A Soft and Caring Infrastructure
When thinking about urban infrastructure, we tend to think about essential facilities that make cities livable, such as roads, sewage treatment, or electrical grids. Ever-present yet overlooked, these are systems that are typically only noticed when they break down: power cuts, water shortages, traffic jams. Some of these infrastructural facilities were built decades ago as monofunctional entities that serve one particular purpose and, as a result, exist today as isolated and enclosed chunks of space within the urban fabric. They are planned by the state, built and managed by expert technicians, and are largely inaccessible to the public.
Today, urban infrastructures have become complex and messy. They can be seen as much more than just old pipes, cables, and containers. Urban infrastructures are deeply entangled with the landscape and the biodiversity of the environment in which they intervene. This entanglement is further complicated by the fact that urban infrastructures are traditionally sites of expertise. These infrastructures appear difficult to read and, as a result, impossible to alter.
But what happens when an urban infrastructural space is opened up – its function hybridized and its use collectivized? What protocols, routines, schedules and choices manifest when an urban infrastructure is infused with care: softened and layered with diverse meanings? Can these new circumstances transform urban infrastructures into spaces for commoning and platforms for public debates?
A soft and caring infrastructure collaborates with the existing environment and its agents. Such is the case of the Floating University in Berlin. 1 The site was designed in the early 1930s as a rainwater retention basin to serve the Tempelhof airfield and adjacent avenues, and it was encased in concrete after the Second World War by the US Army. Today, it remains as a fully functioning water infrastructure, holding and diverting rainwater into the city’s canal system. Buried eight meters beneath street level, the basin is also surrounded by a “Gartenkolonie” – an allotment or community garden – and is almost invisible to passersby.
From the time of its construction in 1930 to its activation in 2018, the basin was closed off to the public. Yet over the course of its many secluded decades, a diverse range of animals, plants, and algae took root and gave birth to a unique landscape: a man-made environment reclaimed by nature, forming what Gilles Clément describes as a third landscape, which includes sites that are “left behind (délaissé) urban or rural sites, transitional spaces, neglected land (friches), swamps, moors, peat bogs, but also roadsides, shores, railroad embankments, etc.” 2
After Tempelhof airport was decommissioned in 2008, the city’s redevelopment plan proposed building over the airfield and relocating the neighboring rainwater infrastructure. This would have transformed the 22,500-square-meter city-owned piece of land occupied by the basin into a valuable, profitable asset in Berlin’s real estate portfolio. However, the Tempelhof referendum of 2014 saw Berliners vote against any kind of construction on the airfield. The result of this referendum not only protected the unique inner-city hybrid green space (Tempelhofer Feld) but also provided protection for the basin.
As part of ongoing cultural activities on and around Tempelhof airport, the architecture group raumlabor initiated the activation of the rainwater basin site in 2018. Having been involved with public action groups around the airfield as well as cultural collaborations, such as the 2012 “The World Is Not Fair Fair” with the HAU theatre, raumlabor wanted to open up this unique and hidden site for all Berlin residents to use and enjoy. They reimagined the site as an “Off-shore Campus for Cities in Transformation.” From April to September 2018, the Floating University invited varied constellations of students, professors, summer schools, and self-organized groups, mainly from the design and art fields, to develop their own curricula and experiment on and with the site. Aside from inviting institutions to free themselves from their own rigid and often restrictive structures, the open program engaged with the general public by offering a wide range of activities, including theatre performances, BMX riding, and bee-keeping workshops.
The Birth of Floating University e.V.
The founding year of the Floating University saw a diverse range of visitors involved to varying degrees with the activity on site, creating a unique social and environmental ecosystem. Like an orchestra without a conductor, this apparent chaos not only encouraged diversity but, more importantly, allowed the unexpected and the unplanned to emerge. Moreover, the program consolidated a network of practitioners who, towards the end of 2018, decided to continue the experiment by transitioning from a “temporary” project to an association: Floating University e.V. The Floating University was registered as a non-profit with an elected board and monthly assemblies where all members have an equal voice.
This transition from a temporary intervention to a long-term engagement demanded a profound shift in our constitution as a self-organized group. Designed as a permanently ongoing process, our association involved radically revising routines and habits of being and doing: decision-making processes were made more transparent, different types of labor were de-hierarchized (from cleaning the toilet or writing a contract, to building a bench or giving a lecture), and budget sessions were made participatory.
It was precisely this new legal structure that caught the attention of the Berlin authorities. Shortly after consolidating the association as a registered voluntary association under German law, whose foundational statute declares that the association’s main purpose is the promotion of the general public through education, we were subject of an inquiry by the Berlin Senate of Education. The letter we received read: “I hereby notify you that the use of the word ‘University’ without being entitled to do so under Berlin state law (Section 123 Berlin Higher Education Act) or under the law of another state or country is a misdemeanor under Section 125, Paragraph 1, No. 1 Berlin Higher Education Act, punishable by a fine of up to €100,000.00.” 3
The term “University,” we learned, is a protected term – you can’t just call yourself a “university.” As a temporary art project, it was no problem, but as a registered educational entity we posed a threat to the formal educational system. We were forced to formally drop the word university from all legal documentation. However, still keen to challenge the institutional narrative, we decided to use the strikethrough (University) in all other instances: online, in print, on site, etc. Our contested relationship with the word and its associations thus remain visible.
Practices and Pedagogies
Today, Floating e.V continues to grow as a site-symbiotic organization where heterogeneous interests translate into projects, interventions, events, and installations. We organize in groups that work on specific tasks and topics driven by interest and desires – or what we also like to call “Fields of Knowledge and Action.” Among other activities, the association looks at how to create an economy onsite and how to develop its city-wide network both with the community and the political decision-makers affecting the site. We spend time together attending to all aspects of the Floating site, including maintenance and design of new architectures, events, learning programs, communications, and gardening. A large number of the academic and artistic programs that emerge on site are bounded by loose instructions and infrastructures and emphasize open intentions and frames of work.
Curiosity is a driving pedagogical tool. We observe, mimic, try things out, and engage. The very nature of the site demands exchanges with others, both human and nonhuman. Nonverbal signifiers often replace spoken or written instructions. A perfect example of these forms of exchange is the rubber boots lying around everywhere. The boots have no signs or directions. People simply wear them to step into the water. It is self-explanatory, but it also requires another form of being curiously active and willing to embody the site through one’s own tacit experiences. The physical act of lifting a watering can make us aware of how much water is used to flush a toilet. On days when the site is inundated with heavy rain, we monitor the rising water level until the site becomes untenable or flooded completely; in these moments, we learn to experience rain as a volume of water as opposed to an event with a specific length of time.
In 2019, following the establishment of the association and responding to emerging international climate movements such as Fridays for Futures and Extinction Rebellion, the festival program “Climate Care” sought to address climate breakdown through a curriculum for urban practice. The program was designed to provide ideas and methodologies – theories and practices – through which groups and individuals could address climate challenges.
Through the Climate Care festival, Floating University was reimagined as a “Natureculture Learning Site.” We borrowed the idea of Natureculture from Donna Haraway, 5 who argues for the dissolution of the chasm between humans and Nature (with a capital N, objectified and othered). 6 Following this term, we focused on learning as a form of living, understanding each action we took in the basin as a learning process. We invited others to learn with us and to acknowledge our relations with the site and how we cohabitate with its many living forms. It is in this approach that Floating University situates its mission: to open, soften, maintain, and take care of this unique public urban infrastructure, its human culture, and its multispecies over-layers, while bringing nondisciplinary, radical, and collaborative programs to the public.
Climate Care
In the 1990s, Joan Tronto introduced the concept of “care” into political philosophy, arguing for care as a basis for radical political judgments and the future cornerstone for a revitalized democracy. 7 The ethics of care challenge us to construct social relations and systems based on relational and situational morality, beyond abstract or universal notions of justice. These theories and practices of care 8 offer ways of relating and living, of perceiving and making, both as a society and as individuals engaged in mutual responsibility, attentiveness, and responsiveness. 9
From this perspective, the ethics of care offers us an applicable set of ideas and alternative social norms to establish pathways for support, trust and, conviviality, promoting diversity, polyvocality, and respect for each other’s differences.
Climate Care, the biannual ten-day festival we curate, takes on this definition and set of values and extends it to the diverse, complex, and evocative site of the Floating University. The questions the festival engages with include: How might we care daily for our earth, ourselves, our community, and our education? What kind of infrastructure could we create at the Floating University in order to help practices of care at different scales? How do those practices draw on and relate to the physical surroundings and the environment? How do we hold space and situate sites for the complexity of our moment?
The first edition of Climate Care (2019) explored the interplay between ecology, pedagogies, and ethics of care. The second edition of Climate Care (2021) critically explored the notion of rewilding, questioning both the biological and ethical implications of this intervention at micro and macro levels.
During Climate Care, artists, thinkers, scientists, activists, and designers are invited to propose educational modules that encourage embodied and tacit knowledge to emerge from experiences on site. From compost making, experimentation with bio-materials, and the construction of urban hives, to weather writing and “tuning-in” methods, the festival urges participants to look at practices of care on a planetary scale and explore the concept of environmental personhood within the basin itself.
Natura Basina
It is simple to see how our presence has been beneficial for the diverse life forms on site. Look at the edges of the buildings, and you will see plants growing along them in greater numbers than in the open center of the basin. By slowing the water down, our disturbances – in the forms of temporary and mobile architectures, walking, growing edible plants, studying this site – have supported the build-up of sediment in the basin.
When water slows down, sediment (particles of sand, silt, and clay) falls out of it. In this sediment, plant roots can take hold and create habitats for frogs to procreate, baby ducks to be born, and foxes to hunt. The plants also slow the water down, enabling more sediment to build up and more plants to grow. The cycle is co-constituting. Algae are another entity in the basin that contributes to the build-up of the mud. After floods, algae often bloom in thick mats. When the water drains out of the basin into the Landwehrkanal and Spree River, the algae dry up and integrate into the mud as organic matter, broken down by microorganisms. The mud you see in the basin is a product of our disturbances, working in tandem with the reed plants, time, algae, and the original engineering of the basin as a holding place for water when floods come. The cattail reed beds have tripled in size since our inhabitation of the site. We see new plants taking hold and old ones multiplying. Young baby willow trees take root in the center of the concrete basin.
We believe this wetland is in the process of transitioning into a grassland and eventually a forest. This habitat is shifting away from aquatic plants and towards grasses, purslane, and willow trees that are now showing up. Human disturbances and interventions, such as Floating e.V.’s activities and passivities, working in tandem with the self-will of the burgeoning grassland could, one day, become a small, naturally generated forest – a very rare thing in Berlin.
From Wild to Rewild
At Floating, we advance an understanding of the site informed by Gammon’s “cluster concept” 10: one that holds the site, its biological diversity, the association, and its cultural diversity, as well as the Berlin context, all in one bag. To be onsite is to be connected to these larger contexts. To think of rewilding in this specific city is to allude to the empty spaces of postwar, post-Wall Berlin, where unprecedentedly large areas of free space meant subversive botanical and cultural movements could grow in the cracks: a period known as the “wild years.” This wildness was the result of a particular set of conditions: a sudden regime collapse, an absence of a consolidated state, a city in a slow process of reunification, and an incredible amount of space – from Second World War bomb sites to empty apartments abandoned by fleeing East Germans. Wildness was also what characterized the unique subcultures and nightlife that emerged exploring, seizing, and inhabiting those spaces.
While the party was going wild, so was a neoliberal urban development agenda. In order to resolve the city’s debt issues and urgent need for capital, 14 million square meters of Berlin’s public land and empty real estate were sold between 2001 and 2013 for a total of €2.4 billion. As a result, free spaces in the city have become increasingly scarce, and the number of displaced residents has soared. In response, multiple citizen-led movements have emerged. For example, Stadt Neudenken successfully demanded more transparent and sustainable urban development policy from Berlin’s House of Representatives. Kotti&Co. and its gezekondu began as a protest camp to fight rising rents and later became a local landmark at Kottbusser Tor. The successful Tempelhof referendum prevented the city administration from unfolding their development plans. And Haus der Statistik is currently being developed through an unprecedented collaboration between civic and state actors to collectively invent its future.
Despite these efforts, the feeling remains: Berlin has lost its wildness. Wild urban lives have been tamed by higher rents; an absence of a caring policy for public lands has resulted in enclosures and privatization. Profit-driven city-making has displaced the wildness and ushered in waves of gentrification.
We want to connect with those wild years and reflect on what Berlin and its inhabitants can learn from them. Can we reclaim wildness and rewilding as an attitude to shape our cities and our lives? Can qualities such as openness, otherness, togetherness, joyfulness, and playfulness – without romanticizing the past – bring us together to foster bonds and interconnectedness on both the local and the planetary scale?
Most recently, rewilding has been introduced in cities’ Green New Deals as a strategy to help downsize the production of CO 2 and mitigate climate breakdown. Sometimes these efforts include interventions such as green envelopes (roofs and façades), vertical farming, wildlife corridors, urban gardens, the planting of trees, or just allowing !nature” to regenerate. These are welcome efforts, but rewilding should not just be understood and implemented in a reductionist way. Rewilding efforts should be always paired with social and climate justice. Rewilding is a plea for the systemic changes they require, rather than a solution-oriented approach that continues to drive capitalism even if it is tinted green.
With Climate Care: The Rewilding Years (2021), we aimed to reclaim some of the qualities and lessons of Berlin’s wild years, and to claim “rewilding” as a careful practice, before it becomes another buzzword devoid of meaning.
The Future of the Site
Recently, we have learned of the plans to “re-naturalize” the basin, proposed by our landlord Tempelhof GmbH, the state-owned company that manages the site. This means the environment enjoyed by the life forms currently occupying the site will be dramatically altered. For example, the thick concrete floor will most likely be removed and replaced with a porous layer to allow incoming polluted rainwater to filter and trickle into the ground. This kind of spatial transformation will deeply affect both the biodiversity onsite and our ability to fill it with cultural and educational programming. With such plans for refurbishment underway, the future of the site after the intervention is unclear.
However, the process is still open and has the potential to be defined collaboratively. Could the renaturalizing process explore the relationship between urban nature and urban infrastructures by establishing a dialogue between artists, academics, engineers, gardeners, and technocrats to prototype different possible systems on site? Could this initiate a dialogue where artificial divisions between these forms of practice – artistic, academic, and scientific; civic and governmental – are dismantled?
A lobby group formed in the association is seeking to establish dialogues with the landlord, local politicians and the wider community around the basin. While the unique model and project that Floating University offers is widely recognized, celebrated, and awarded within architectural, academic, and cultural contexts, the reality of urban development – its technocratic and its growth-driven character – remains in stark contrast to the intentions set forward by the association.
As a result, the association has not been invited to take an active part in the upcoming transformation process, despite our repeated requests. The site of the basin remains highly contested, with many political players from the district pushing for different plans, ranging from recreation or sports grounds to social housing or a park. If these plans pan out, development of the site would reverse it to its mono-functional origin, losing sight of the enormous learning potential of hybridized uses of sites within the city.
We believe an urban transformation process is a learning process and therefore should include social and pedagogical components that allow for legibility, assimilation, and participation. The basin’s renaturalizing process holds the potential for an urgently needed conversation around eco-social renewal of urban infrastructures in ways that expose how cities are made and maintained, and how they respond to the current climate breakdown.
