CityLAB Berlin & Gieß den Kiez
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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CityLAB Berlin, a public civic-tech lab opened in 2019 by the Technologiestiftung Berlin and funded by the Senate Chancellery, builds open-source urban prototypes. Its flagship, Gieß den Kiez (2020), maps roughly 625,000 of Berlin's street and park trees from the open tree cadastre plus weather-service data, letting residents adopt trees and log their watering through drought summers. A related research project, QTrees, adds AI irrigation forecasting.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →Sources
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Compare this project
A tree with an ID number: four registers, four things the number is for
Giving every tree a record is the same technical act everywhere. What differs is what the record is then used for — and in one case the register turned out to audit the campaign that created it.
| Project | Since | Status | Outcome | Evidence | Run by | Cost | What the record is for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Urban Forest Visual & Email-a-TreeMelbourne, 🇦🇺 | 2013 | Live | Succeeded | Independent | City government | not public | An arborists' inventory that accidentally became a public relationship: every street tree carries an ID, a species and an estimate of its remaining useful life — and residents started writing to them. |
| Bangkok's Million-Tree RegisterBangkok, 🇹🇭 | 2022 | Live | Ongoing | Official | City government | not public | An audit of the city's own headline. When the first million was declared, the register showed only about a third of the records were trees; the rest were shrubs and climbers. |
| CityLAB Berlin & Gieß den KiezBerlin, 🇩🇪 | 2019 | Live | Ongoing | Official | Civil society | not public | A task list. The open tree cadastre plus weather data tells residents which tree needs water, and logs who watered it through the drought summers. |
| Freetown the Treetown Mobile Token SystemFreetown, 🇸🇱 | 2020 | Live | Ongoing | Official | City government | not public | A payment record. Community growers are paid by mobile money against geotagged photos of the tree they planted, and survival is what the money is measured on. |
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “CityLAB Berlin & Gieß den Kiez” — Berlin, Germany. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/berlin-citylab-giessdenkiez/ (last verified 2026-07-25). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.