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