Urbanism Berlin: Exploring the City's Art & Culture

The urban farming project Himmelbeet (sky patch) is currently planning an extensive roof-top garden over Berlin! On the top of a former multi-storey car park in Berlin-Wedding, the nonprofit project is going to open an open gardening zone as from May 2013… In addition to the crops a beekeeper will supervise beehives. Workshops, cultural events and a coffee shop will revive the environment. We take a stand for maintaining of regional varieties, and want to grow organically and by the principles of permaculture. Gardening will take place in mobile raised beds. In addition to the community garden space, it will be possible to lease an own bed for a season. (loosely translated) ...

Anna Borgman and Candy Lenk realized the installation Luftschloss (cloud castle) on Alice-Salomon-Square in Berlin-Hellersdorf. The temporary urban intervention is the result of the examination of the fragmentation and incompletion of the space and the disappointed hopes for permanence and wholeness. The installation is 2300 m³ in size and is divided into four phases, showing different stages of transformation… I really like the idea, but what’s even more interesting is to see the exaggerated carelessness of the pedestrians. It’s like nobody notices anything; no one questions the installation, or wonders about it. It’s unbelievable… ...

The best places in Berlin are now marked as such by students of Communication in Social and Economic Contexts (Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftskommunikation, GWK) at the Berlin University of the Arts (Universität der Künste Berlin, UdK)! The group placed several controversial posters throughout the entire city, presenting slogans like - *U8 is the best place for buying heroin in Berlin. Amen.*, - *Mustafas is the best place for waiting in line in Berlin. Amen.*, - *Kastanienallee is the best place for dying on your fixi in Berlin ever. Amen.* or - *Revaler Straße is the best Technostrich ever. Amen.* For those of you who already visited Berlin, these best places in Berlin should not be that unfamiliar… ...

A few days ago, French urban hacktivist Florian Rivière (the guy who installed the fabulous advertising carousel earlier this year) did a Hack your city into a soccer field workshop in Berlin-Kreuzberg! Soccer is one of the basic ways to reclaim the street. But today cities prevent this practice to facilitate car movements and security. Games or sports are just allowed in specific places: soccer fields, golf courses, skateparks, basketball courts… everything is confined. The aim of this workshop is to look for interstitials urban space where we could play soccer wildly. Because play is a claim of freedom and city is a place for freedom. ...

Berlin’s creative studio Cheesecake Powerhouse just came up with a new urban intervention: They installed street lamp light switches in public space! And although that’s not suitable for the mass, it’s in my opinion a brilliant idea, especially for smaller neighbourhoods, parks or almost uninhabited urban areas… The Cheesecake Powerhouse was founded 2012 in Berlin by Chehad Abdallah, Eugenio Perazzo, Fabian Greitemann and Julian Stahl and usually operates in various design disciplines. Nevertheless, they work with people coming from all kinds of disciplinary backgrounds like video production, copywriting, strategy, skateboarding, graffiti or digital, what becomes visible in that recent street lamp light switch installation. So what’s next? ...

Self-proclaimed urban hacktivist Florian Rivière is in Berlin right now. Inspired by the hackers culture, the Frenchman reinvests and diverts public space to allow citizens to reclaim their environment. His interventions, located between urban design, DIY and upcycling (upgrading waste), have the particularity to be spontaneous and raw, exclusively made with objects found in the street, and always with humor… Games, furnishings, traps, maps, instructions… so many urban tactics to show the functionality of sites, and direct action of the user on urban space. (Florian Rivière) ...

I have a big foible for abandoned amusement parks. One reason - and it doesn’t matter whether the decaying park is located in the US or even in China - is the somehow scary atmosphere of old, often broken attractions, archaic Western buildings and roller coasters. Another reason is, that those abandoned parks, providing never ending impressions, are perfect playgrounds for urban explorers and photographers like me… Kulturpark - A Public Art Project in Berlin In Berlin, a group of cultural developers and activists together with experimental architects from Berlin, researchers from Harvard, and placemakers from the Urban Art Institute plans to re-open the abandoned amusement park Spreepark, located in the sprawling Treptower Park, as a creative camp. The group’s aim is to utilize the process of producing artistic site-specific visions, combined with ideas and memories of publics, to create a grassroots proposal for the park’s future, what sounds like a really great thing for Berlin! ...

Ostkreuz station is was one the tradition-richest train stations in Berlin. With its (rusty) structural steelwork, old brick-built houses, fantastic stairs and other architectural peculiarities Ostkreuz was the mother-of-all old-school interchange stations in the Eastern part! Since winter 2007/08 it’s now under construction - the plan is to build another ugly glass palace station - for what reason it’s just superb for me to get the chance to look back and enjoy the old days by watching the nice Ostkreuz documentary by Laura Geiger and Tom Kretschmer who filmed Ostkreuz’ everyday-life between 2005 and 2007. ...

Berlin is a very dynamic city - everyone who already had the chance to come to this town knows that. To catch this flowing Berlin spirit and to deliver some brilliant impressions from the street of the German capital, Matthias Makarinus (who also did the abandoned places in Berlin series and captured the snow in Berlin) started to create a new and astonishing video 16 months ago! Dynamic light, clouds, street life, movement and much more. Shot from May 2010 - September 2011… ...

Five month ago, I wrote an article about a beautiful video, which shows the cold snow atmosphere in Berlin. These days are over now, and the filmmakers crew started another series about abandoned places in Berlin: The first part of the series is about the famous “Eisfabrik”, an old and abandoned but great industrial building in the heart of Berlin, I visited with tape artist BUFFdiss some month ago…The second part is a beautiful documentary of the old “Bärenquell” brewery in the south-east of Berlin. ...