As part of the exhibition HOW DO WE AGGLO?, a keynote presentation “Site Matters – towards Urban Ecotone Thinking” with Prof Andrea Kahn from New York took place on Saturday 19 August. In addition, the initiators Benita Braun-Feldweg, Lisa Diedrich and Flavio Janches presented the projects that students from Cairo, Buenos Aires, Malmö and Erfurt have developed in their exploration of Berlin as a place of agglomeration.
Agglomerations are the future of our cities. The negative image of the urban fringe is a view of the past. Instead, we see unique potential in the agglomeration that must not be left to unchecked growth.
Faceless, fragmented, forgotten – this is the state of most areas in cities around the world. How can these fragmented areas be brought together? Imagine creating urban ecotones as places of friction and encounter, where spatial interventions bring people together to inhabit buildings, open spaces, urban systems and atmospheres.
Welcome to the experiment: an exhibition, 5 approaches, 4 universities and 3 disciplines to agglomerate ideas for urban living in Berlin. We want design to become a topic again: site-specific, across the hemispheres, through the professions of architecture, urban planning and landscape architecture, and anchored in theory and practice.