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    MyCity® [Seminar]

    Course Description

    Teaching

    First session: Wednesday April 14th, 2021 | 3 pm | Zoom

    The image you see here is taken from the book: A Vision of Britain: A Personal View of Architecture (1989), written by Charles, Prince of Wales. The page is a full bleed image taken from an 18th century oil painting of London by Canaletto, covered by the consecutive page; a semi-transparent image of a modern London from the 1990s. With this literal covering of a romantic painting with a contemporary image, Prince Charles is making an argument, or even a critique on modern architecture. He later published ten key principals on how to build cities in the future, which he then managed to apply in the building of his own town know as Poundbury.

    In history, Prince Charles isn’t the only individual in a position of power to express an idea about how the future urban environment should look. Several public figures: members of royal families, successful businessmen, entrepreneurs or popular artists, have at the peak of their success, fame, admiration and power proposed future visions of cities. To design a city is in this vein also to project ideas about how its citizens’ everyday life should be lived.

    The seminar MyCity® will explore the relationship between a) media, as a crucial tool that mediates influence of the individual and influence of the mass; b) that individual itself, and c) the vision of the urban environment – an imaginary or real place that synthesizes persona spacial ideas that triggered collective imagination.

    Today, we live in a society that lets common future visions diminish, while a growing number of wealthy individuals with certain ambitions are free to use their influence and imagination in politics that are supposed to govern the many.

    Can My City be also everyone’s City?

    Participants: max. 32

    4 SWS – 6 ECTS

    Quisposnumber: 2347243

    Please register via ISIS, before the first session

    Team: Veljko Markovic, LA Frederik Springer

    SHOPPING BERLIN 2040

    Studio Description

    Teaching

    Originally, this studio was planned to discuss the effects of global investment in retail and commercial real estate on gentrification and segregation processes in Berlin, aiming at proposing alternative models and spatial interventions towards a common good. At the current state of a global crisis of health, economy and more importantly the constitution of our society in terms of freedom, interaction and publicity, this focus has shifted.

    We will still work on retail and commercial spaces and their effect on Berlin’s public life. While we are writing these lines, nobody can imagine how even in a month from now the crisis will have developed, yet we seem to have to prepare for the worst: a massive shut-down due to bankruptcies of all kind of small, mid-size and even large-scale businesses based on customer interaction, likely replaced by online shopping. It seems that not only the livelihoods of entrepreneurs and staff are endangered, but also the city as we knew it is about to vanish.   

    We will work in three phases:

    1. Yesterday: The ordinary urban everyday lost (MEMORY MAPPING);

    2. State of Exception: The urban everyday of enduring crisis (DOCUMENTING CRISIS);

    3. Scenarios of Uncertainty: The misogynist, the dirty realist, and the idealist (PROJECTING FUTURES: BERLIN 2040)

    (PiV: Dr. Holger Lischke, FG Planungs- und Bauökonomie/ Immobilienwirtschaft, TU Berlin)

    Please check your TU-emails and register via ISIS until April 16th,  further information and the first preparatory assignment will be handed out on April 20th.