Baulücken inside the Ring

Empty building sites in Berlin, found in the land register and checked against 2024 aerial photos. How many homes could go there?

How we found them

–

apartments in total, from

Planning assumptions

Ground coverage Share of the site the building covers (GRZ). Berlin block edges often reach 0.6.

Height cap Gaps match the party walls on either side. Free-standing sites may go up to 1.5× their surroundings, as far as the 0.4 H setback from neighbours' windows still leaves a 12 m deep footprint. This caps both.

Floor area per apartment Gross, incl. stairs and walls. 80% of floor area counts as usable.

Planning limits

Leave out listed monuments Leave out flood zones Leave out noise above 65 dB Only land zoned for housing or mixed use Only near S-/U-Bahn (600 m) or tram (400 m)

Sources: Denkmalkarte, flood zone ordinances, strategic noise map 2022, land-use plan (FNP), VBB stations via OpenStreetMap.

What the empty sites look like

By neighbourhood

How this was made

All land parcels in Berlin from the ALKIS land register (42,000 inside the Umweltzone, which is exactly the S-Bahn Ring).
Keep parcels with little on them according to the register's building footprints.
Drop parcels overlapping parks, playgrounds, cemeteries, allotments, schools, water or rail, or crossed by a street.
Merge neighbouring empty parcels into sites, so a lot split into many strips counts as one.
Sort sites into tiers: gaps between buildings up to 1.5 ha (conservative), up to 5 ha with a neighbour (middle), up to 20 ha (everything).
Check every site on the 2024 true-orthophoto by eye: vacant, parking, construction site, already built, green space, open space between slab blocks, public space or other.
Apartments = area × ground coverage × floors × 0.8 ÷ floor area per apartment.
Extra floors: residential buildings lower than the building they share a wall with are raised to its eaves line (max +2; mansard roofs already hold a floor). Free-standing flat roofs of 3–6 floors get +1. Roof shapes from the LoD2 3D city model.
Supermarkets: single-storey stores from OpenStreetMap matched to the land register, with homes on top up to the surrounding height; Middle and Everything also build over their surface car parks.

A rough screen, not a planning verdict. Ownership, detailed zoning plans (B-Pläne), structural capacity and soil contamination are not checked; heritage, flood zones, noise and the land-use plan are, at the site's centre point. Data: Geoportal Berlin (dl-de/zero-2.0: ALKIS, LoD2 3D model, orthophotos 2024, land-use plan, land values 2025, flood zones, strategic noise map 2022), Denkmalkarte Berlin, Landesdenkmalamt Berlin (dl-de/by-2.0), © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), OpenFreeMap.