These results help constrain assessments of CH4 emissions from freshwaters in the world's growing cities, facilitating extrapolation of urban emissions to large areas, including at the global scale.

The influence of condition assessment uncertainties on sewer deterioration modelling

Deterioration models can be used to forecast the evolution of the condition of the sewer network under different investment strategies. Models are calibrated using condition scores obtained from sewer visual inspection. Many studies highlighted the uncertainties in the procedure of sewer condition assessment, mainly due to the subjectivity of the coding operator. However, the influence of this uncertainty on the outcomes of deterioration modelling remains unknown. This paper analyses the influence of sewer condition uncertainties on the prediction of deterioration models. An optimisation methodology has been applied to quantify uncertainties in sewer condition assessment from the analysis of a set of repeated inspections. Then, a method is proposed to propagate uncertainties in the survival curves of a deterioration model using the inspection dataset of the city of Berlin, Germany. Results indicate that old pipes in bad condition are more prone to False Negative than False Positive (higher probability to miss defects). As a result, the propagation of uncertainties leads to more pessimistic survival curves with a confidence interval of ±12% at 100 years. The analysis shows that the required replacement rate to maintain a constant network condition is underestimated if uncertainties are not considered.

Impact of artificial illumination on the development of a leafmining moth in urban trees

Light emission from street lighting or other light sources alters the living conditions for organisms in urban areas. Nowadays, the impact of light at night (ALAN) on urban plants and their trophic environment is not well understood. To gain more insight about herbivore plant’s interaction when exposed to ALAN, outdoor and greenhouse tests were conducted using the horse-chestnut leafminer, Cameraria ohridella, as a test organism due to its adaptive behavior. At the end of the season, the development of chestnut tree leaves and the leafminer were measured at illuminated versus non-illuminated sites in the city of Berlin and the rural area of Brandenburg. Illuminated leaves were larger than those grown in darker rural areas and, extended larval activity was recorded. Additionally, in the greenhouse, infested chestnut seedlings were exposed to two different light regimes; one treatment provided continuous illumination and the other short daylight conditions. After only one week, the mine size was lower on illuminated seedlings, presumably due to reduced leaf senescence. The leafminer developed a lower proportion of diapausing pupae and a higher proportion of free pupae, which leads to a further generation within the season. The results indicate a strong impact of ALAN on plant metabolism, a secondary effect on leafminer development and its larval activity. For urban trees, the consequence might be an increased herbivore / parasite pressure. For herbivores and parasites less adapted to winter damages than the invasive leafminer a reduced dormancy due to direct or indirect effects of ALAN could even threat the population.

Places where Famous Ophthalmologist Albrecht Von Graefe Lived and Worked in Berlin

Many things are said and written about famous ophthalmologist Albrecht von Graefe. This work gives detailed description of the places where he lived and practiced ophthalmology in Berlin, because very little was written about it and never in one paper. Von Graefe was born in 1828 in villa Finkenherd in the north-west part of Tiergarten in Berlin. He lived in Behrenstrasse, one of the fashionable streets in Berlin, where he began his ophthalmological practice in 1850. Later, in 1852 he founded a famous private eye clinic in Karlstrasse 46 where he treated numerous eye patients and educated many prominent ophthalmologists and surgeons. Several times he had changed his residence addresses. Among other places, he also stayed in Unter den Linden Avenue and Bellevuestrasse near Potsdamer Platz. In 1868 he became the head of the eye clinic in the Charité Hospital. Since then he lived in a spacious house on Viktoriastrasse until his death in 1870. Although Albrecht von Graefe lived only 42 years, he travelled a lot, but most of his life he spent in the city of Berlin. Graefe made many contributions to ophthalmology being considered the "father of glaucoma" and the nestor of modern ophthalmology.