BB2040

In case you are in Potsdam please come to see our exhibition at Rechenzentrum Starting this Friday for a week. -> link to exhibition in bio

The Thessalian Campos in the era of the Plantationocene. Agricultural Policies, Multispecies Exhaustion and the shift towards Care.

Next Tuesday 05.05.2022 5pm (utc+1) : x

Zoom-link : in bio

This work explores one of the most productive cotton landscapes in Greece, the Thessalian valley, and investigates how specific agricultural policies caused a series of agrarian transformations that led to its exhaustion. To grasp how the system operates, I drew upon the philosophical term Plantationocene, which best describes the mechanisms that exterminate contemporary plantations. Through a series of diagrams and mappings, I depicted the spatial manifestation of the system, and the infrastructural network that was inflicted upon the landscape and gradually turned what we used to perceive as "green" and "natural" into a mechanized and dysphoric landscape. Finally, driven by the notions of care, maintenance and repair, I developed alternative strategies for the future of the valley that could potentially lead to the transition towards a Landscape of Care.

Evelina Faliagka is an architect born in the Greek countryside. She holds a M.Arch from the University of Thessaly (Volos, Greece) and a M.Sc in Urban Design from TU Berlin. She works in the fields of urban design, and architecture. Her main research interests focus on developing caring design scenarios for multispecies co-habitation at this time of climate, social and political instability.

[EN] INVESTIGATIONS! with Ananda Ehret:

Berlin will experience periods of extreme heat in the future. The assessment of local environmental and urban conditions facilitates effective adaption measurements and the creation of diverse atmospheres.

In the forthcoming years urban areas will be increasingly affected by the impacts of the climate catastrophe. Due to the agglomeration of people, infrastructure and economic activity cities are particularly vulnerable to these accelerating threats and therefore priority areas for climate change impact assessment. The Project 30°+Berlin focuses on heatwaves in the context of Berlin and explores alternative approaches for dealing with extreme heat. It aims to deploy and exploit local climatological conditions and combines temperature reduction with the creation of generous and programmed public spaces.

Learn more about the project on our Website!

#30°

: Everything is connected.

In an urbanised society, infrastructures constitute the foundation of communal life. Organised in networks they facilitate the flows of—and relationships between—goods, humans, and non-humans. Connectivity, especially in terms of digital infrastructures, set off profound societal transformations and resulted in a new era of humankind: the networked society. However, networks always produce a degree of self-containedness, leaving behind what is not included. Today, facing imminent transformation challenges, centralised, hierarchical network infrastructures are being called into question in the shift towards more holistic decentral or distributed logics.

MICROARTICLE: Global Cities

New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin?
As a financial center, a ‘Global City' represents a node of concentrated economic power in a world spanning network, facilitated by, and enabled through modern information and communication technologies. The ‘Global City’ is characterized by its high diversity of languages, cultures, religions and ideologies, possibly more than by its local embeddedness. The rise of global cities has resulted in a loss of power of the nation-state, continously questioning the relationship - and responsibilities -  between the country and the city.

MICROARTICLE: Out of Milk?

The Internet of Things (IoT) describes a vision of ubiquitous connectivity, a mesh of every place, everything and everybody. Smart objects have sensors and programmed communication capabilities that allow them to interact in a network with other (smart) objects and get in touch with humans through user interfaces. To stay with a well known example, smart refrigerators let us know when the milk is almost empty, or even order fresh milk automatically. This everyday example illustrates the potential in terms of increased efficiency that the IoT promises.

Read the full articles and more on on our website!

2021

: Go with the Flow!

When we move around the world we shape our environment, meanwhile carrying different species of plants, animals—and even viruses—with us. The way infrastructures organise the flows that run through and across our cities reshapes them. Berlin’s streets, blocks, housing typologies, and most things surrounding us, were designed around our means of transport. At some point goods started moving around us more than humans or animals: today’s canals and railways were infrastructures once designed to move the materials from which the city was built. However, we must be careful in curating the flows in order to create synergies rather than barriers, and thus, inequalities.

MICROARTICLE: There’s a
Train Comin’

Students of O. M. Ungers developed large-scale complexes planned over transport infrastructures at the TU Berlin in the 60s. Ironically, his large-scale buildings in the Märkisches Viertel remained underutilised in terms of transport, which led to massive social problems. 

MICROARTICLE: 1,2,3,4…

The S-Bahn ring has long been understood as dividing line between the inner city, with its high rates of influx and gentrification processes,and the rest of Berlin. After the land, building and rental prices accelerated enormously, it’s the administrative border between Berlin and Brandenburg that is now coming into focus. Here, a new ring of suburban ghettos could emerge in the coming decades, making any sustainable planning of the BB-habitat impossible.

Read the full articles and more on on our website!

2021

& : What goes around comes around. 

BB’s economy today is based on consumption, with sites of production and disposal connected through global logistics infrastructures exploiting human and natural resources out of sight. However, BB has a tradition of local circularity – a century ago, visionary planners imagined a city and region nourishing each other. The ground of Brandenburg once built the city of Berlin – its mud used for bricks and its sand for cement. And after the war, rubble was returned to the earth to form modest peaks around the city. The BB of the future is planned today and we must consider its life cycle from cradle-to-cradle – do Brandenburg’s forests have the answer? 

MICROARTICLE: Anthropocene Landscapes of Berlin

A look at today's morphology of Greater Berlin reveals a spacious landscape with a few subtle elevations and often homogeneous urban development. Parallel to that, artificial mountains and cautious clusters of higher urban developments in the inner city mark individual high points. An analytical differentiated drawing of the topography (black), artificial mountains (red) and planning heights (blue) promotes a discussion of the origins and types of development of these morphological landscapes and provides a view of their correlations and interplay.

MICROARTICLE: Holzbauland

Building materials and especially cement account for a significant amount of CO2 emissions. However, the region of Berlin-Brandenburg is growing and tens of thousands of new apartments are needed. As Berlin sets its goal to become a carbon-free city by 2050, new ways of constructing homes are needed.

Read the full articles and more on & on our website!

2021

: Not just cute, but vital.

Did you know that cities can be hives of biodiversity, and that, due to its unique history of separation, Berlin is a prime example? Through infrastructures and their flows of humans and goods, we have transported species across continents, simultaneously disrupting and enriching endemic habitats. However, the city’s biodiversity is under threat with more and more paved surfaces and harsher environments. In Brandenburg, landscapes are already highly manicured through human centered land use with industrialized methods of agriculture and forestry, which eliminate natural habitats and retreats for animals and plants. How can we sustain biodiversity in the future?

MICROARTICLE: Living in the Plantationocene

The Plantationocene, defined by Donna Harraway and Anna Tsing as the fundamental revolutionary transformation in the unequal and patchy, but global ways, of the plantation as an apparatus of natural social redoing of worlds, is also a way of looking at the planetary effects of extractivism, monoculture practices, and coercive labor structures that paved since the 1600s the ideals of progress and modernity that would boom after the Industrial Revolution, and are largely responsible for increasing social inequality and triggering—as well as accelerating—climate change.

MICROARTICLE: Species in Flux

Through our mobility infrastructures we have altered many ecosystems, bringing foreign species into new habitats. Through trade routes Europe acquired new food ingredients from other parts of the world, like maize or potatoes, now very present in German cuisine. This could sound enriching but it can quickly turn dangerous, as some of the incoming species become a threat to the native ones due to the lack of natural predators. We have transported animals, plants, insects—even plagues—around the world, and the recent pandemic has made it extremely clear how interconnected we are.

Read the full articles and more on on our website!

2021

: Does Infrastructure Care?

Food banks, childcare, public toilets, the Corona Warn-App, food delivery services and emergency shelters are just some examples of Infrastructures of Care. Self-care, care-for-others, solidarity, kinship, care in society, the provision of shelter, security and support; or the provision of a safe future for coming generations are all different types of care. Care can be defined in a multitude of different ways, but essentially comprises the provision of what is needed for health, welfare, maintenance, and protection.

MICROARTICLE: Dorfladen +

Dorfladen plus in Golzow is the centerpiece of a co-produced village renewal process. The initiative brings together people
 from different backgrounds around a shared mission. It develops and adapts around the topic of secure provision of healthy and regional food to a local community in the Oderbruch area.

MICROARTICLE: Building Care Upon Neglect

A large part of Berlin’s urban development was determined by the Hobrecht Plan, drawn up in 1862. It proposed a city in harmony with its surroundings, where the city’s sewage would be used as nutrients for surrounding agricultural fields, known as Rieselfelder. Due to the ensuing changes in wastewater owing to Berlin’s growth as an industrial hub – heavy metals and chemicals entered the sewage stream and thus the Rieselfelder. They were still used for agricultural production in GDR times, but ceased following reunification. Today the fields are used as a nature reserve and as space for leisure. Some of the land has been converted for building use, on the condition that developments help decontaminate the earth. 

Read the full articles and more on on our website!

2021

: The Future is Electric!

As Germany transitions towards a carbon-neutral energy future, its producing and transmitting energy infrastructures will become an even more visible and mundane part of our daily landscapes. Until 2040 we will be witnessing the synchronicity of the different systems side-by-side: Infrastructural systems based on fossil fuel combustion will need to change, be retrofitted or adapted in use and operation; while new technologies and devices for generating, transmitting and storing energy will have to find space, public acceptance and financial backing for their implementation. In a decentralised energy grid of prosumers, smaller communities and municipalities will have to become major suppliers for urban agglomerations.

MICROARTICLE: Feel the Power!

The city of Berlin is heavily dependent on privately owned power plants fuelled by either hard coal or natural gas to provide heat and electricity for its inhabitants. All this can change by fundamentally restructuring the energy landscape starting with the following hypothesis: “Energy should be completely decentralized.”

MICROARTICLE: The Power of Art

Luckenwalde, a town roughly 30 mins to the south of central Berlin by regional train, has been keeping its rich industrial and architectural heritage rather quiet. After undergoing decades of decline, its disused lignite coal power station was recently brought back to life by the artist Pablo Wendel, who converted it to generate electricity once again; this time sustainably from wood chips.

Read the full articles and more on on our website!

2021

: We are what we eat.

Next to water and air, food is the basis of our subsistence; yet our modern industrialized food system—which characterises Germany’s, and especially Brandenburg’s agricultural landscapes—focuses primarily on increasing production volumes that are commodified through the use of infrastructures, policies and global supply chains. In Brandenburg, roughly half of the surface is farmland, but an incredible 98% of it is for animal feed and energy crops. Due to the unsustainable exploitation of soils we have no more than 60 soil cycles left before agricultural land becomes unproductive. However, food security in the future is not necessarily tied to large quantities of food, but rather to our diet: this will determine land distribution, farm size and soil resilience.

MICROARTICLE: Meat Me!

The farming of animals, their slaughter and the processing of livestock, including marketing, distribution and consumption form a complex network in our economy and society. The rural area of former East Germany is still characterized by many large-scale farms from the 1950s. At that time agriculture and thus livestock farming were specialized and intensified by forcing individual farmers to form agricultural production cooperatives (LPGs). Most of these farms still operate conventionally and carry out only one segment of production.

MICROARTICLE: The Decoupling of the Socialist Village

Agriculture, which primarily produced the old settlement structures in rural Brandenburg, employs fewer and fewer people today. Through the industrialisation of agricultural production in Germany, four workers can now cultivate up to 1,000 hectares and, by 2030, agriculture is expected to lose another 40 percent of its jobs. The supra-regional, subsidised industrial agro-industry has led to de-embedded villages that are decoupled from surrounding agriculture and do not benefit from either jobs or profits.

Read the full articles and more on on our website!

2021

: It won’t just blow over.

Air knows no borders, and neither does airborne pollution and heat. Berlin, built from thermally-massive materials, is already up to 7°C warmer than the surrounding landscapes of Brandenburg due to the urban heat island effect. Global heating has to be tackled on all levels, including new mitigation infrastructures for carbon capture and storage, and the prioritization of environments that can sequester carbon from the air. At the same time, we must learn to adapt to heat by mobilizing cooling infrastructures which utilize water and inner-city greenery, and let air flow.

MICROARTICLE: Heat Island Effect

Berlin like any other big city, consists of buildings that act as thermal masses that store and then emit large quantities of heat. Besides buildings, paved asphalt streets not only store and emit heat but also disrupts natural water absorption and evaporation processes of the soil that usually cool down the cities. Both these elements influence micro-climates of neighbourhoods, and can lead to significant localized fluctuations in temperatures. This simple phenomenon causes a heat island effect which not only makes our commutes to school or work hotter, but also has a direct impact on our brains and productivity levels.

MICROARTICLE: Earth 2.0

We are currently in a new geologic time known as the Anthropocene, an epoch scientists have yet to make fully official, but it is said to have started some time around “the year 1950 when the Great Acceleration, a dramatic increase in human activity affecting the planet, took off”. This not only affects our environments within soil, and water, but also the air we breathe.

Read the full articles and more on on our website!

2021

: Ever heard of water stress?

Access to water is a critical issue for many places around the world and, although Berlin-Brandenburg’s landscapes are commonly characterised by rivers and lakes, it will become a vital topic for the region in the next decades. By the end of the century, water regions – and their shortages or excesses – could reshape traditional, political and administrative borders. In order to ensure sustainable conservation of our water resources and raise the needed awareness of the issue, water infrastructure has to become a more visible, engaging and connective part of our daily landscapes – beyond just flooded streets and U-Bahn stations when it fails us.  

MICROARTICLE: Why so stressed, BB?

Controlled water consumption? Fixed watering periods? A growing world population and resource intensive economies coupled with severe climate conditions exert stress on local freshwater resources.

MICROARTICLE: Hybridizing Infrastructures

Rethinking water as infrastructure for social and ecological transformation processes has been a major feature in academic, professional and policy debates. Fueled by concerns about climate change related risks and the need for adaptation the focus is mostly on promoting proactive approaches to water resource management.

Read the full articles and more on on our website!

2021

There are many things we take for granted: water coming out of the tap, the Kita taking care of your kids; even the trains being late, or streets filled with unmoving cars. It all seems stable, but the status quo can change - and probably will.

Reaching our collectively-desired goals of inclusive, equitable, and ecologically-sustainable living in Berlin-Brandenburg will require a number of systemic changes and ‘infrastructural turns’. As the binding tissue of urbanisation, infrastructures such as roads, airports, wind turbines, or solar fields have shown their potential to polarise, but also to unite, as they necessitate political, economic, and cultural decision making. Addressing necessary infrastructural transformations is a key lever for change towards sustainability. 
 
This is a call for action!

Parallel to the exhibition, we will also present our thoughts on the infrastructures of the future here and on the website!

2021 Landscapes

In the heart of Berlin-Mitte, Wissensstadt Berlin 2021, an open-air exhibition addressing the topics of health, climate and living together, is currently under construction and will be open to the public from this Saturday 26th June on. We are very pleased to have been invited to contribute!
— free admission— 
For more information:
www.wissensstadt.berlin

Our contribution comprises the  INFRASTRUCTURE! Theses, which we have developed over the past few weeks. This content, along with a series of MICROARTICLES written by various collaborators, such as FAKT, Living Systems, Studio Amore, among others, will be available on our website from tomorrow on.

In the heart of Berlin-Mitte, Wissensstadt Berlin 2021, an open-air exhibition addressing the topics of health, climate and living together, is currently under construction and will be open to the public from this Saturday 26th June on. We are very pleased to have been invited to contribute to this exhibition/show (to avoid repetition) !
— free admission— 
For more information:
www.wissensstadt.berlin