Insurgent Design: Unlearning practices through marginalized spaces

Format: Design Studio // Habitat Unit, TU Berlin
Teaching team: Juliana Canedo, Qusay Amer, Danielle Amorim

The Master Studio offered in the Winter Semester 2025 at TU Berlin engages with the district of Neukölln as a complex and contested urban environment shaped by migration, diversity, and ongoing socio-spatial transformations. Often celebrated as a city of migrants, Berlin promotes diversity as a defining feature, yet this narrative frequently obscures underlying contradictions produced by neoliberal urban policies. Neukölln, where more than half of the residents have migrant backgrounds, exemplifies these tensions. Public discourses continue to stigmatize the neighborhood and its communities, attributing urban challenges such as inadequate sanitation or environmental issues to cultural practices rather than addressing structural causes like insufficient infrastructure and long-term disinvestment. These narratives often precede and justify processes of gentrification, where rising real estate pressures displace existing populations and prioritize economic interests over social needs.

The studio critically engages with these dynamics through the lens of post-migrant perspectives, which challenge the binary distinction between “locals” and “migrants” and instead advocate for a more inclusive understanding of urban citizenship. Within this framework, migration is understood not as an exception but as a constitutive and transformative force shaping contemporary societies. It emphasizes equal rights, collective empowerment, and the recognition of cultural diversity as an integral component of urban life. By moving beyond migration as a marker of difference or exclusion, the studio explores how cities can be reimagined as spaces where diversity is normalized and actively contributes to more equitable forms of coexistence.

Building on this theoretical grounding, the studio adopts an insurgent urbanism approach that foregrounds collaborative and participatory practices as tools for urban transformation. Students are invited to experiment with alternative methods of mapping, storytelling, and design that center the experiences, needs, and aspirations of Neukölln’s diverse residents, including long-term inhabitants, migrant communities, and temporary users. Through this process, the studio seeks to challenge dominant planning paradigms and to develop counter-narratives and spatial proposals that resist displacement and exclusion. Insurgent urbanism is approached as both a methodological framework and a political stance, emphasizing resilience, self-determination, and the capacity of communities to shape their own environments.

The focus of the studio is the area around Hermannplatz and Sonnenallee, a site currently at the center of intense public debate and political contestation. Large-scale development projects, including the proposed transformation of the Karstadt site and the construction of one of Berlin’s largest refugee shelters, expected to accommodate more than 1,000 people by 2027, have intensified discussions around urban futures, social justice, and spatial inclusion. Within this context, the studio encourages students to critically examine ongoing developments and to propose alternative visions that respond to the complexities of the area.

Through a combination of theoretical reflection, fieldwork, and design exploration, the studio fosters an environment of critical inquiry and collaborative learning. It aims to equip students with the tools to engage with contested urban realities and to contribute to the development of more inclusive, just, and resilient cities. By working across disciplines and engaging with local contexts, participants are encouraged to rethink the role of architects and planners, positioning themselves as facilitators of dialogue and co-producers of urban space. Ultimately, the studio seeks to reimagine Neukölln as a dynamic and equitable urban landscape in which diversity is not only acknowledged but becomes a driving force for collective futures.

Outcomes

Ebook