Abstract

Starting from a close-up view of a Berlin site typical in its mixing of top-down and bottom-up cultures, the paper focuses on the increasing informal, situated and everyday urbanisms in Berlin and abroad. It interrogates the strategies of participatory design and spatial appropriation that could help to transform these forces into long term, sustainable and holistic practices. Looking at the artist-squat K77, the research/event/publication, Strategies of Participative Architecture and Spatial Appropriation, the design/concept Forum K 82—a centre for cooperative, self-determined education and work, and through research on US-American Community Design, the paper argues for bringing activist and architectural practices, university work, political and economic discourse into an immanent and productive exchange that reinforces direct-democratic and sustainable potentials in the built environment

How to Cite:

Heyden, M., (2008) “Evolving Participatory Design: A Report from Berlin, Reaching Beyond”, field 2(1), 31–46.