Seminar SoSe 2026
Tatia Kiknadze, Sucheta Bhattacharrya

Urban Living Room

The seminar explores how belonging is actively constructed, not passively granted, through everyday spatial and cultural practices in Berlin. In the city shaped by migration and marked by cultural friction, over 53% of residents were not born here. Questions of arrival, identity, and coexistence shape daily life. Berlin offers refuge, freedom, and creative possibility, yet it also reflects fragmentation, spatial exclusion, and social polarization. Against this backdrop, the seminar asks: How can daily rituals, architecture, and urban practices cultivate spaces of care and inclusion?

By reflecting on past constructions of “home” embedded in personal memory, participants critically examine their own notions of belonging and explore how a new “living room” is constructed in a place of arrival, Berlin in this case. 

The “living room” is understood not only as a domestic interior, but as a broader spatial condition: any shared space in which identity, attachment, and everyday rituals take shape. The course combines spatial research with narrative inquiry and self-reflection. Students situate their observations within broader debates in urban anthropology, migration studies, and architectural theory. Individual explorations gradually culminate into shared outputs: an archive of cartographies and reflections, visual and narrative documentation, and a collectively produced zine. 

The seminar is open to BA and MA students from all BUA institutions and disciplines. No prior design or research expertise is required; curiosity, openness, and a willingness to engage in reflective and field-based methods are key. Conceived as a collective urban practice, Urban Living Room aims to create a “soft space in a hard city”, a space for dialogue, experimentation, and collective authorship. This is an X-Tutorial funded under the Excellence Strategy of the Federal Government and the Länder by the Berlin University Alliance.

Image © art Tatia Kiknadze & photo Sucheta Bhattacharyya

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