Bodenschatz Berlin
Preparing the Ground with Design Science Fiction
F.N. Mengel (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
G Vrachliotis – Mentor (TU Delft - History, Form & Aesthetics)
Rachel Lee – Mentor (TU Delft - History, Form & Aesthetics)
R.R. van den Ban – Mentor (TU Delft - Teachers of Practice / AE+T)
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Abstract
Boden – a German term that can refer to soil and land, ground and floor, territory and habitat. Overhearing Boden in Berlin’s streets these days will, however, oftentimes result in tuning into a conversation about land ownership, the soaring cost of living and the city in transition. People, it seems, are worried. They are increasingly affected by effects of market processes, speculation, a marginalising financial approach* towards the city. They are not alone: Also Berlin's diverse ecological actors are threatened by such profit-oriented practices. Therefore, the term “Boden“ in Berlin has been conceptualised for discussing processes originating in and revolving around land tenure. In turn, its tangible qualities and positive notions are covered up, buried by a merely technical and somewhat pessimistic discussion. The inherent ambivalence is leaving Berlin’s Boden, stripping it off its multiple social and ecological facets: Boden has become a bare quantifiable medium.
This overheard finding is the spark of this thesis. While unsuccessfully searching for a singular translation of Boden, I started to discover more and more dimensions, relations, associations with the term. Thus, the question arose: Can we solve the multi-dimensional issues Boden faces in Berlin by exploring its stratified character, its layers of meaning? How can Boden in the city become tangible, meaningful, a resource - Bodenschatz - again? Can Boden itself become an ally for the city’s human and non-human inhabitants to solve the Bodenfrage issues?
The resulting proposal, Bodenschatz, is a multi-layered exploration of dimensions comprised in Berlin’s Boden. This is approached by science fiction: taking into account the status quo of science and research, it is reimagining urban futures as a fictional prototype of cyber-socio-ecological cohabitation on Berlin’s Boden. Its main vector is not analysis but action towards re-taking socio-ecological urban agency in Berlin. Architecture becomes a vehicle to spatialise this, the missing link to fill in the gaps between science and fiction. Without romanticism or fatalism, the project is a comment on the current state of affairs - and how the city of the future could be imagined by the means of today.