Wonderlab Berlin – Project Report
October 29 - November 1, Berlin Wonderland Platform for European Architecture in collaboration with Eutropian
As an effect of the economic crisis and social movements in the past decade many actors in architecture and planning recognized that traditional funding models lost their capacity to feed small-scale, community-oriented urban projects. While designers elaborated new methods to address problems of community, participation and ecology, they also created alliances with a new generation of developers and economists as well as law specialists to experiment with new models for funding urbanism. By launching unsolicited projects, designers acquired new skills and turned into developers and financiers. In the same time, local communities, cultural groups, citizen networks emerged as clients for cooperative urbanism helping establish parallel social services and a parallel welfare system. In the frame of Wonderlab Berlin, the Wonderland Platform for European Architecture launched a call and invited selected young architecture offices and protagonists of the new civic economy from various European cities to join the debate about the future of new economic models in cooperative urban development. The 4-day workshop included site visits and case study analyses, from cooperative ownership models through crowdfunding and autoconstruction to the shared economy, giving an overview of the current experiments in funding urbanism.
The workshop participants were LCC (Rotterdam), T Spoon (Rome), Architettura Senza Frontiera (Milano), Stealth (Amsterdam/Belgrade), Fatkoehl Architekten+Urban Catalyst (Berlin), Ramon Marrades (Valencia), Urbego (Copenhagen), SIC (Madrid), Ateliermob (Lisbon), Homebaked (Manchester), Kristien Ring (Berlin) and Bostjan Bugaric (Ljubljana-Berlin), and CANactions (Kiev). The public events also involved Stefanie Raab (Coopolis, Berlin), Luke Haywood (Deutsches Institut fßr Wirtschaftsforschung, Berlin), Michael Lafond (id22 Institut fßr kreative Nachhaltigkeit, Berlin), Tore Dobberstein (Complizen, Berlin) and Francesca Ferguson (Urban Drift, Berlin). The corresponding exhibition included Funding Urbanism (Linnalabor), The Underside: High Line Corridor Pneumatic Waste-Management Cooperative� (Juliette Spertus), Urban Solar Infrastructure (169 architecture), Super!Mercato (Lorenzo Pentassuglia), Ridley
(Suzanne O’Connel), greenIsland (Claudia Zanfi), GreenFacades (Gebietsbetreuung Wien), Funding Urbanism (Zuloark), Cozinha Comunitåria das Terras da Costa (project by ateliermob + projecto warehouse), Halele Carol (Meta van Drunen), Bankruptcity (denieuwegeneratie), Architetture e Economia (Maddalena Dalfonso), Exceptional Urbanity (Alessandro Coppola), Funding Urbanism (Focardi Salati), Scarcity in Excess (Arna Mathiensen), Funding Urbanism (Pierre Michel).
During the workshop, participants visited six
urban projects in Berlin: Spreefeld,
Holzmarkt, ExRotaprint, Zentrum fur Kunst und Urbanistik, Prinzessinengarten and Markthalle9. The visited sites were similar in their innovative economic models and well as in their profile that often combined non-profit activities with for-profit activities, giving an important role to socially and culturally relevant activities. The visited projects are a mixed between bottom-up process and middle-out strategies: they are hybrid processes between citizen ideas, collectives groups and platforms, cooperatives, foundations, economical funds agencies and developers. The Prinzessinengarten, for instance, is an initiative to turn an urban void into a community urban garden. Holzmarkt, in contrast, implies a new way to conceive an urban development with a multitude of agents including private companies in a very complex urban site on the riverfront of the Spree.
Visit to the Princessinengarten The novelty in these approaches is the way these projects look for cooperative ownership of their properties. In the Prinzessinengarten, organizers of the community garden gained access to the land from the Berlin Council and later signed a 5-year contract with the Federal BerlĂn Government, allowing them to establish their presence for a longer term. Other projects including the ExRotaprint and Holzmarkt invited various Swiss foundations and pension funds to invest in land under the buildings used by the communities and rent them back with good conditions. This format meant a cooperative ownership of buildings, without the possibility of selling them or making any individual profit from the properties.
Spreefeld, for instance, made a cooperative for the co-housing, and everyone as a cooperative former put the money to buy the land with Triodos Bank. All the projects have loans with different entities in a very good conditions. So there is a economical responsability to go further with the citizen projects in time and make them sustainable. The exrotaprint and ZK/U are models to have a limited economy that allows everyone to function by their own without increasing taxes or rent value of the places to work in. We cannot make here and exhaustive analisis of each project but in a general term the 6 projects have very different funding agents that allows them to be economicaly sustainable: skateholders, Shareholders, Users, Enterpreuners, Institutions, Foundations join economical resources to allow this projects appear as a new way to understand citizen urbanism. As Ex-rotaprint says “ “Exrotaprint concerns urban development, the real estate and monetary economy, tendencies of social separation and exclusion, and art strategies within city politics, and is an example for developing new projects in urban space. Here a realm of possibility exists, non-profit and united, non-ideological but contingent on agreement and consensus.” So the question also is if everyone should
has a “Right to the Funding”? As this
approach is only possible for a creative class with access to all the possible economical agents. Don´t forget we are talking about Berlin. Multi-Gobernances is the only way. If we define gobernances as a set of processes and relationships between actors that define the public decision-making, we will find in this projects different roles and process that are innovative in the way they understand the different aspects for decisions and conflicts. - Administration as a framework, not as an agent. - Who owns the land allows you to do what ever in a citizen sense but not to define a concrete program and proposal. - Swiss Pension Funds are a relevant agent in Berlín. - Informal citizen urbanism has a very formal structure. - Users pays for the activities and the services this projects develop.
- Urban Cooperatives are the best economical infraestructure to organize citizen activities. We talk about multigobernances because in this projects are many different agents that are not related closely with the others. For instance, the Holzmart project has strong ties with the DB public company and they built a framework and in other hand the citizen activities have another way to understand the daily use of the space and what is allowed and who can begin a deal in the urban lot. Citizen Urbanism has also a great economical urban impact Berlin knows how to manage and take advantage of the citizens activities. From the underground period, to the actual citizen initiatives, the administration is very consciousness on how
the informal citizen practices attracts tourist and foreigns for
other parts of germany and other countries. The incomes of this visits to the tourist also helps to support the citizen practies, actions or projects. Maybe is much difficult to evaluate the urban impact of the Prinzessinengarten in terms of affective nets that builts, or the impact in the neighborhood of the sales of organic eco-food. Very clear in terms of how many people spent the weekend in it. So the Prinzessinengarten project asks themselves Are we useful now in the neighborhood? When they arrive 5 years ago the community was very different. How is the impact of this project in the gentrification process of kreuzberg? Maybe the project is more useful now in other parts of Berlin or Germany they asked themselfs. So here is another innovation for a resilient project. In other hand, ZK/U or Ex rotaprint have a different engagemnet with community and the urban impact is very different. They recover an obsolete buildings working with the foundations funds with a renting model for the workers and social companies. Also their activity are increasing the value of the land and the building in a socially marginalized area but they limited in ten years his incomes. As they clearly says “The non-profit GmbH disrupts the speculation-spiral of the real estate market and owns the buildings
through a heritable building right. It is responsible for all aspects of project development, the financing, renting of spaces, and renovating the ExRotaprint site.Non-profit status dispels the conflict over partial ownership and allows for planning unencumbered by individual interests. ExRotaprint gGmbH partners do not profit from the income generated by the property and cannot realize any increase in value from a sale of their stake in the partnership. Thus a long-term and stable location is created that can be developed on its own terms.”
Finally, The Markethalle9 case has a more tradicional way of finance but they rescue again the market for the speculative process for a big supermarket to a more social and ecological sustainable project in the area. In three years time the cooperative had paid the investment an now is time for the profits. The project had increased the value of the neighborhood
and their daily activities allows to have more liveable time during the
days. The Holzmarkt development has a very different approach. For a decade, Bar 25 was one of Berlin’s wildest clubs. Now, its founders want to create a new development on the site. It is to cater to former clubbers and preserve an element of 1990s Berlin. But the hurdles are high. As this article for Der Spiegel explains the Nightlife undergrouns Berlin promoters are now the ones who are building new urban developments with in the citizens. This is a “for profit” project with an investment of 10.000.000 euros to develop cultural, night life, students housing and offices building in the area. We will be
the social impact of this project in a near future, but for their
promoters the investment would be a best way to undertand how citizens can build their own projects in a very different way than tradicionally highest bidder. For sure, this is a project that Berlin administration will promote and communicate Lifting the Underground into the Mainstream Challenges: We can share some challenges the cities could adapt to increase an intensive use of space, not only in the public sphere, and begin to experiment new models of making city with more complex ideas. As we say in the workshop: “From a self-organized appropiation of space to a professionalized governance model within a permisive institutional framework, which reconciliates the tension between self-sustaining and speculation, profit and democracy, short and long-term.� - More permissive institutions. - Finding funding mechanisms that don-t slave - Tension between professionalization and democracy - Define the role or framework of administration - Space availabilty -
How to engage the market economy in a shared value economy from the citizen
initiatives. - How to construct a economic-sustainable model involving companies, markets, and also how communitie could change their willing to donate, support, or pay for it. - How to share a proffesional management with a creative development - If a super wealth economy could provide funds to citizen initiatives and spaces, could those investors come to the south? - Are we ready for this approach?‌ we expect your point of view in the commentaries. Funding urbanism workshop participants: Atelier Mob, City Hound,Urbego, LCC, Stealth, Homebaked, Bostjan Bugaric, Kristien Ring, Fatkoehl architekten, urban Catalyst Studio, Valencia Vibrant,
ASF Milan, CANactions, New Generations, Tore
Dobberstein,Complizen, Urban Drift, Francesca Ferguson, VIC and Wonderland.
Site visits
Diagram of the visited project in Berlin. Source: VIC
As Tiago Mota Saraiva from Ateliermob, Portugal described: “During the days of the Wonderlab in Berlin we had a very intense program visiting new and inspiring projects that are rising up. After the Fall of the Wall, Berlin was led to bankruptcy. In the beginning of this millennium, following the neoliberal policies reigning the world, local government decided to massively sell city plots to the best bid while transferring planning and city urban policies decisions to the private sector. What we have seen during these days were the projects which, held on popular or neighbors resistance, manage to rise up amongst corporate investors and private interests shredding the city. They all started over the last ten years. What I did found very interesting was the participation of the, so called, good banks and the pension funding on this process as a decisive stakeholder from the citizens/inhabitants part, providing means to avoid gentrification and to liberate plots from real estate speculation. On the other hand, it strikes me how the city governance is totally away of this processes and, some times, establishes itself as the main obstacle to it. Even though all these processes need more time to be developed and analyzed, what can be clearly seen as something to follow up is the this idea of the pension funds starting to be a decisive actor on public/citizens decision in the cities. When, more and more, we hear that national pension funds are lost in off-shores and highly risky investments, I believe that citizens should start to reclaim these investments for their cities. Investing in the city is profitable and safer. And it puts our money on the service of public interest.�