MakeCity – Observing Urban Microspaces

Back when our Service Designer Bastian Boss was studying design in Tokyo, he went to a workshop on micro spaces by the Still City Project, where he met his friends David Bauer, Niklas Fanelsa and Jan Lindenberg.
The four of them have all been highly inspired by artists like Wajiro Kon or Genpei Akasegawa and the general concept of observing spaces that people usually overlook. As specified observation techniques are a huge part of Service Design as well (with the difference of usually being adapted onto humans, not objects), the designers and architects were more than interested when the MakeCity Festival Berlin offered the opportunity to join and give workshops on urban subjects, including “Urban Commons”.

So they went for it and held workshops in Schöneberg and Neukölln, introducing a rarely noticed part of the urban spaces in Berlin, the so called “Baumscheiben” (tree pits).

For those of you who have no idea what that actually is (you’re not alone!) they documented the whole thing and even presented it to our whole office at one of our weekly Brainfood presentations.

A tree pit is an unsealed area around the trunk of a street tree, that can be and often is used for a variety of different things (such as gardening, seating, commercial use or simply storage). Due to the huge differences in uses between some districts, Bastian and his friends divided their workshops into two different tours, one in Schöneberg and one in Neukölln.
The participants were equipped with observation papers, documenting the things they found most interesting.
They were also asked to think themselves into a range of different characters (or even objects) in order to change their own perspectives. 
The basic idea of the workshops was to change the way people see their own surroundings and get them to appreciate the little things they can find everywhere around a city, if they just look for them.

Unfortunately, the city of Berlin seems to have quite some issues with many of the tree pits, as they are often used for seating outside of bars and cafes. This seems to attract a lot of noise at night and is one of the reasons for new laws about the use of these urban spaces. So if you happen to walk through the streets of Berlin sometime soon, watch out for tree pits as long as they’re still there!