Wet City, Cultivated Wildness ALAR 8010 Research Studio . Fall 2022 Overview The Fall 2022 Berlin studio will examine the city’s relationship to water through the
landscapes and infrastructures that have formed the greater region. The studio will view these landscapes through two lenses simultaneously, as infrastructures supporting Bradley Cantrell urban settlement and as a wild eco-hydrological network that can support multi-species autonomy.
Michael Lee The urban landscape of Berlin presents a compelling space for investigating the dynamics of hydrology and how the design of the landscape infrastructure may play a role in the creation of diverse habitats. The topic of water is at the forefront of European news as the continent is undergoing a long-standing drought as the effects of a changing climate are becoming apparent. As climatic change is extensive and lacks predictability, it is paralleled by increasing awareness and intensifying concerns about quality of life and sustainability in this contemporary city.
This research studio will ask students to develop a project that addresses how the hydrological networks may contribute to the life of an evolving city. Each student will produce a unique body of research that uses the lens of wildness, interpreted broadly, to guide the speculation of material assemblies, programs, and planning of public water infrastructure. The initial focus will be within center of Berlin, in particular the loop of the Spree and Landwehr Kanal, but will expand to the greater Berlin region and the Spree River watershed. The studio will begin with a collaborative research phase, the production of a guidebook, initial hypotheses/hunches, and will then move into design propositions through individual or paired projects.
Studio Narrative The division of Berlin after World War II resulted in two distinct situations, each of which markedly delayed the forces of market capitalism that shaped most other major cities in the West. Communism was avowedly anti-capitalist, and instrumentalized urban and infrastructural planning for the repressive goals of a totalitarian state. West Berlin was an island, cut off from the rest of western Europe, and required constant injections of money and population to be sustainable. After reunification, both halves of the city featured low rents, abandoned properties, vacant land, and a depressed economy with high unemployment. It would take almost twenty years for investment and the relocation of the federal government from Bonn to kick development into high gear. In the contemporary era water resources have been at the center of intense debates on the cities climate future and who can and will control these critical assets.
Europe is currently in crisis, undergoing a severe drought, the issue of water scarcity is ever present across the continent. The Rhine River, running from the Alps to the North Sea, is currently experiencing low water levels that make it impossible for cargo ships to carry full loads. While the continent often experiences periods of low rainfall the frequency and severity of drought conditions continues to worsen. In Berlin, the Spree River is undergoing a broad range of pressures as Eastern Germany has suffered from a March to April period with effectively no precipitation. Not only are water levels falling but the desiccated landscapes are also causing wildfires that are running rampant. These environmental shifts are coming from a changing climate that is producing record high temperatures, increased evaporation, and stalled weather systems leaving the region parched.
Eastern Germany is also seeing the closing of the mining industry with many of the large lignite and coal mining operations shuttering operations over the past decade. The operation of the mines required large pumping systems that put excess water in the surrounding watershed, artificially topping off the rivers throughout the year. While the injection of water caused issues with pollutants, without this excess water the effects of climate change are exacerbated.
In conjunction with the environmental shifts, Berlin is also undergoing a cultural shift due to new investment and the influx of global tech companies. High profile projects have become lightning rods for public response, provoking intense debate about the future of the city and in some cases leading to oppositional action. The new Amazon headquarters tower at Warschauer Strasse, now in the early phases of construction, is just the latest example of a corporate landmark rising from a post industrial site in the former East. Its neighbors include the Mercedes Benz Arena, a new Mercedes headquarters, a shopping mall, and luxury condominium towers in various stages of construction on the one hand —and the remnants of a post-1990 informal DIY creative scene that colonized a series of abandoned warehouses and industrial ruins along a rail line. In a similar fashion but with a different architectural strategy, Google is currently renovating an ensemble of historic buildings in the trendy Mitte district to serve as a new regional office. While the influx of capital has necessarily increased infrastructural capacity it also has strained the city and the corporatization of Berlin has seen the water system become privatized and this life-giving resource is now a commodity.
The aim of this studio is to examine the reality and the limitations of urban water infrastructure, and to develop a more nuanced account of its many manifestations in concrete situations. We will use the concept of wildness, defined in multiple ways to produce conceptions that are social, cultural, and ecological as an initial provocation. What is often perceived as infrastructure to accomplish a singular goal, is sometimes better understood through other lenses, and perhaps evaluated through multiple variables and with productive frictions. The research agenda is to use the concept of wildness as an instigator to speculate about the possible multiplicities of hydrologic systems within contemporary Berlin without reduction to a single valuation.
Phase I : Hunches and Hypotheses : Themes, Mappings, and Guidebooks The initial research phase will map the hydrological, ecological, and infrastructural systems that define how water functions within Greater Berlin and the region. The body of research will be accomplished through group work and an individual representation of each designer’s design intent/concept. The research will also provide a working definition of wildness and how the term can be productive in the design of urban landscapes.
Phase II: Propositions The final phase of the studio will ask students to develop a speculative proposition that addresses the concept of wildness/autonomy as it is expressed in the landscapes of Berlin’s hydrological networks.
The following is an introductory background for the studio, not all are required but should be consulted based on your interests:
On Design + Theory
• Bélanger, Pierre. “Landscape as Infrastructure,” Landscape Journal. No. 28 (Spring 2009): 79-95.
• Desvigne & Dalnoky. The Return of Landscape. (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1997). • Institute for Landscape Architecture / ETH Zurich. Landscape Architecture In Mutation. (Zurich: Verlag, 2005). See especially: • Picon, Antoine. “Constructing Landscape by Engineering Water.” 98-115. • Waldheim, Charles. “Urbanism, Landscape, and the Emergent Aerial Subject.” 116-135. • Reed, Chris, and Nina-Marie Lister, eds. Projective Ecologies. (Cambridge and New York: Harvard Graduate School of Design and ACTAR, 2014). See especially: • Reed, Chris, and Nina-Marie Lister. “Introduction: Ecological Thinking, Design Practices.” 14-21. • Hight, Christopher. “Designing Ecologies.” 84-105. • Varnelis, Kazys, ed. The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles. (Barcelona: Actar, 2009).
On Ecologies + Technologies
• Bryant, L. (2014). In Onto-cartography: An ontology of machines and media. Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press. Chapters 1-3. • Cantrell, Bradley and Holzman, Justine. Responsive Landscapes. (Routledge, 2016) • Cantrell, Bradley and Mekies, Adam. Codify. (Routledge, 2018) • Cook, Robert E. “Do Landscapes Learn? Ecology’s ‘New Paradigm’ and Design in Landscape Architecture.” Inaugural Ian L. McHarg Lecture. March 22, 1999. • Del Tredici, Peter. “Brave New Ecology,” Landscape Architecture 96 (February, 2006): 46-52. • Del Tredici, Peter. Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). • Gabrys, Jennifer. 2017. Program Earth: environmental sensing technology and the making of a computational planet. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816693122.001.0001. Chapter 1 • Galloway, A., & Thacker, E. (2004). Protocol, Control, and Networks. In Grey Room (16th ed., pp. 6-29). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. • May, J. (2011). The Logic of the Managerial Surface. In Praxis 13: Ecologics (Vol. 13, pp. 116-124). Boston: Praxis. • Margolis, Liat and Alexander Robinson. Living Systems: Innovative Materials and Technologies for Landscape Architects. (Basel: Birkhauser, 2007). • Prominski, Martin, Antje Stockman, Susanne Zeller, Daniel Stimberg, and Hinnerk Voermanek. River. Space. Design.: Planning Strategies, Methods and Projects for Urban Rivers. (Basel: Birkhauser, 2012). • Morton, Timothy. Being Ecological. (MIT Press, 2018) • Morton, Timothy. Hyberobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) • Raxworthy, Julian. Overgrown: Practices Between Landscape Architecture and Gardening. (MIT Press, 2018)
• Rob Holmes, July 2020. “The Problem with Solutions,” Places Journal. • Ashley Carse, 2012. “Nature as Infrastructure: Making and Managing the Panama Canal Watershed”. Social Studies of Science.
• Elissa Rosenberg, 1996. “Public Works and Public Space: Rethinking the Urban Park”. Journal of Architectural Education. • Collier, Mizes, Schnitzler. “Public Infrastructure/Infrastructural Publics”. Limn. https://limn.it/articles/preface-public-infrastructures-infrastructural-publics/ • Shannon, Kelly, and Marcel Smets. 2016. The landscape of contemporary infrastructure. Rotterdam: Nai010.