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    Berlin Brandenburg 2040: IN TOUCH

    course description

    Teaching

    Introductory presentation: Thursday 29.10.2020 | 14:00 – 16:00 physical (Forum)/online

    The first semester of the Urban Design Studio will investigate the potential of infrastructure networks to connect the city‘s cores with its hinterland and beyond – case in point Berlin and Bran- denburg. Infrastructures both create connections and establish territories, but also cut and disrupt landscapes.

    Travelling to sites and surveying locations, we will investigate current and future infrastructures as well as infrastructures that have become obsolete and remain as ruins in the metropolitan landscape. Trailing urban transformations occurring along the in- tersections of various infrastructures, we will endeavor to inves- tigate their pasts, qualify the present and analyze the potential of the intersections in order to speculate on their roles in the future.

    Our present, shaped by the global pandemic or climate change induced droughts and heat waves, brings the grave challenges to an already highly complex urban system to the fore. In order to make a future living in Berlin-Brandenburg inclusive, equitable and ecologically sustainable – values we hold dear – will require a number of vital systemic changes and infrastructural turns.

    Students will work in interdisciplinary groups exploring a varie- ty of infrastructure along specific routes. We will use speculative scenario building and for- and back-casting techniques to explore what changes and interventions in the near future should be initi- ated to bring about necessary change. Students will then develop tenders and design briefings as a basis for a comprehensive plan- ning proposal.

    The Studio will be held both online and physical. Excursions are planned.
    For current information please check the Webstites of CUD, Habitat Unit or TU Urban Design Master.

    Teaching: WM David Bauer, WM Veljko Markovic, LA Andrijana Ivanda

    Image: CUD

    Berlin XX XL* [Studio]

    Course Description

    Teaching

    Urban Design Studio

    In the context of the forthcoming 2020 centenary of Greater-Berlin the studio will look at the city’s past (built, unbuild, destroyed, forgotten) and present (contested, procrastinating, path-dependent) to speculate on its future (socially and ecologically aware, sustainable, beautiful). Based on the study of current transformation drivers as well as local/global tendencies students will use an imagined Berlin placed in the years 2040/2070 as a laboratory for scenario building through speculative design approaches. Revisiting the bold move that unified eight independent cities, 59 rural communities and 27 estates within a single legislative act in 1919, the studio will rethink administrative boundaries, spatial constellations, infrastructures and resource flows from Mitte to the Hinterlands.

    Divergent scenarios will be developed with help of external experts on topics ranging from transformation design, climate change, resource and food security, energy, age or housing – combining research with speculative design in a playful manner. The studio will participate in the open urban design competition “100 years of (greater) Berlin International Urban Design Ideas Competition Berlin-Brandenburg 2070”.

    * Roman numereals “20 40” I Generic Sizes “Superlarge”

    (fig: Behind the Scenes of “Metropolis”, 1925-1926 (source: https://www.flavorwire.com/), recollaged by VM)