Wood is a construction material for affordable housing, an important CO2 storage source, and also part of Industry 4.0 in Berlin TXL. With the project Bauhütte 4.0 comes the creation, within Berlin TXL – The Urban Tech Republic, of an innovation and production site for a digitalized value-creation chain called "Forest to City". The construction concepts and manufactured components developed in Bauhütte 4.0 are being used in the adjacent residential buildings of the district.

Schumacher Quartier will provide upwards of 5,000 homes for more than 10,000 people and is expected to become a model residential district for urban timber construction. The buildings in the very first construction phase will be built using a minimum percentage of timber of 50%. In this phase, different types of construction, both established and experimental, are expected to be implemented and the timber content in the next phases of construction will gradually be increased.

The term Bauhütte 4.0 refers to the long period of the Bauhütte Movement and the construction of social housing in early 20th century Berlin. The partners involved in Bauhütte 4.0 are Tegel Projekt GmbH, the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology (IPK) and the Department of Urban Planning and Sustainable Urban Development of the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin). Six core themes have been defined for the curated site:

Goals of Bauhütte 4.0

• Convert cities into CO2 storage spaces and promote climate neutrality
• Transform Europe's building culture towards a bio-based, circular economy
• Innovative production processes for scalable and even more inexpensive multi-story timber construction in cities
• Integrated value-creation chain consisting of timber construction, processing, planning, parts production, building, maintenance, and ultimate disposal via the exchange of digital information between all the trades involved
• Promote the Berlin-Brandenburg as a business location by developing a sustainable Industry 4.0 that enjoys global demand