Transforming Cities

RESEARCH-DRIVEN
DESIGN
Jörg Stollmann
Current and historical examples of urban interventions in the field of
academic learning and teaching range from projects of communitybased
planning to DIY projects and even artistic interventions in the
urban space. All these projects have one thing in common: they are
the result of the stakeholders’ understanding of their share of social
responsibility, and they want to anchor this understanding in the
academic field. Currently, this approach resonates surprisingly
broadly with policymakers’ and the local authorities’ (even if this
response often remains rhetoric). Maybe that is why in the past years,
there has been a continuous rise in the number of initiatives aimed at
evaluating the numerous individual projects in consideration of their
historical and methodological aspects. Presenting our experience
within the framework of the Akademie einer neuen Gropiusstadt
(AnG: Academy of a New Gropiusstadt), I want to illustrate how our
Working Group for Urban Development and Urbanisation of the TU
Berlin (Technical University) in co-operation with other working
groups, students, experts, users, and designers of the urban space
uses spatial interventions as laboratories to work in. The physical
results of these projects are not the ultimate aim or an end in itself,
but they serve to connect teaching, research, and practice, as well as
to contribute to the formation of a socially responsible practice of
research-driven design.
Teaching urban development is an increasingly complex challenge.
On the one hand, we have to impart the technical, historical, and
creative basic knowledge to our students. On the other hand, we
have to anchor an interdisciplinary way of learning and teaching in
co-operation with partners from civil society, politics, and the
economy as part of our academic work – if we take urban development
seriously as a platform for negotiating future forms of life and
society. Co-operating with actual stakeholders, that is, the researchdriven
and designing intervention of students and teachers in urban
development, demands great efforts from all parties involved.
A precise formulation of the task given by the user would be desirable
prepared sociological studies concerning the situation and
the motivation of all partners to commit to the project beyond their
basic professional obligation. It is often, however, only partly realistic
to meet these requirements while also considering the university’s
term structure and the real planning procedures. That is why we think
it is important to know and to communicate which possibilities and
which limits determine all the stakeholders’ work.
At the time when we set up the Working Group for Urban Development
and Urbanisation at the TU Berlin, it was evident that, in
comparison to other European university locations, the advantage to
learning and teaching in Berlin is the city’s direct connection to urban
development and to processes of appropriation in civil society. We
took advantage of our team’s varied experience regarding practice
and study, for example, the lesson learnt from the students at the
Universität der Künste Berlin (Berlin University of the Arts) who
founded the architecture collective “free class” or the active
participation of our team members in the artistic squatting and
restoration of the 1990s. I personally contributed my experience of
co-operative projects with the southern hemisphere at the ETH
Zürich (Technical University), which allowed me to gain insights into
the complex processes of negotiating between a self-generated city
and urban planners, policymakers, and the authorities. Our goal was
to become active in the city together with the students; to be open
to inquiries from the authorities, politics, and civil society; and to
help shape processes of negotiation ourselves. We wanted to see
academic work as a “phase zero” for real planning processes – a
phase in which we can determine what is to be shaped, planned, and
built.
Unlike the successful internal TU DesignBuild projects of the
Institute of Architecture – die baupiloten, the CoCoon project
(CoCoon: sector for contextual construction), and the practical
architecture project Students constructing in ... – we urban developers
do not focus on the built result but on the process that makes the
project possible. The more important issue for us is the effect a
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