Campus Esche
Campus Esche is a location in the middle of Berlin-Westend. The site, which is now home to two refugee accommodation facilities, two day-care centres, and a neighbourhood cultural and meeting place, was the site of the “Westend Treatment Centre for Patients with Nervous-System Disorders” from the late 19th century. Since the summer of 2020, the area has been transformed into a vibrant campus and a community and neighbourhood hub, involving all local institutions and seeking to be accessible to all local people. The vision of Campus Esche is a place where people come together and collectively shape society. The goal is encounter, creative work and the personal development of the users, whose talents and ideas are developed through initiatives.
The Campus Esche project is planned and run by MORE THAN SHELTERS in cooperation with the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf integration office as well as with local stakeholders and initiatives, and with the participation of several branches of the Berlin Senate. The project is funded by the district of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf and the Robert Bosch Stiftung.
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Stadtwerk mrzn
Stadtwerk mrzn is an open and experimental construction site, an international future laboratory, a space of possibility.
Craftspeople, architects, artists and gardeners are working together with young and older people, new and long-standing neighbours, and local initiatives and associations to create joint ideas for open spaces, new ways of working and new models of community-based urban development. The goal of Stadtwerk mrzn is to build something together with local people and to recreate this place for the present day. The site offers a number of ongoing workshops. Designers (both with and without migrant backgrounds) from various civil society initiatives, universities and the local neighbourhood have taken the Stadtwerk as their starting point to discuss urban design, utopias, climate change, architecture and new concepts for an open and diverse community.
Stadtwerk mrzn is planned and run by S27 – Art and Education, in cooperation with Berlin Mondiale. The project is funded by the European Social Fund Germany and the Lotto Foundation Berlin.
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Conversation with Vera Fritzsche on 21.02.2022
station urbaner kulturen/nGbK Hellersdorf
The station urbaner kulturen is a decentralized venue run by the Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) in the large housing estate at Berlin-Hellersdorf. With a programme of discussion-based events, exhibitions and interventions in public space, artists and residents work together on the development of the neighbourhood.
With the exhibition space station urbaner kulturen and the outdoor site Place Internationale, this practice has two very different sites for reflection, debate and collaboration with the local community. The outdoor site Place Internationale is an extensive green space crossed by residents between the subway station Cottbusser Platz and the intersection of Carola-Neher-Strasse and Maxie-Wander-Strasse. Today, the green space is becoming a space where local communities can engage in dialogue, and new audiences can emerge – here, the past, present and future of Hellersdorf converge.
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station urbaner kulturen / nGbK Hellersdorf
Haus der Statistik
Haus der Statistik near Alexanderplatz in Berlin-Mitte, formerly the headquarters of the East German government’s Central State Administration for Statistics, has been empty since 2008. Until 2017, the building was owned by the federal government, which wanted to demolish it and sell the site, but the Berlin Senate was able to acquire the building complex as part of the Capital Financing Agreement.
This large empty space offers an opportunity to create a place through the cooperation of urban society, politics and local government, creating a connection between existing neighbourhoods and Berlin’s diverse urban society. Administrative uses, a new city hall for Mitte, and integrated forms of living and working as well as space for art, culture and social activities are currently being created there. To achieve this goal, a constellation of stakeholders came together from the Senate Department for Urban Development and Housing, the Mitte district office, the state-owned companies WBM and BIM, and the ZKB. These organisations share the responsibility for implementing the public welfare-oriented developments generated by the Haus der Statistik in the form of new cooperations, while ensuring the widespread participation of urban society.
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Wasserwerk/Berlin Mondiale
Wasserwerk in Berlin-Kreuzberg is a location and hub of Berlin Mondiale – here, people can come together, experience and make art and culture, meet each other in an egalitarian environment, and celebrate community and diversity. For 2021, an eight-person jury has selected six partners and projects that have taken place at Wasserwerk. In response to the theme “Social Imaginations – What kind of city do we want to live in?” one of the projects was a travelling garden. Play, circus and movement, Raqs Sharki & Raqs Baladi, rap and culinary narratives also invited people to experience and take ownership of the neighbourhood in a new way.
Berlin Mondiale is a Berlin-wide network of cultural practitioners and artists whose work engages with urban spaces and communities with experiences of migration, asylum and exile and employs a radically diverse, collaborative and responsive approach.
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