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RESEARCH & FIELD REVISITED THIS BOOK IS THE SECOND AND FINAL VOLUME OF A PUBLICATION DOCUMENTING QUESTIONS, METHODS AND RESULTS OF THE «EXPERIMENTAL PARTICIPATORY PROCESS FOR FRANKFURTER ALLEE NORD» (XBV_FAN)1 IN THE DISTRICT OF LICHTENBERG, BERLIN. Between 2011 and 2015, a collaboration took place between the Berlin Unversity of the Arts (UdK), the District of Lichtenberg and the Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment, Berlin. The goal was to «record and present the views of the local residents» living in the Frankfurter Allee Nord (FAN) urban redevelopment zone, and then to utilise this information as the basis for «innovative, creative and sustainable participatory processes.»2 In this volume, four projects from the time period 2013-2015 are presented. TRANSFORMATION DESIGN The XBV_FAN, conceptualized and carried out at the «lived/space/lab»3 at the UdK, is based on an inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration. Those involved include not only individuals from the university’s many courses of study, officials from the district offices in Lichtenberg and the Berlin Senate, but also the citizens of Lichtenberg. At the lived/space/lab, our work is based on a thesis derived from phenomenological spatial theory,4 which assumes every person who lives in a certain area has specific, everyday knowledge of that place. We have dubbed this knowledge «local expertise», and the residents, business owners and other local actors involved in our studies as «LOCAL EXPERTS». Their (often subconscious) knowledge was collected, documented and then analysed in different forms. The exploration, investigation and further development of this knowledge was the task of the so-called «EXTERNAL RESEARCHERS», in this case all students from the Berlin University of the Arts. Initially, they were outsiders to these areas, coaxing the often unseen or forgotten local knowledge of the residents to the surface through qualitative questioning, precise observations or other methodological aids. Both groups – the externals and the experts – were composed of a heterogeneous mix of people and varied from project to project. While the interviewees came from a wide variety of backgrounds, age groups and social groups, the group of researchers – who may have more in common biographically – was composed of an interdisciplinary and very international set of individuals.5 In the first part of each seminar, small teams of external researchers and experts worked together and achieved very individual results, which were then shared with the rest of the group. In an academic context, these results formed a pool of information, stories and personal details, which functioned as a multi-faceted mosaic composed of different knowledge sets. Only when viewed together at the end of each research phase did it become clear that it was exactly this diversity, which led to a cohesive image of what the city – and its public urban space – can become in the best case scenario: a heterogeneous and differentiated field, in which diverse living philosophies, opinions and interests are layered on top of one another, without necessarily coming into conflict with one another. Of particular interest in our studies was the identification and presentation of specific qualities of the urban space apparent when regarded as «lived space». Within lived space, there are theoretically no definitive values, no quantifiable indicators and no difference between correct and incorrect, or «good» and «bad» sites: a natural principle of uncertainty exists, which on the one hand stems from the personalities of those present, and on the other from the pre-existing cultural ideas and normative social practices of each site. Despite this, it is possible to analyse certain qualities and criteria specific to the lived urban space. Besides the atmosphere of places (which