︎
Mark


The City as Continuous Commons


The project investigates multispecies cohabitation at the urban intersection point of the three districts Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain and Mitte in Berlin. The vision is to create a toolbox enabling multispecies cohabitation within future developments along the river to establish a close connection among the districts.

A green axis connects the Tempelhofer Feld in the south with Volkspark Friedrichshain in the north, met by Spree river, the blue axis right at the projects site. The area consists of horizontally segregated layers of various uses, mostly closed entities which are barely interacting with each other and thereby creating an anonymous part of the city. A totally different picture shows the mapping of the local species around the Spree, which are using the different spaces on both sides as their habitats, each serving different needs. They are creating complex networks among each other, consisting of predator-prey relations or forms of symbiosis.

To "glue" the ends of the green axis together a Rorschach test is applied along the blue axis, letting the green spaces squeeze in all neighboring spaces. A toolbox of interventions adds the necessary elements to strengthen the emerging spatial situations in the different areas:

1) Increasing biodiversity -  in urban spaces as well as built structure by various types of vegetation on ground and facades

2) Improvement of cohabitation - by sometimes separated, in other cases shared spaces for all possible actors

3) Urban space creation - with a focus on connectivity, like passages to connect different urban spaces

4) Architectural elements - focusing on decreasing the buildings footprints, reusing existing infrastructure and creating symbiosis between all possible actors.