From Tegel and Tempelhof to large tracts of urban land where the Wall used to be: Berlin is a site for large-scale landscape transformations, ad-hoc appropriations and new urban prototypes. Against this backdrop, Make City will make the notion of urban commons a key focus: exploring the nature of those spaces and urban resources of the city that are shared and collectively experienced.
As cities are increasingly regarded as enterprises to be competitively managed in the pursuit of economic growth – now more than ever before – the commons takes on greater significance as a political process. They are a crucial tool to be employed in what Michael Hardt describes as the ‘act of making and reclaiming that which we manage collectively’. In keeping with this idea of wide scale participation, urban commons can be seen as civic spaces that allow for the free, unhampered exchange of ideas. In this way, the act of commoning (Gemeinschaffen) becomes a collective exercise through which such spaces may be rethought and ultimately reinvented.
Make City will bring together designers, thinkers and makers who are engaged with the different facets that make up this social project – the redesigning of social ecosystems, the reshaping of the urban landscape, the strengthening of a civic economy that drives alternative forms of exchange, and the reclaiming of the spaces of the commons.
IMAGE: Péage Sauvage for Estuaire, Nantes by Observatorium, Rotterdam