New build - GWG München

Living together in the
Maikäfer Estate:
The role of GWG München
Posters, flyers and chants: In the mid-1980s, emotions were
running high after it was announced that the Maikäfer Estate
was to undergo fundamental modernisation. Many tenants
feared they would lose not only their homes but also their
neighbourhoods, not to mention the sensationally low rents
close to the city centre, and their beloved gardens. The MIG,
not a Russian fighter plane but the abbreviation for the
“Association for the Preservation of the Maikäfer Estate”,
mobilised itself. By the end of the 1980s, the interest group
numbered more than 250 members. The resistance it put up
was creative and successful, thanks to its well organised meetings
in the Echardinger Einkehr public house and the green
stickers bearing the legend “I mag d’Maikäfersiedlung” (“I like
the Maikäfer Estate”).
It was not without reason that the tenants rejected demolition
and change. Originally built as affordable National Socialist
“people’s apartments” in 1936, the area had for years been
known for its sense of solidarity and neighbourliness, born out
of an organically nurtured sense of community. In a survey,
eighty percent of the tenants stated they would remain in the
estate even if no renovation was carried out.
When a compromise was finally reached in the early 1990s
and the renovation of the estate finally took off, the former
housing lawyer and current Lord Mayor, Christian Ude, repeated
the three essential elements of the Maikäfer estate:
trees, gardens and low rents. All three of these aspects have
been preserved. To this day, even after the in part complex
modernisation of the estate in the Munich suburb of Berg am
Laim, it is still characterised as much by its green spaces as it is
by the sense of identity of its residents.
Aerial photograph of the Maikäfer Estate in 2009
Bad-Schachener-Strasse (left), Echardinger Strasse (top) and
St.-Michael-Strasse (bottom). In between (from top to
bottom), Krumbadstrasse, Heilbrunner Strasse, Höhenstadter
Strasse, Kainzenbadstrasse and Bad-Kissingen-Strasse.
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