Interview with Gerjan Streng by Laura Frias & Hande Öğün 33

able to reveal different scenarios. There are clients who know what they want (an offce, a square, a road) and they want you to do that as quick and as effcient as possible. But if the topic is the future of housing for instance it is more valid to design different options and to show that there is not just one design. Recently I read this book ‘Speculative Everything’ by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby in which they show four scenarios that are all feasible and imaginable for one brief. This is an interesting way of thinking: how to generate new ideas based on different political grids, from very authoritarian to anarchistic or radically democratic. We try to work in this way on a city level and to speculate on what the design brief will be the coming ten or twenty years.

How did the collaboration between you and

Raumlaborberlin for the studio of The Floating

University arise? Did you frst select the topic (corrupted urban systems and utopia) or choose the site near Tempelhof Berlin? At the end of last year the head of INSIDE (Hans Venhuizen) asked me if I would like to guide a studio. So far I was only involved in a skills workshop and when I heard the year theme would be ‘corruption’ with Raumlabor, I got interested. I spoke to Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius of Raumlabor who told me they wanted to build a Floating University. We were talking about the site, located right at the heart of Berlin, thinking about new urbanism and what kind of projects the students could work on. We picked the topic of both corruption and utopia as tools to fnd out what is wrong with the city nowadays and to use the Floating University as a test site. If you just turn the site into a new neighbourhood, you know what you get, the municipality will start to build roads, dig a sewage system and people will live there. But what can you do as a designer to stimulate other ways of living? How do people actually want to live? In an apartment you don’t have any impact on how to deal with waste, there is no garden and no way of growing your own food. So we came up with fve obvious infrastructures: mobility, energy, water, food and trash for the students to work. Keeping in mind the theme of corruption, the students were asked to come up with new ideas about what is going on in the Netherlands and Germany where it seems as if all systems are taken care of.

In this studio we have learned that the current urban systems (food, water, energy, trash, mobility) are corrupted, because they don’t work the way they should. Which system requires more urgent change in our cities today? All of them. Right now there is a lot of attention for energy, obviously, usually this is triggered by external conditions like the Paris Agreement and the fact that we need to deal with our energy in a different way. The same counts for how we deal with our food. Nowadays people are more aware what kind of food they eat and it is much easier to buy organic food. Besides food, mobility is another issue in transition because of the increase of technology. Water is also facing quite some challenges because of climate changes. The crisis has also been an opportunity to dive into these topics. If it is not known in which direction things are moving, we as designers have a lot of power. This thinking of fows in systems is transforming from a super centralized organized system into a system empowered by producers and consumers. Consequently the users will have more impact on the system and can initiate discussions about how to rearrange the infrastructure. I don’t know where it goes yet but things are defnitely changing by giving more control to the people and thus for the society at large.

From 0 to 10 how much do you live a sustainable life? Do you think sustainability is also corrupted? (Laughs) That’s a diffcult question. I am defnitely not a 0, but I am also not a 10, because I live in a small house that is poorly insulated and I have a gas heater. I travel to Amsterdam every week, I partly eat meat so that’s a plus (laughs). I have a bike, I buy organic products depending how much money I have at that moment (laughs), I do not have a car. So I try to be sustainable but I also want to live a comfortable life. I am not going to sit on the couch in my house with extra sweaters on, which I used to do in the past. It feels like a kind of a failure but if you want to live a super sustainable life and to grow your own food, it is basically a job and takes all your time. All in all I guess I am a 7.

Places_of_Hope © Erikjan Koopmans