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SPATIAL PRACTISE
Spatial Practice brings together participatory projects at the intersection of urban development, culture, and public space. Through workshops, temporary interventions, collaborative design processes, and cultural programming, these projects explore how places can be collectively shaped and activated. Rather than proposing fixed solutions, they create frameworks for dialogue, experimentation, and shared ownership, bringing together diverse perspectives to reveal the social, cultural, and spatial potential of urban environments.
THREE PLACES FOR CHORWEILER
Three Squares for Chorweiler explored how temporary artistic interventions can open up new perspectives on public space. Together with the collective Umschichten, Urban Catalyst developed the Platzstation—a mobile, multifunctional platform that transformed three public squares into spaces for exchange, collective action, and spatial experimentation. Building activities, concerts, communal cooking, neighbourhood walks, and idea walls turned the squares into open laboratories where future uses could be tested in real time. The ideas developed and evaluated together with local residents ultimately informed a spatial development concept, several key elements of which were later implemented permanently.
INTERMEDIATE SPACE TO ARRIVE
Intermediate Space to Arrive explored how spaces in transition can be collectively shaped through artistic interventions, temporary spatial experiments, and participatory design. Rather than proposing a predefined urban vision, the project created a framework for dialogue, testing, and shared ownership. Through workshops, collective building activities, and everyday encounters, residents and practitioners explored existing potentials, experimented with new uses, and initiated long-term processes of spatial transformation.
RAW DIALOG
100 HOURS URBAN INTERVENTION
100 Hours Urban Intervention explored public space as a site for collective design, making, and appropriation. German and Latvian students collaborated with local stakeholders to conceive, build, and activate a series of temporary interventions directly on site. Based on spatial analysis, conversations with local users, and an exploration of how simple interventions can unlock new spatial qualities and uses, the projects were realised as full-scale prototypes. Seating structures, a boardwalk, a raft, and a bicycle repair station tested new forms of public space in everyday use. Several of these interventions were later permanently integrated into the site, contributing to its long-term spatial development.
TAKA SUMMERSCHOOL
International Summer School | Roja, Latvia explored how temporary spatial interventions and collaborative design-build processes can activate public space. Developed in collaboration with RISEBA University of Applied Sciences (Riga), the summer school brought together international students to investigate local contexts through site-specific research, collective design, and hands-on construction. Working closely with the local community, the participants created full-scale interventions that tested new forms of public use and social interaction.
URBAN INTERVENTIONS
Urban Interventions | Muscat explored public space as a site of cultural encounter and artistic appropriation. Between 2017 and 2020, a series of site-specific interventions were developed in Muscat in collaboration with local and international artists, architects, and designers. Temporary installations, performances, and collective actions activated everyday urban spaces and tested alternative forms of use. Inviting passers-by to engage with and reinterpret their surroundings, the projects demonstrated how artistic practice can challenge existing spatial conditions and foster new relationships between place, culture, and the public realm.
MAKING FUTURES
Making Futures explored public space as a site for collective learning and artistic research. The project investigated how future forms of living together can be explored through spatial interventions, performative formats, and collaborative processes. Bringing together artists, architects, researchers, and the public, it created an open laboratory where research, production, and exchange became inseparable parts of the creative process. Rather than focusing on a finished outcome, the project understood the shared process of experimentation and collaboration as the artwork itself.
VENICE PERFORMANCE
Venice Performance explored the public spaces of Venice as stages for tourist rituals and everyday spatial practices. Based on site-specific research into perception, image-making, and tourist behaviour, twelve students developed a series of performative interventions and site-specific installations that were realised across selected locations in the city. Drawing on local histories, narratives, and everyday situations, the projects challenged familiar ways of experiencing Venice and opened new perspectives on the relationship between city, image, and public space.
GILDING PUBLIC SPACE
Gilding Public Space explored how artistic practice can reframe the perception of public space through collective action and temporary intervention. As part of the Academy of a New Gropiusstadt, students from TU Berlin collaborated with the Chair of Urban Design and Urbanization (Prof. Jörg Stollmann), the Community Centre Gropiusstadt, and the Intercultural Meeting Point to temporarily gild a public square. A series of urban interventions and participatory gilding workshops invited local residents to transform everyday objects into symbols of shared value, opening new perspectives on place, community, and belonging.
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