(un)learning
urbanity
symposium
Symposium for emerging critical urban studies and practice
19-21 June 2026
free entry, donations appreciated
About the symposium
A space beyond the academic
From June 19–21, 2026, the (re)searching urbanity collective is hosting its third symposium at the Floating University in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Under the title “(un)learning urbanity”, the symposium invites participants to collectively reflect on current urban realities through the lens of unlearning – questioning familiar and normative ways of thinking and practicing, to create space for more solidaric, climate-conscious, and community-oriented forms of urban futures. The event is conceived as a shared space for learning and reflection, bringing together different forms of knowledge, experience, and practice.
The program is based on an open call and features more than 30 contributions by emerging and more established voices from the fields of art, research, and urban practice. It includes workshops, talks, and exhibitions across the three-day program.
The symposium is free of charge (donations are welcome) and open to everyone. As an open format, visitors are welcome to drop by spontaneously and engage with questions of urban coexistence, regardless of prior knowledge or background. Program contributions will be held in both English and German.
What to expect
Talks
Short, focused presentations by researchers and practitioners from diverse fields
Workshops
Panels
Exhibitions
Program
Friday, 19.06
17:00
Opening of the exhibition
EN / Drifting Tea Open Spatial Intervention & Tea Offering, Miu Onoda (she/her), Ku Yoshitomi (he/him)
Drifting Tea explores how small sensory practices can open up lighter ways of relating to place in the city. It responds to the experience of transient citizens: people who live with temporary, shifting, or partial connections to urban environments, somewhere between visitor and resident.
The project asks how public and shared spaces might support subtle forms of presence. Through tea serving and tea making, participants are invited to pause, notice their surroundings through the senses, and leave a postcard reflection.
The project treats relation to place as something that may be brief, incomplete, and still forming. Drifting Tea invites people to stay lightly, and to notice how urban places are felt through small encounters, materials, and moments of pause.
DE / Gegen-/Architekturen der Sexarbeit, Beverly Engelbrecht (she/her)
EN & DE / recovery / resilience from violent regimes – Shared Knowledge Spaces for collective Imagination on Biodiversity participatory installation, Polyphonic Dreems, Jil (they)
Du kommst in einen Raum, berührst das Moos und tauchst ein in Geschichten von 100 Jahren lokaler Umweltzerstörung und Biodiversitätsverlust. Es erzählt davon, wie die ökologische Nachbar*innenschaft immer homogener geworden ist, weil viele mit den lokalen Umständen und giftigen Rückständen nicht mehr zurechtkamen. Es erzählt aber auch die ungesehenen Perspektiven von Versuchen, gegen allgegenwärtige Zerstörungswut kollektive Antworten zu finden.
Recovery / Resilience from Violent Regimes ist ein multisensorischer Lernraum, der Geistern der Vergangenheit und den Geistern der Zukunft einen Platz bietet. Dabei steht das Moos als lokale Träger*in der Erinnerung und Akteur*in ungesehener Carearbeit für die Renaturierung von Böden im Mittelpunkt. Gleichzeitig werden auch die Besuchenden nach ihren Erinnerungen zu Veränderungen und Erfahrungen mit lokalen Ökosystemen befragt, sodass die Arbeit als wandernde Installation ein wachsendes Archiv der Erinnerung für Klimagerechtigkeit und ökologische Konfliktarbeit wird.
EN / How we read a city: perception of a place installation, Lea Hasenkamp (she/her)
Before navigation became digital, cities were read differently. In Prishtina (Kosovo), orientation often relied on shared references, stories, and everyday descriptions rather than addresses or maps. Places were described through what happens there, what is remembered, or who is connected to them.
These situated ways of navigating still persist, yet they are increasingly overlaid by standardized digital systems. With this shift, not only routes change, but also attention: what becomes visible, relevant, and worth remembering.
Two large-scale drawings translate this transformation into a spatial comparison. Both depict the same site and scale. One follows a reduced cartographic logic. The other interrupts this structure through layers of marks, symbols, and short narrative traces—pointing to events, informal uses, and personal references that escape standardized representation.
What emerges is not a contrast between objective and subjective views, but a tension between different ways of reading the city—coexisting, overlapping, and gradually displacing one another. A short essay extends this approach through a more narrative lens.
EN & DE / urban space as a living archive. Moments of resistance and healing poster presentation, Fee Wüstenberg (she/her)
What happens when an urban space remembers differently? This poster engages with the initiative to rename Berlin’s Hermannplatz as Hind Rajab Place — a practice of bearing witness that inscribes memory, responsibility, and visibility into urban space. In a city where street names predominantly commemorate white, heterosexual men, the intervention disrupts dominant regimes of remembrance and asks: Whose lives are considered grievable? How can healing emerge through the reclaiming of space and resistance against forgetting?
Hind Rajab (2018–2024) was a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza in 2024. Her name now travels through protest and collective remembrance into the urban space. The project asks whose lives are publicly grieved and remembered — and how counter-archives can create new forms of belonging. The PhD project Contested Memories in Urban Spaces at the European University of Flensburg investigates the city as a living archive that is continuously rewritten through activist practices — and as a site of decolonial and queer-feminist learning.
EN / Veiled Memories installation, Nicole Hipp (she/they)
During feminist protests, the city changes its skin. Walls, monuments, and public buildings fill with graffiti, posters, and accusations written in anger. For a brief moment, the city becomes a collective voice. Then it gets painted over. Veiled Memories emerged from this feeling of helplessness. Since 2022, Nicole has been collecting these images: photographs quickly taken during protests in Mexico City and Berlin, screenshots, traces that existed only briefly on walls and posters before surviving only inside our phones. For this installation, Nicole printed these images onto fragments of industrial debris — concrete, wood, and discarded materials. Objects that feel like rescued pieces of the street, saved before erasure. If you look closely at the objects, you will notice the pixels. The blurriness. These are not physical graffiti brought indoors, but digital traces collected over years through phones, screens, and the circulation of protest across the internet. From walls to phones to physical objects — this journey is part of the work itself. Veiled Memories asks what it means to preserve what cities attempt to forget and to give a permanent body to something that was never meant to last.
EN & DE / Grieving Doves: Whose Lives are Seen installation, Grieving Doves
Grieving Doves is an open Berlin-based initiative that honours Palestinians killed by Israeli violence and stands for the liberation of Palestine. Since 2023, the group has gathered almost weekly to write the names and ages of those killed in Gaza, by hand, in community, on pieces of fabric, sewing them onto wings carried in public actions, at demonstrations and interventions, to honour and mourn each one.
To date, over 26,000 names have been written. In Germany, where Palestinian grief is often marginalised or suppressed, this collective practice of mourning refuses the erasure of lives and disrupts narratives that seek to justify mass killing. It asks the city to look and to feel, rather than turn away.
At the symposium (un) learning urbanity, Grieving Doves presents a selection of these wings and sewn names, alongside Filastin, a large-scale dove assembled from hundreds of name-bearing fabric pieces , and photographic documentation of their actions in public space. Together, these works bring grief into the city, unsettling its selective memory and exposing the politics of visibility.
By carrying names into urban space, the project reclaims the city as a site of mourning and resistance. It invites a process of unlearning: to recognise the lives being lost , and the structures that make their loss possible.”
DE / Stadt der Freund*innen – konkrete Utopien für ein 'anderes' Zusammen-Sein in Berlin multimedia, Marieke Fischer (she/her)
Krisen wie Gentrifizierung, zunehmende soziale Isolation und Konflikte um öffentlichen Raum verschärfen sich in Berlin. Diese Herausforderungen verlangen nach neuen Denkweisen – nach Ansätzen, die Verbindung, Sicherheit und Hoffnung in den Mittelpunkt stellen. Inspiriert von (queer-)feministischen Perspektiven versteht dieser Ausstelleungsbeitrag Freund*innenschaft als konkrete Utopie und subversive Praxis: als Möglichkeit, Zugehörigkeit zu schaffen und Netzwerke gegenseitiger Unterstützung aufzubauen. Während Stadtplanung und Politik weiterhin romantische Beziehungen und heteronormative Kleinfamilien privilegieren, untersucht der Workshop freundschaftsbasierte Lebensweisen als zukunftsweisende Alternative für urbanes Zusammenleben. Gemeinsam fragen wir: Welche konkreten utopischen Vorstellungen entstehen, wenn Menschen hegemoniale Stadt- und Machtstrukturen hin zu einer von Freundschaft geprägten Stadt öffnen? Wo entstehen Momente des Bruchs mit dem Vertrauten, in denen mögliche Zukünfte bereits in der Gegenwart sichtbar werden? Welche Potenziale und Grenzen liegen darin, Freund*innenschaft im Verhältnis zu urbanem Raum neu zu denken?
EN / Playful Inclusion multimedia, Saba Barani (she/her)
This contribution builds on the Playful Inclusion research group and engages (un)learning as a collective, critical, and playful process for rethinking urbanity from a post-migrant perspective. It starts from the premise that dominant notions of “home” and “belonging” are often fixed, exclusionary, and spatially bounded, and thus require active unlearning. The workshop and exhibition invite participants to rethink normative understandings of home by exploring diverse, situated, and often fragmented practices of home-making. Particular attention is given to how temporalities and socio-political conditions shape experiences of belonging across different groups.
The format is a collaborative mapping process. A map installation serves as a shared surface where both workshop participants and exhibition visitors contribute. Through guided prompts and examples, participants will map personal narratives, spatial practices, and affective dimensions of home across scales—from the body to the neighborhood and beyond. This unfolds through two modes: facilitated workshop session and open, ongoing exhibition contributions. In parallel, participants co-create an inclusive, evolving glossary that challenges dominant vocabularies of home, belonging, and urban life, capturing plural meanings,contradictions, and emerging concepts.
Re-use Commons Student Housing film, Püren (she/her), Jonathan (he/him), Jesco (he/him)
Campus as Commons explores how underused university buildings can be transformed into affordable, commons-based student housing. The project combines design, construction, and research in a transdisciplinary format at TU Berlin.For this contribution, we present excerpts from an ongoing documentary film project that accompanies the process. Rather than a finished film, the material offers a raw insight into the making of the project: scenes from the workshop and building process, spatial experiments in the former mathematics building, and moments of collective construction with students from TU Berlin as well as international participants from Gdańsk and Milan. The footage captures both hands-on construction and reflective moments, where participants discuss their ideas on reuse, collective living, and alternative housing models. It documents the emergence of the project as a student-led initiative that moves between architectural practice, political questions and commons-based approaches to space.
EN / Mapping Postmigrant Landscapes: Traces of Marielle Franco's Legacies in Berlin Urbanism exhibition, Ingri Berns Pavezi (they/them)
The exhibition maps the visual traces of Marielle Franco’s presence within Berlin’s postmigrant urban landscape. Marielle Franco was a Black, lesbian Brazilian woman, activist, sociologist, and human rights defender, assassinated for political reasons in 2018. Her death mobilized global solidarity, including within Berlin’s Brazilian community and its allies. They ensured that she was not forgotten and sent a clear message of solidarity and strength to Brazil, worldwide, and to the neighborhoods of Berlin. Today, those echoes have become an integral part of the urban landscape of Berlin. Through photographs and portraits, we invite you to consider: How does a post-migrant presence shape our cities? How can transnational solidarity influence our daily spaces, and which struggles are incentivised—or censored—today? Ultimately, how are memory and belonging transformed by the renaming of Berlin’s public and semi-public spaces?
This work is dedicated to the Brazilian community in Berlin. My 11 years with you have convinced me that home is where we dwell; as such, we must care for it through presence, justice, joy and solidarity with our neighbouring communities, whether global or local. The exhibition is a partial result of my work as a guest researcher for the Postcolonial Neighborhoods project, funded by the DFG and based at the Institute of European Ethnology at Humboldt University.
DE / rest is resistance x stitching feminist futures interactive installation, Frieda Grimm (she/her), Johanna Köck (she/her)
Der Teppich ist eine Einladung, zusammenzukommen, sich im Laufe des Symposiums auszuruhen und über bestimmte Fragen rund um Zugänge und Ausschlüsse der Erholung nachzudenken. Wie könnte eine Neuorganisation von Räumen der Erholung und Fürsorge zugunsten marginalisierter Menschen aussehen? Inspiration waren die Nap Events von Tricia Hersey und ihr Buch “Rest is Resistance”.
Stitching Feminist Futures ist ein textiles, kollektives Skizzenheft über Gedanken, Motive und Forderungen rund um eine feministische Bauwende.
Im gemeinsamen Sticken entsteht Raum für Begegnung, Austausch und Vernetzung. Der Stoff ist ein fragmentarisches Dokument der Vielen und ist inspiriert von Kollektiv Sticken und anderen stabilen Feminist*innen.
19:00
Opening Panel, 60 min
Description will be added later
Saturday, 20.06
11:00
EN / City of friends - envisioning concrete utopias together workshop, 120 min
Marieke Fischer (she/her)
Marieke Fischer (she/her)
Crises such as gentrification, growing social isolation, and conflicts over public space are intensifying in Berlin. These challenges call for new ways of thinking – approaches that foreground connection, safety, and hope. Inspired by (queer-)feminist perspectives, this workshop places friendship at the center of a concrete utopia: as a subversive practice that fosters belonging and builds networks of mutual support.
While urban planning and policy continue to privilege romantic relationships and heteronormative nuclear family models, this workshop explores the possibilities of friendship-based ways of living as a forward-looking alternative for urban life.
By imagining a ‘city of friends’, we will engage with questions such as: What kinds of concrete-utopian imaginaries emerge when people come together to open up hegemonic urban and power structures toward visions of a city shaped by friendship? Where do moments of disruption occur – ruptures with the familiar that allow seemingly future possibilities to already take shape in the present? What potentials lie in rethinking friendship in relation to urban space and ways of being – and where are its limits?
In this creative workshop, we will explore these ideas collectively through conversation, writing, mapping, and collage. No prior knowledge is required – only a curiosity and willingness to envision an-other(ed) kind of city together.
DE / Stadt vs. Land- Rechte Großstadtfeindlichkell und romantisierte Naturvorstellungen workshop, 120 min
Fine (she/her)
Fine (she/her)
Description will be added later
12:00
13:00
EN / Beyond Expertise: What can children teach us about space? lecture + station, 60 min
assemble.berlin (them)
assemble.berlin (them)
Description will be added later
EN / Playful Inclusion, Unlearning Home workshop, 120 min
Saba Barani (she/her)
Saba Barani (she/her)
This contribution builds on the Playful Inclusion research group and engages (un)learning as a collective, critical, and playful process for rethinking urbanity from a post-migrant perspective. It starts from the premise that dominant notions of “home” and “belonging” are often fixed, exclusionary, and spatially bounded, and thus require active unlearning. The workshop and exhibition invite participants to rethink normative understandings of home by exploring diverse, situated, and often fragmented practices of home-making. Particular attention is given to how temporalities and socio-political conditions shape experiences of belonging across different groups.
The format is a collaborative mapping process. An A0 map installation serves as a shared surface where both workshop participants and exhibition visitors contribute. Through guided prompts and examples, participants will map personal narratives, spatial practices, and affective dimensions of home across scales—from the body to the neighborhood and beyond. This unfolds through two modes: facilitated workshop session and open, ongoing exhibition contributions. In parallel, participants co-create an inclusive, evolving glossary that challenges dominant vocabularies of home, belonging, and urban life, capturing plural meanings,contradictions, and emerging concepts.
14:00
EN & DE / Spheres of Post-Urban Spaces book presentation, 60 min
Lorenz Krauth (no pronouns)
Alexander Mehren (he/him)
Lorenz Krauth (no pronouns)
Alexander Mehren (he/him)
Description will be added later
15:00
EN / Preservation in a Living Megacity: Towards Co-Creative Heritage Practices in Old Dhaka talk, 60 min
Khandoker Upama Kabir (she/her)
Khandoker Upama Kabir (she/her)
Description will be added later
EN & DE / Beyond the Binary- Genderkonstruktionen in der Architektur input + reflection, 120 min
Marko Hüsch (he/him)
Marko Hüsch (he/him)
Description will be added later
16:00
EN / city-wastescapes interactive talk, 60 min
julia sába (she/they)
julia sába (she/they)
Description will be added later
17:00
DE / Surpassing the Lines: Kartieren queerer Erfahrungen im urbanen Raum presentation, 60 min
Lino Schröder (he/him)
Lino Schröder (he/him)
Description will be added later
DE / Zentrum Raum: Skillbörse 3.0 workshop, 180 min
Zentrum Raum e.V.
Zentrum Raum e.V.
Description will be added later
18:00
EN / What potatoes have to do with revolution presentation, 60 min
Snackbar Frieda
Snackbar Frieda
Description will be added later
19:00
Sunday, 21.06
11:00
EN / Counter-Mapping Workshop on Plural Urban Experience: In Search of The Non-Default City workshop, 120 min
Gosia Rybak (she/her)
Wanda Wahl-Mertes (she/her)
Andria Charlilaou (she/her)
Gosia Rybak (she/her)
Wanda Wahl-Mertes (she/her)
Andria Charlilaou (she/her)
Description will be added later
DE / Physische Präsenz als inklusive Praktik? Über gefühlte Zugänglichkeit zu und gefühlte Sicherheit in öffentlichen Räumen workshop, 120 min
think SI3
think SI3
Description will be added later
EN / 11:30 Werk like Drag workout / athletic intervention, 90 min
Feminist Spaces Collective
Feminist Spaces Collective
Description will be added later
12:00
13:00
EN / (un)learning public space through reconnection talk, 60 min
spatial cru
spatial cru
Description will be added later
EN / Feld Study – Engaging with Emptiness lecture performance, 60 min
lilia Lukács (she/her)
lilia Lukács (she/her)
Description will be added later
14:00
EN / Rewilding as Urban Resistance talk, 60 min
Eduardo Coronado (he/him)
Eduardo Coronado (he/him)
Description will be added later
DE / Queere Räume in Berlin: Zufluchtsorte, aber für wen? lecture with discussion, 60 min
Mimo Taschler (they/them)
Indra Schwartz (sie/ihr)
Mimo Taschler (they/them)
Indra Schwartz (sie/ihr)
Description will be added later
15:00
DE / re:move – notes on obstacles lecture performance, 60 min
Maria Butt (she/her)
Lili Theilen (she/her)
Maria Butt (she/her)
Lili Theilen (she/her)
Description will be added later
DE / Straßen erzählen Geschichte(n): Den Stadtraum als dekolonialen Lern- und Erinnerungsort verstehen workshop + presentation, 120 min
Michelle Crooks,
Michelle Crooks,
Description will be added later
16:00
EN / Kurdish un-urbanity: rethinking city-ness in Rojava lecture, 60 min
Duygu Örs (she/her)
Duygu Örs (she/her)
Description will be added later
17:00
EN & DE / Unmute the Streets presentation & talk, 60 min
Mona (she/her)
Jara (she/her)
Linus (they/them)
Mona (she/her)
Jara (she/her)
Linus (they/them)
Description will be added later
EN & DE / Architecture of Ruinous Landscapes multimedia reading session, 60 min
Kaspar Jamme (he/him)
Felix Künkel (he/him)
Justus Schweer (he/him)
Kaspar Jamme (he/him)
Felix Künkel (he/him)
Justus Schweer (he/him)
Description will be added later
18:00
DE / Und wie weiter? 'Andere' Räume, gemeinschaftliche Zukünfte, solidarische Städte panel discussion, 60 min
Description will be added later
2023 Symposium
Sneak peek into the previous edition
Over three days in Berlin, the third edition brought together practitioners, researchers, and activists for an intense program of talks, workshops, and performances across the city.
500
participants
attended
70
contributions
3
days of intense program
Location info
floating university
Floating e.V. is a self-organised space and group, where practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds meet to collaborate, co-create and imaginatively work towards futures. The site was designed in the 1930s as a rainwater retention basin and opened in 2018 as a cultural infrastructure.
Accessibility
Wheelchair access via ramps. Gender-neutral toilets throughout. Accessible to people with visual, hearing, motor and cognitive impairments. Team members are available for support.
Getting there
floating universityLilienthalstr. 32
10965 Berlin
Ubahn Südstern