Deep Urban Experimentation

As an activist-researcher in residence at Haus der Statistik in Berlin, I spent 6 months studying, supporting, and shaping Berlin’s – and perhaps Europe’s – most promising New European Bauhaus lighthouse demonstrator project. Through community-oriented project development, experimental participation formats, and strategic planning, the project seeks to cooperatively develop a long-abandoned urban building block to secure spaces for living, working, and culture that serve the common good and is affordable in the long term. My research led to the conceptualization of the concept of Deep Experimentation, which connotes an emerging new type of urban experiments that transgress previously disconnected notions of radical and value-driven sustainability transformation with more managerial and pragmatic approaches to sustainability transitions in inventive ways. I conducted the project as part of the Erasmus School for Culture, Communications, and History’s European Research Council project on “Crafting future urban economies.”