Instructor: Eve Blau
Course: Reconceptualizing the Urban: Berlin as Laboratory
Students: Pedro Aparicio, Mikela De Tchaves, Igor Ekštajn, Emma Goode, Eliyahu Keller, Michael Keller, Aleksandra Kudryashova, Namik Mačkić
Directed by Eve Blau, co-principal investigator of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, the Berlin Portal is composed of a core team of Harvard professors and advanced graduate students from the Graduate School of Design and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Working together with Berlin-based scholars and practitioners, we aim to develop collaborative projects that focus on six strategic research themes:
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the interdependence of formal and informal planning practices;
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the relationship between gentrification and historic preservation;
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nature and agriculture in the city;
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the urban imprint of cross-border mobility and migration;
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infrastructure and urban organizational systems; and
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innovation in the post-industrial and post-socialist city
Our first step in developing unique research themes and questions was facilitated by an on-ground research seminar in Berlin, in which the group of students had met and collaborated with various scholars from the city, and engaged in their own personal research projects, rediscovering both the formal, known, and historic aspects of Berlin, as well as new trends and tendencies, informal aspects, and contemporary issues.