About

Hello and welcome!

This is a project documenting all the streets in Berlin, Germany that are named after a woman. Why? Because less than 5% of Berlin's streets and squares are named after women, compared to nearly 29% named after men. To counter this, a quota is in effect in certain boroughs (like Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg), meaning that any new street built must be named after a woman. This is part of what's known as gender mainstreaming.

On top of this, while many of these names are well-known in Germany, in some cases there is little or no information about the person available in English. That makes no sense, since Berlin is known for being a city with residents and visitors from all over the world, many of whom are drawn to it precisely because of its layers of history. Some of these figures will ring more bells than others; even if we don't know exactly what they're known for, they're part of our daily lives in Berlin. For instance, anyone who's taken a Sunday stroll from Alexanderplatz to Kollwitzplatz will have heard of Rosa Luxemburg; she has a whole street and a square. But they might not be aware of exactly how she shaped Berlin as we know it today.

After the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, swathes of vacant land sprung up not only along the parts where it had physically divided the city for 28 years, but also in spaces where decrepit GDR-era buildings had been knocked down, and on the outskirts of the city as it grows. Since then, rapid development and the resulting permastate of 'becoming and never being' (art critic Karl Scheffler, 1910) is said to characterise Berlin. Within the constraints of this project, the areas where this phenomenon is perhaps most obvious are in highly developed commercial centres, such as at Hauptbahnhof (west of Washingtonplatz) and off Warschauer Straße (around the Uber Arena). But also, in random corners of Neukölln where you probably can't get a flat white with oat milk served to you by a Melburnian!

Some other core concepts guiding this project are digital humanities, psychogeography, and geocaching.

About the creator

My name is Rosamund. I'm a Berlin-based software developer with a background in translation and writing, originally from the UK. I've always been obsessed with maps and streets, even designing my own towns as a kid...

Since moving here more than a decade ago, my fascination has reached a whole new level, and luckily there's still quite a bit for me left to uncover. I got the idea for this project when on my lockdown walks, I started noticing how many Berlin streets — particularly newer ones — were named after women. Whenever I looked them up later on, I was often impressed by their stories of courage, sacrifice, innovation, and frequently tragedy, but was also struck by how many of them were unknown in the English-speaking world.

Details about how I built the project are here. Questions about the project's contents are answered here.