In this year’s course „Designing Transformation- The City on the Edge“ we found ourselves investigating an area that has been underlying a lot of change during the past twenty years. It is a site that has sparked a big amount of controversy: the recently renamed Uber Square, former Mercedes- Benz- Platz and even earlier: O2 Platz in the district of Friedrichshain- Kreuzberg right next to the station S/U Warschauer Straße. A site that has developed from an abandoned, derelict land with railways and industrial remains in the early 2000s to an entertainment area where large companies like Zalando, Uber and Amazon settled in. Not only did they place their enormous buildings into the landscape but they also influence and control the infrastructure of the area. What has happened to Uber Platz and the area around? Taking the vast development of the site into account, we wondered, what shapes a city? What made this area undergo such a change? Who controls what? And who are the owners here?

In the beginning of January 2025, the Universität der Künste saw itself confronted with drastic budget cuts of 8 percent for the universities of Berlin imposed by the Berlin Senate. A university-wide protest evolved and our design studio joined forces with the “Do What You Want” studio to form our own protest group.

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