Wonderlab Berlin – Project Report

October 29 - November 1, Berlin

Wonderland Platform for European Architecture in collaboration with Eutropian

As an effect of the economic crisis and social movements in the past decade many

actors in architecture and planning recognized that traditional funding models lost their

capacity to feed small-scale, community-oriented urban projects. While designers

elaborated new methods to address problems of community, participation and ecology,

they also created alliances with a new generation of developers and economists as well

as law specialists to experiment with new models for funding urbanism. By launching

unsolicited projects, designers acquired new skills and turned into developers and

financiers. In the same time, local communities, cultural groups, citizen networks

emerged as clients for cooperative urbanism helping establish parallel social services

and a parallel welfare system.

In the frame of Wonderlab Berlin, the Wonderland Platform for European Architecture

launched a call and invited selected young architecture offices and protagonists of the

new civic economy from various European cities to join the debate about the future of

new economic models in cooperative urban development. The 4-day workshop included

site visits and case study analyses, from cooperative ownership models through

crowdfunding and autoconstruction to the shared economy, giving an overview of the

current experiments in funding urbanism.

The workshop participants were LCC (Rotterdam), T Spoon (Rome), Architettura Senza

Frontiera (Milano), Stealth (Amsterdam/Belgrade), Fatkoehl Architekten+Urban Catalyst

(Berlin), Ramon Marrades (Valencia), Urbego (Copenhagen), SIC (Madrid), Ateliermob

(Lisbon), Homebaked (Manchester), Kristien Ring (Berlin) and Bostjan Bugaric

(Ljubljana-Berlin), and CANactions (Kiev). The public events also involved Stefanie

Raab (Coopolis, Berlin), Luke Haywood (Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung,

Berlin), Michael Lafond (id22 Institut für kreative Nachhaltigkeit, Berlin), Tore

Dobberstein (Complizen, Berlin) and Francesca Ferguson (Urban Drift, Berlin). The

corresponding exhibition included Funding Urbanism (Linnalabor), The Underside: High

Line Corridor Pneumatic Waste-Management Cooperative” (Juliette Spertus), Urban

Solar Infrastructure (169 architecture), Super!Mercato (Lorenzo Pentassuglia), Ridley

(Suzanne O’Connel), greenIsland (Claudia Zanfi), GreenFacades (Gebietsbetreuung

Wien), Funding Urbanism (Zuloark), Cozinha Comunitária das Terras da Costa (project

by ateliermob + projecto warehouse), Halele Carol (Meta van Drunen), Bankruptcity

(denieuwegeneratie), Architetture e Economia (Maddalena Dalfonso), Exceptional

Urbanity (Alessandro Coppola), Funding Urbanism (Focardi Salati), Scarcity in Excess

(Arna Mathiensen), Funding Urbanism (Pierre Michel).

During the workshop, participants visited six urban projects in Berlin: Spreefeld,

Holzmarkt, ExRotaprint, Zentrum fur Kunst und Urbanistik, Prinzessinengarten and

Markthalle9. The visited sites were similar in their innovative economic models and well

as in their profile that often combined non-profit activities with for-profit activities, giving

an important role to socially and culturally relevant activities.

The visited projects are a mixed between bottom-up process and middle-out strategies:

they are hybrid processes between citizen ideas, collectives groups and platforms,

cooperatives, foundations, economical funds agencies and developers. The

Prinzessinengarten, for instance, is an initiative to turn an urban void into a community

urban garden. Holzmarkt, in contrast, implies a new way to conceive an urban

development with a multitude of agents including private companies in a very complex

urban site on the riverfront of the Spree.

Visit to the Princessinengarten

The novelty in these approaches is the way these projects look for cooperative

ownership of their properties. In the Prinzessinengarten, organizers of the community

garden gained access to the land from the Berlin Council and later signed a 5-year

contract with the Federal Berlín Government, allowing them to establish their presence

for a longer term. Other projects including the ExRotaprint and Holzmarkt invited various

Swiss foundations and pension funds to invest in land under the buildings used by the

communities and rent them back with good conditions. This format meant a cooperative

ownership of buildings, without the possibility of selling them or making any individual

profit from the properties.

Spreefeld, for instance, made a cooperative for the co-housing, and everyone as a

cooperative former put the money to buy the land with Triodos Bank. All the projects

have loans with different entities in a very good conditions. So there is a economical

responsability to go further with the citizen projects in time and make them sustainable.

The exrotaprint and ZK/U are models to have a limited economy that allows everyone to

function by their own without increasing taxes or rent value of the places to work in.

We cannot make here and exhaustive analisis of each project but in a general term the

6 projects have very different funding agents that allows them to be economicaly

sustainable: skateholders, Shareholders, Users, Enterpreuners, Institutions,

Foundations join economical resources to allow this projects appear as a new way to

understand citizen urbanism. As Ex-rotaprint says “ “Exrotaprint concerns urban

development, the real estate and monetary economy, tendencies of social separation

and exclusion, and art strategies within city politics, and is an example for developing

new projects in urban space. Here a realm of possibility exists, non-profit and united,

non-ideological but contingent on agreement and consensus.”

So the question also is if everyone should has a “Right to the Funding”? As this

approach is only possible for a creative class with access to all the possible economical

agents. Don´t forget we are talking about Berlin.

Multi-Gobernances is the only way.

If we define gobernances as a set of processes and relationships between actors that

define the public decision-making, we will find in this projects different roles and process

that are innovative in the way they understand the different aspects for decisions and

conflicts.

- Administration as a framework, not as an agent.

- Who owns the land allows you to do what ever in a citizen sense but not to define a

concrete program and proposal.

- Swiss Pension Funds are a relevant agent in Berlín.

- Informal citizen urbanism has a very formal structure.

- Users pays for the activities and the services this projects develop.

- Urban Cooperatives are the best economical infraestructure to organize citizen

activities.

We talk about multigobernances because in this projects are many different agents that

are not related closely with the others. For instance, the Holzmart project has strong ties

with the DB public company and they built a framework and in other hand the citizen

activities have another way to understand the daily use of the space and what is

allowed and who can begin a deal in the urban lot.

Citizen Urbanism has also a great economical urban impact

Berlin knows how to manage and take advantage of the citizens activities. From the

underground period, to the actual citizen initiatives, the administration is very

consciousness on how the informal citizen practices attracts tourist and foreigns for

other parts of germany and other countries. The incomes of this visits to the tourist also

helps to support the citizen practies, actions or projects.

Maybe is much difficult to evaluate the urban impact of the Prinzessinengarten in terms

of affective nets that builts, or the impact in the neighborhood of the sales of organic

eco-food. Very clear in terms of how many people spent the weekend in it. So the

Prinzessinengarten project asks themselves Are we useful now in the neighborhood?

When they arrive 5 years ago the community was very different. How is the impact of

this project in the gentrification process of kreuzberg? Maybe the project is more useful

now in other parts of Berlin or Germany they asked themselfs. So here is another

innovation for a resilient project.

In other hand, ZK/U or Ex rotaprint have a different engagemnet with community and

the urban impact is very different. They recover an obsolete buildings working with the

foundations funds with a renting model for the workers and social companies. Also their

activity are increasing the value of the land and the building in a socially marginalized

area but they limited in ten years his incomes. As they clearly says “The non-profit

GmbH disrupts the speculation-spiral of the real estate market and owns the buildings

through a heritable building right. It is responsible for all aspects of project development,

the financing, renting of spaces, and renovating the ExRotaprint site.Non-profit status

dispels the conflict over partial ownership and allows for planning unencumbered by

individual interests. ExRotaprint gGmbH partners do not profit from the income

generated by the property and cannot realize any increase in value from a sale of their

stake in the partnership. Thus a long-term and stable location is created that can be

developed on its own terms.”

Finally, The Markethalle9 case has a more tradicional way of finance but they rescue

again the market for the speculative process for a big supermarket to a more social and

ecological sustainable project in the area. In three years time the cooperative had paid

the investment an now is time for the profits. The project had increased the value of the

neighborhood and their daily activities allows to have more liveable time during the

days. The Holzmarkt development has a very different approach. For a decade, Bar

25 was one of Berlin’s wildest clubs. Now, its founders want to create a new

development on the site. It is to cater to former clubbers and preserve an element of

1990s Berlin. But the hurdles are high. As this article for Der Spiegel explains the Night-

life undergrouns Berlin promoters are now the ones who are building new urban

developments with in the citizens. This is a “for profit” project with an investment of

10.000.000 euros to develop cultural, night life, students housing and offices building in

the area. We will be the social impact of this project in a near future, but for their

promoters the investment would be a best way to undertand how citizens can build their

own projects in a very different way than tradicionally highest bidder. For sure, this is a

project that Berlin administration will promote and communicate Lifting the Underground

into the Mainstream

Challenges:

We can share some challenges the cities could adapt to increase an intensive use of

space, not only in the public sphere, and begin to experiment new models of making city

with more complex ideas. As we say in the workshop: “From a self-organized

appropiation of space to a professionalized governance model within a permisive

institutional framework, which reconciliates the tension between self-sustaining and

speculation, profit and democracy, short and long-term.”

- More permissive institutions.

- Finding funding mechanisms that don-t slave

- Tension between professionalization and democracy

- Define the role or framework of administration

- Space availabilty

- How to engage the market economy in a shared value economy from the citizen

initiatives.

- How to construct a economic-sustainable model involving companies, markets, and

also how communitie could change their willing to donate, support, or pay for it.

- How to share a proffesional management with a creative development

- If a super wealth economy could provide funds to citizen initiatives and spaces, could

those investors come to the south?

- Are we ready for this approach?… we expect your point of view in the

commentaries.

Funding urbanism workshop participants: Atelier Mob, City Hound,Urbego, LCC,

Stealth, Homebaked, Bostjan Bugaric, Kristien Ring, Fatkoehl architekten, urban

Catalyst Studio, Valencia Vibrant, ASF Milan, CANactions, New Generations, Tore

Dobberstein,Complizen, Urban Drift, Francesca Ferguson, VIC and Wonderland.

Site visits

Diagram of the visited project in Berlin. Source: VIC

As Tiago Mota Saraiva from Ateliermob, Portugal described:

“During the days of the Wonderlab in Berlin we had a very intense program visiting new

and inspiring projects that are rising up. After the Fall of the Wall, Berlin was led to

bankruptcy. In the beginning of this millennium, following the neoliberal policies reigning

the world, local government decided to massively sell city plots to the best bid while

transferring planning and city urban policies decisions to the private sector. What we

have seen during these days were the projects which, held on popular or neighbors

resistance, manage to rise up amongst corporate investors and private interests

shredding the city. They all started over the last ten years. What I did found very

interesting was the participation of the, so called, good banks and the pension funding

on this process as a decisive stakeholder from the citizens/inhabitants part, providing

means to avoid gentrification and to liberate plots from real estate speculation. On the

other hand, it strikes me how the city governance is totally away of this processes and,

some times, establishes itself as the main obstacle to it. Even though all these

processes need more time to be developed and analyzed, what can be clearly seen as

something to follow up is the this idea of the pension funds starting to be a decisive

actor on public/citizens decision in the cities. When, more and more, we hear that

national pension funds are lost in off-shores and highly risky investments, I believe that

citizens should start to reclaim these investments for their cities. Investing in the city is

profitable and safer. And it puts our money on the service of public interest.”