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    Data Territories: Lübbenau

    Seminar 26/27

    Teaching

    Digital infrastructure is reshaping the relationship between settlements, labour, energy systems, and the territories that support computation. In Atlas of AI (2021), Kate Crawford describes data centres as “non-descript” objects, “out of sight and abstracted away,” with their environmental impact largely invisible – contrary to the visible smokestacks of coal-fired power stations. AI data centres are increasingly located in rural landscapes while serving metropolitan regions, creating new demands on land, water, electricity, and infrastructure. These enclosed objects offer few permanent jobs, have a significant impact on the environment and face growing public opposition.
    What changes when a small town becomes part of the physical infrastructure of the digital age? How are local economies and collective memory affected as computation becomes part of the territory with a long history of energy production? What spatial conditions emerge when historical energy systems, water landscapes, tourism, and digital infrastructures coexist within the same territory?
    The urban design studio uses Lübbenau as its case study. Lübbenau is located approximately 80 km from Berlin in the Brandenburg region. The town is known as an entry point to the Biosphere Reserve Spreewald, where its canal system supports a tourism economy. The Spreewald’s canal system is an infrastructural landscape developed over centuries to manage water, mobility, and agriculture. Energy infrastructures of lignite extraction and coal-fired power generation transformed the region in the 20th century. The construction of an €11 billion AI data centre on the site of the former power plant is the latest in a line of Lübbenau’s successive yet coexisting infrastructures – one that, unlike the canal landscape it neighbours, is enclosed and inaccessible to the public.
    This history of overlapping infrastructures gives the studio its starting point. After the research phase, students will develop design proposals and spatial strategies addressing landscapes, infrastructure, buildings, or public space. The studio asks how digital infrastructures transform spatial relationships with the territories that host them.

    Team: WiMi Iva Baljkas Pick / Lecturer Zlatko Nikolic

    (fig: Kräne stehen auf einer Baustelle für das neue Schwarz Digits Rechenzentrum. Auf dem Gelände des ehemaligen Kraftwerks Lübbenau soll eines der größten und nachhaltigsten Rechenzentren in Deutschland entstehen. +++ dpa-Bildfunk +++)

    IBA 34-37 - Eine Bestandsaufnahme

    Seminar WS 26/27

    Teaching

    IBAs are part of the history of urban planning in Germany, and a new chapter is about to be written in Berlin with the IBA 2034–37. IBAs provide an opportunity to reflect on the major urban questions of their time. Today, one of the greatest challenges is the Bauwende (the building transition), which requires transforming our built environment by repurposing what already exists. We need to imagine singular, site-specific, and frugal solutions to meet the demands of sustainable and socially just urbanism.
    The studio proposes to take the IBA 34–37 as an opportunity to test a project method based on the investigation of the existing, in order to identify potential project situations and to invent from the resources of the place. We will understand the existing as the result of all layers of institutional and vernacular histories—past and present—that have shaped the site in all its dimensions, both material and immaterial.
    We will focus on a perimeter of 400 hectares located within the area designated by the IBA: the Ring. An intensive fieldwork around the S-Bahn Wedding will be an opportunity to explore observation and description tools rooted in various disciplines, in order to build a narrative of the existing that will serve as the basis for the design project.

    Team: Prof. Jörg Stollmann / WiMi Jeanne Lacour

    Conflicting Natures: Rights, Rule, Restoration

    Seminar WS 26/27

    Teaching

    Nearly a quarter of global land is in private ownership, the most productive of which is owned by just 10%. In Europe, 60% of forests are privately owned. Similarly, most agricultural land is in the hands of family farms and private individuals. In Germany, almost a third of the country is forested, an area of about 11.4 million hectares: half is privately owned. Much is controlled by historic aristocratic families, the largest being the Thurn and Taxis family. Berlin sits against this trend. It boasts Germany’s largest urban forest, a more-than-human landscape in public ownership in a city where non-human natures are increasingly understood as a multiplicity of life with rights. Spatial conflicts over land use, value and climate change intersect with struggles over ideology, class and contested meanings of nature. The reemergence of a transnational ultra-wealthy oligarchic class is banking capital in land, hedging its bets against socioecological collapse. In parallel, we are witnessing the return of extremist right-wing ideologies where territory is connected to blood and borders, and ‘Nature’ is used to justify racialised and gendered violence. While solving these problems is beyond the scope of a lone urban design project, we will use the critical spatial design method to research and map actors, regimes and power dynamics to better understand new spatial figurations of nature. Here, design is understood as critical, dialectical and processual. It is integral to problem-framing and future-thinking and integrated from the beginning of the course. The aim is to curate an exhibition of the studio’s collective work, part of the international conference ‘Architectures of Authoritarianism’ hosted at IFA in 2027.

    Team: Jamie-Scott Baxter / Lecturer Régis Lemberthe

    (fig: Screenshot, https://www.thurnundtaxis.de/informieren/neuigkeiten/art/glorias-zukunftswald)