The city is always growing and always decaying. Understanding the city as a process opens up moments for intervention and opportunities to actively shape a place to live.

The exhibition Open Archive for Urbanism – What is the city? What can it do? What should it do? is built around a modular library on the themes of the city, accommodation, neighborhoods, labor migration, large-scale housing projects, and periphery/center. Selected texts, studies, and publications offer a historical basis and show how places, societies, and neighborhoods are formed, up to the present. At the same time, they provide insights into current debates and research on urban development and city life.

Visitors are invited to use the library and to alter the way the books are ordered. These rearrangements create new contexts and viewpoints – becoming points of departure for conversations, discussions, and further questions.

Art supplements the open system of knowledge, facilitating direct experience and surprising perspectives. The approaches deployed here range from forensics to poetry to critical observation. From different viewpoints, the artists consider the city as an image and space of perception, as build architecture, as a framework of social relations, and as a surface for the projection of societal concepts and conflicts.

Thierry Géhin looks at transitional spaces and the relationship between inside and outside, visible and invisible, public and private – and the limited scope for individual creativity within predefined structures. By shifting viewpoints, Sinta Werner questions perceptions of architectural uniformity; using deliberately simple geometrical structures taken from our everyday environment, she makes clear that our knowledge of built forms makes impartial seeing almost impossible. By contrast, Michele Galassi presents a residential project for different lived realities, raising questions around forms of exclusion, adaptation, and opportunities in mainstream society.

The quasi-archaeological traces of the first inhabitants of the so-called Ostseeviertel in Neu-Hohenschönhausen, found by Sonya Schönberger tell the story of bygone visions, promises, and disappointments. With an approach between function, decorum, and appropriation, the Sudden Starlings Collective makes a physical study of the freestanding concrete partitions originally made by the East German artist Gertraude Pohl. Having lost none of their topicality, Manfred Butzmann’s posters refer to urban conflicts and processes of negotiation in urban space, reminding us that questions of public space, participation, and shaping the city are always also political questions.

In combination with the library, these works create an open archive of urban experience – a framework of research, artistic reflection, and public appropriation. With a varied program of events, it invites us to view the city not only as a given structure, but as an ongoing process of deliberation about what it is, what it can be – and what it should be.

Artists: Manfred Butzmann, Michele Galassi, Thierry Géhin, Sonya Schönberger, Sudden Starlings Collective, Sinta Werner 

nGbK work group station urbaner kulturen: Juan Camilo Alfonso, Jochen Becker, Eva Hertzsch, Constanze Musterer, Adam Page, Katharina Ziemke