Nomadisch Grün (Green Nomad) launched Prinzessinnengärten (Princess Gardens) as a pilot project in the summer of 2009 on Moritzplatz in Berlin Kreuzberg, a site that had been a wasteland for more than half a century. Along with friends, activists and neighbors, the group cleared trash, built transportable organic vegetable gardens and harvested the first fruits of their labor. Source : Photos de Google Earth (Moritzplatz Berlin 2006/2012) Imagine a future where every available space in big cities is used to allow new green spaces to flourish. Green spaces that residents create themselves and use to produce fresh and healthy food. This would result in increased biological diversity, reduced CO2 emissions and a better microclimate. These spaces would foster a sense of community and the exchange of a wide variety of skills and forms of knowledge, and help people lead more sustainable lives. They would constitute a kind of miniature utopia, a place where a new urban lifestyle can emerge, where people can work together, relax, communicate and enjoy locally produced vegetables. In the future, more and more people will live in cities rather than rural areas. The city will therefore become the decisive place for the development of more sustainable modes of eating, living and traveling. The city of the future should be a pleasant and climate-friendly place to live, where everything is done to preserve our natural resources. Prinzessinnengärten is a new place for urban learning. It’s the place where locals can come together to experiment and learn more about organic food production, biodiversity and climate protection. This space will help them adapt to climate change and become familiar with healthy eating, sustainable living and a future-oriented urban lifestyle. With this project, Nomadisch Grün intends to increase the biological, social and cultural diversity of the neighborhood and pave the way for a new way of living together in the city. Text Source : https://prinzessinnengarten.net/about/

Natur-Park Südgelände Once opened as part of the Expo 2000 world exhibition, the park on the site of the former Tempelhof marshalling yard fascinates with its unique combination of old railway technology, wild nature worthy of protection and art. From the very beginning, the park has stood for the successful transformation of a former industrial wasteland into a nature park of a special kind. Originally planned by artists and landscape architects, visitors to this unique park, the first of its kind, stroll between the present and the past through partly untouched nature, which time and again reveals surprising new relics from days gone by. Located directly at the Priesterweg S-Bahn station, the 18-hectare green space extends almost to Südkreuz. After the station was finally shut down in 1952, nature gradually reclaimed the territory and allowed an impressive diversity of species to emerge. In 1999, the Natur Park Südgelände was designated as a landscape conservation area and parts of it as a nature reserve. Railway history is omnipresent everywhere: in addition to tracks, points and rail tracks, water cranes, light poles, a steam locomotive and one of the oldest turntables in Germany have been left in the park. Together with the steel water tower and the old bridge master's office, the almost 5,000 square metre locomotive hall is part of a listed overall complex. In 2022, the jury of the Italian Benetton Study and Research Foundation based in Treviso (Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche, Treviso) honoured Berlin's urban nature and the Natur Park Südgelände as a "bridge between ecology, art and urban culture" with the International Carlo Scarpa Prize. The international award, which has been presented annually since 1990, recognises outstanding places in landscape architecture that relate nature-related, historical and design values in a special way and bring them to life. source text Kunst und alte Industrierelikte im Schatten des Wasserturms: Der Natur-Park Südgelände ist zugleich wild und schön gestaltet. Foto: Imago/Schöning Photo by Allison Tweedie Photo by Konstantin Börner

“The opaque is not the obscure.. it is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence” “We clamour for the right to opacity for everyone” Édouart Glissant When asked to describe the Floating University, as members of this multifaceted venture are often asked to do, the answer starts with an exhale and a pause, followed by a highly personal interpretation – the description of a shared experience as seen from a set of highly individualised viewpoints. That the Floating University allows for that level of complex communication of itself the fact there is no corporate script, that it is a deeply opaque infrastructure for each visitor to project onto, is the political essence of the project. The Floating University requires a new language of practice and perhaps a new practice all together. A practice that negates the institutional way of doing things, challenges the need for unified transparencies of meaning, elaborates on processes of making and thinking together and frees spaces in the city to do so collectively. image © Lena Giovanazzi Drawing by Jade Dreyfuss 2022 Source main image: ©Jean-Marie Dhur, Zabrieski Buchladen Source text: Floating University