Same but Different: The Floating University Berlin (FUB) and the Making of Another University

Abstract

While architecture has surfaced in recent years as a key resource in shaping the entrepreneurial university both programmatically and aesthetically, the Floating University Berlin has taken architectural design as the starting point for developing a temporary space for creating and reflecting upon the future of urban societies and the role universities might play therein. In its unfolding the FUB resonates with some of the processes of neoliberal city and campus development, and at the same time turns these into potentialities for overcoming the imagination of the entrepreneurial university. The article shows how the exploration of potentialities within existing spaces and discourses might be understood as one way of resisting and transforming them. It points to potential roles that architecture could play in enacting this form of affirmative critique and presents five tactics of making space for another university.

Keywords:

• Floating University Berlin
• campus development
• community of practice
• spatial tactics

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the reviewers and the editor Igea Troiani for her insightful feedback and for pushing the paper to another level. A special thanks goes to Gazi Islam for providing us with invaluable feedback and inspiration for reworking the paper after the first review. Finally, we are greatful to the architectural collective Raumlabor and to all the participants of the FUB for welcoming us as researchers during the open weeks and for the time they took for interivews and coordination.

Notes

1. From a field note by Dalal Elarji, taken on July 7th 2018, at the Floating University Berlin.

2. From the FUB homepage, accessed at http://www.floatinguniversity.org/, on July 18th 2019, our translation.

3. These notions are used on the FUB homepage and were translated by the authors.

4. Tina Besley and Michael A. Peters, Re-Imagining the Creative University for the 21st Century (Rotterdam: Sense Publ, 2013).

5. Maribel Guerrero et al., “Entrepreneurial Universities: Emerging Models in the New Social and Economic Landscape,” Small Business Economics 47, no. 3 (2016): 551–63; Henry Etzkowitz, “The Entrepreneurial University Wave: From Ivory Tower to Global Economic Engine,” Industry and Higher Education 28, no. 4 (2004): 223–32.

6. Ronald Barnett quoted in Besley and Peters, Re-Imagining the Creative University for the 21st Century, xi; Ronald Barnett, Imagining the University. New Studies in Critical Realism and Education (London: Routledge, 2013); Michał Izak, Monika Kostera, and Michał Zawadzki, The Future of University Education. Palgrave Critical University Studies (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

7. From an interview with one of the members of Raumlabor, conducted by Dalal Elarji, on July 13th 2018, Berlin.

8. From an interview with one of the organizers, conducted by Dalal Elarji, on July 13th 2018. refering with the notion of “citiymaking” to Cassim Shepard, Alex Fradkin, and Rosalie Genevro, Citymakers: The Culture and Craft of Practical Urbanism (New York, NY: The Monacelli Press, 2017).

9. Barnett quoted in Besley and Peters, “The Creative University: Creative Social Development and Academic Entrepreneurship,” in Re-Imagining the Creative University for the 21st Century, 11; Ronald Barnett, The Ecological University: A Feasible Utopia (London: Routledge, 2018).

10. Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, “The Neo-Liberal University.” New Labor Forum 9, no. 6 (2000): 73–79.

11. Peter David Whitton, “The New University: Space, Place and Identity” (Doctoral, Manchester Metropolitan University); Dougals Spencer, “Architectural Deleuzism: Neoliberal Space, Control and the ‘Univer-City’.” Radical Philosophy 168, Series no. 1 (2011): 9–21.

12. Peter Hall, Cities in Civilisation (London: Phoenix, 1999); Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

13. Katharina Borsi and Chris Schulte, “Universities and the City: From Islands of Knowledge to Districts of Innovation,” The Journal of Architecture 23, no. 7–8 (2018): 1143–80.

14. Kees Christiaanse and Kerstin Höger, Campus and the City: Urban Design for the Knowledge Society (Zürich: gta-Verlag, 2007).

15. Besley and Peters, Re-Imagining the Creative University for the 21st Century; Jos Boys, Towards Creative Learning Spaces: Re-Thinking the Architecture of Post-Compulsory Education (London and New York: Routledge, 2010); Scientific approaches may be considered as another way of contributing to re-imagining university space, such as the space syntax led research by Chi-Hung Lo, Ya-Chuan Ko, and Yao-Tsung Ko, “Application of Space Syntax Theory to the Sustainable Development of Tunghai University Campus Environment,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Mathematics 18, no. 6 (2015): 883–903.

16. Jos Boys, Building Better Universities: Strategies, Spaces, Technologies (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015), 4; Barnett, Imagining the University.

17. Boys, Towards Creative Learning Spaces, 6.

18. Noam Austerlitz, Unspoken Interactions: Exploring the Unspoken Dimension of Learning and Teaching in Creative Subjects. Centre for Learning and Teaching in Art and Design. London: Clip Cetl/ Edinburgh: Word Power Books; Olivia Sagan, “Playgrounds, Studios and Hiding Places: Emotional Exchange in Creative Learning Spaces,” Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education 6, no. 3 (2008): 173–186; Maggi Savin-Baden, Learning Spaces: Creating Opportunities for Knowledge Creation in Academic Life (New York: Basic Books, 2007); Boys, Towards Creative Learning Spaces.

19. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

20. From an interview with a workshop moderator, conducted by Dalal Elarji, on July 15th 2018, Berlin.

21. Lave and Wenger, Situated Learning.

22. Greg Scott and Roberta Garner, Doing Qualitative Research: Designs, Methods, and Techniques (Boston: Pearson, 2013), 245–62.

23. Greg Scott, Roberta Garner, and Gerald R. Suttles, “Writing Ethnographic Field Notes,” in Doing Qualitative Research: Designs, Methods, and Techniques (Boston: Pearson, 2013), 232–44.

24. Kathy Charmaz, Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: SAGE, 2006), 51.

25. Ibid., 57.

26. From an interview with an architect of Raumlabor, conducted by Dalal Elarji, on July 13th 2018, Berlin.

27. From a field note by Dalal Elarji, taken on July 8th 2018, at the Floating University Berlin.

28. From an interview with one of the Floating University team members, conducted by Dalal Elarji, on July 7th, 2018, Berlin.

29. Anke Fesel and Chris Keller, eds., Berlin Wonderland: Wild Years Revisited 1990–1996 (Berlin: Bobsairport, 2014).

30. Philipp Misselwitz and Markus Miessen, “Rethinking Temporary Use in the Neoliberal City,” in Spaces of Uncertainty - Berlin Revisited (Berlin, Boston: Birkhäuser, 2018), 63.

31. Claire Colomb, Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of Urban Reinvention Post-1989. Planning, History and Environment Series (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012).

32. Raumlabor Berlin, Art City Lab: neue Räume für die Kunst; New Spaces for Art (Berlin: Jovis, 2015).

33. Chris Steyaert and Timon Beyes, “Narrating Urban Entrepreneurship: A Matter of Imagineering?” in Governance der Kreativwirtschaft, ed. Bastian Lange, Ares Kalandides, Birgit Stöber, and Inga Wellmann (Bielefeld: transcript), 207–21.

34. Jeanne Astrup-Chauveaux, “Guerridae: The Big Lexicon,” Floatzine, July 3, 2018, collected on site.

35. Barnett, The Ecological University, 30.

36. Céline Condorelli and Gavin Wade, Support Structures (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010).

37. From a field note by Dalal Elarji, taken on September 10th 2018, at the Floating University Berlin.

38. “BMX School Berlin | BMX Flatland Crash Course + Bike Race – BMX & MTB Competition | Floating University Berlin.”

39. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London, New York: Verso, 2018), 461.

40. From an interview with an architect of Raumlabor, conducted by Dalal Elarji, on July 9^th 2018, Berlin.

41. “Die Foodbrücke.” Available online: https://www.facebook.com/diefoodbruecke/.

42. Ibid.

43. Andreas Reckwitz, The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New (Cambridge: Polity, 2018).

44. Caitlin Cunningham, “Conflicted Commons: A Local Makerspace in the Neoliberal City,” (Theses and Dissertations), https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/4802.

45. Ibid., 12.

46. From an interview with an architect of Raumlabor, conducted by Dalal Elarji, on July 13th 2018, Berlin.

47. From an interview with an artist in residence, conducted by Dalal Elarji, on July 9th 2018, Berlin.

48. N. Endrissat, G. Islam, and C. Noppeney, “Enchanting Work: New Spirits of Service Work in an Organic Supermarket,” Organization Studies 36, no. 11 (2015): 1555.

49. From an interview with an architect of Raumlabor, conducted by Dalal Elarji, on July 9th 2018, Berlin.

50. From a field note by Dalal Elarji, taken on July 7th 2018, at the Floating University Berlin.

51. From an interview with an architect of Raumlabor, conducted by Dalal Elarji, on July 9th 2018, Berlin.

52. Spencer, “Architectural Deleuzism,” 9–21.

53. Steyaert and Beyes, “Narrating Urban Entrepreneurship,” 13.

54. Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Michel Foucault and Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 322.

55. Timon Beyes and Christoph Michels, “The Production of Educational Space: Heterotopia and the Business University,” Management Learning 42, no. 5 (2011): 521–36.

56. Whitton, “The New University.”

57. Barnett, The Ecological University, 87.

58. Steyaert and Beyes, “Narrating Urban Entrepreneurship,” 12.

59. Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities - Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002), 48.

60. Ibid., 49.

61. The five tactics we propose may resonate – to some readers – with Le Corbusier’s “five points.” The latter are design principles developed by Le Corbusier to communicate his manifesto of modern architecture, representing static, architectonic elements. In our paper, we propose five “tactics,” which seek resonance with a more prcessual understanding of architecture as outlined, e.g. by Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

62. From an interview with an architect of Raumlabor, conducted by Dalal Elarji, on July 13th 2018, Berlin.

63. Barnett, The Ecological University.

64. Steyaert and Beyes, “Narrating Urban Entrepreneurship,” 14.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Fund of the University of Liechtenstein (FFF) as part of the research project Organizing spaces of creativtiy and reflection (OSCAR): The university and sustainable regional development with the grant number ar-2-17.

Notes on contributors

Dalal Elarji

Dalal Elarji is a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Institute of Architecture and Planning at the University of Liechtenstein. Her research interests revolve around “other” spatial practices that expand, challenge and question the normative ways of practicing architecture.

Christoph Michels

Christoph Michels is an assistant professor at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Liechtenstein. His research interests concern the interface between architecture and organization studies, with a focus on the production of atmospheres, the spatial development of institutions of higher education and the role of architecture in processes of organizing.