How radical?

As part of the radical playgrounds art parcours (curated by Joanna Warsza and Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius / raumlaborberlin), we explored performative strategies of urban spatial appropriation at the Gropius Bau in April 2024. Our point of departure was the contested development project Kulturhafen at Berlin’s Hafenplatz, a plan that foresees the demolition of a 1970s housing complex and fundamentally calls into question whether current tenants will ever be able to return.

Together with residents and students from the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies at UdK Berlin, we explored how artistic and spatial practices can operate as instruments of resistance. While the company Art Project, in cooperation with the public housing provider GEWOBAG, negotiates the site as a lucrative development opportunity, the people living there have been fighting for years for their homes, and for answers to why such a prime piece of land has been deliberately left to decay. The Berlin Tenants’ Association calls it “Monopoly with pauses.”

Our work positioned itself as a counter-movement: against speculative urban development, against the erasure of social structures, against the logics of urban dispossession. We asked which utopian alternatives might be possible beyond profit-driven planning rhetoric, and what role designers can play within these struggles.

We approached performance as a social intervention — a tool that re-codes space, exposes power relations, and produces collective visibility. Our research culminated in public actions at Hafenplatz: scenographies at the threshold of artistic expression, political articulation, and the demand for the Right to the City.

The process culminated in a joint demonstration, a public space of negotiation that brought our research directly onto the streets and made visible that the city is, and always has been, a contested terrain.