Demand for Cemetery Plots is Declining: What Happens Next? (2024)

When the time comes, we have many options for our final resting place: beneath the leafy canopy of a forest in a green burial, scattered over the ocean, or even transformed into a diamond ring. A wooden casket buried in a cemetery has long since ceased to be the only option. That this is a declining tradition is illustrated by the fact that around 340 hectares (or 476 football fields) of Berlin's cemeteries are no longer needed for graves. "For centuries, cemeteries spread so widely that they had to be built at the gates to settlements and towns. This is the first time that we are seeing cemeteries with too much space. This shift has been emerging since the 1980s and is, among other things, an expression of a change in the way in which we mourn and bury our loved ones," explains Dr. Sylvia Butenschön, research associate at the Chair of Urban Conservation and Cultural Heritage.

"Cemeteries tend to have fertile garden soil, known as necrosol, which is rich in humus, loose, 'populated' by fungi, bacteria, worms, and insects, and stores nutrients, water and CO₂," says Butenschön, who completed her Habilitation, or postdoctoral dissertation, on the history of garden culture and the conservation and restoration of historic gardens. In addition to the trees planted 100 or even 150 years ago, cemeteries are also home to shrubbery, bushes, perennials, flowers, and grasses that would not be found in other green spaces because they were primarily planted around plots, for instance in the case of evergreens, which symbolize the immortality of the soul. Butenschön adds: "From the perspective of fauna and flora, where the past is honored, the present thrives."

In order to understand how burial grounds became green lungs for the towns and cities around them, Butenschön again calls on history: From the early 19th century, the typical avenue cemeteries of the time, with their tree-lined lanes and rectangular burial plots, were located at the gates of the city. The new central cemeteries of larger cities, designed as park cemeteries in a contemporary landscape style, also emerged on the outskirts of cities at the end of the 19th century. With the rapid sprawl of cities and the upswing in residential areas since then, former suburban cemeteries became green spaces in inner-city locations.

It is largely undisputed among researchers and urban communities that vacant cemetery lots should be preserved as green spaces wherever possible. However, as Sylvia Butenschön points out, it is important to examine the specific qualities of each cemetery, i.e. its graves and distinctive plants and animals, in order to develop appropriate conversion concepts and to preserve the genius loci of each cemetery, and make it a meaningful experience. The former Neue St. Thomas-Friedhof, a cemetery in Berlin-Neukölln, is a very telling example of this. Although it has been converted into a public park, the Anita-Berber Park, as the cemetery is now called, bears little resemblance to its former purpose in its current design and atmosphere. "That may be reasonable for this cemetery, given that no burials have taken place there since the 1980s. However, it should not become the blueprint for how we repurpose cemeteries in general," concludes Dr. Sylvia Butenschön.