Tenant engagement in Germany

Berlin, Germany Awareness-raising and training, Climate sustainability

Description

Many renovation projects have shown that tenants are often poorly engaged with renovation activities or are even misinformed about the planned works. Many successful approaches for tenant engagement and communication strategies exist.[1]

A prominent example of tenant engagement is the tenant council (Mieterbeirat) in Germany. Tenants’ councils are elected representatives regarding the tenants’ interests in a respective state. They represent a position of tolerance and solidarity towards all cultures and promote the coexistence of all residents of a neighbourhood. Tenants’ advisory councils and building owners are called upon to work together responsibly and constructively to improve the living situation as well as social, cultural and neighbourly relationships to the mutual satisfaction of the tenants, according to Degewo[2].

The multi-building renovation processes of the DREEAM project involves different stages and one of them is the tenant engagement stage. This means that tenants are already involved even before the renovation process starts.[3]

Scale

local

More information

[1] Kathleen Zoonnekindt (Savills), “Final analysis on the tenants engagement and communication strategies”, ver. 5, paper prepared for a DREEAM project, 30 September 2019. Available at https://dreeam.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/D.4.8_Final-analysis-on-tenants-engagement-and-communication-strategies-compressed.pdf (accessed on 10 October 2020).

[2] Degewo, “Advisory Boards in the Neighbourhoods”. Available at https://www.degewo.de/wohnen-service/mitbestimmung/beiraete/ (accessed on 5 April 2021).

[3] DREEAM Tenant Engagement, YouTube video, 4:15, posted by “DREEAM Project”, 26 September 2018. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFlgd9usnXo amd www.dreeam.eu/multimedia/ (accessed on 27 October 2020).

https://dreeam.eu/