WiSe 2025/26 Playful Inclusion III

Seminar WiSe 2025/26
Saba Barani

Playful Inclusion III
From the Shelter to the City
Co-Learning for Claiming Spaces

There is an urgent need to facilitate the agency of different groups of citizens from diverse backgrounds to negotiate their demands and claim their spaces within the hegemonic architectural and urban development systems in the city. In our co-learning research group Playful Inclusion, we create environments to address these needs. Our approach is grounded in a critical spatial perspective and uses playful, collaborative methods to help citizens exercise their agency.

In Playful Inclusion I, through games, we facilitated a co-investigation of spaces within a refugee camp in Berlin-Marzahn with refugee children, women*, and stakeholders. In Playful Inclusion II, we expanded this facilitation and co-learning process to include not only refugee women* and children from the camp but also those from the broader Marzahn neighborhood. In Playful Inclusion III, we use BENN’s cargo bike to facilitate a mobile place of knowledge exchange and carry out an intervention on two streets in Marzahn where two refugee accommodations (GUs) are located. We facilitate a knowledge co-production setup with different residents of these streets, including those from GUs, from other buildings in the same streets, and stakeholders, to discuss their perspectives, needs, conflicts, imaginations,.... and to tell the story of these streets, critically and collectively.

Students act as co-researchers. We start with critical readings, followed by observations, mappings, and interviews through temporary interventions in different parts of the streets by means of our mobile place of knowledge exchange, and conclude with data analysis. We will collectively decide how to present the results.

The project is interdisciplinary and open to motivated bachelor’s and master’s students with a background or interest in architecture, urban planning, social and political sciences, or related fields.

This Research Group works in cooperation with BENN project and Refugee accommodations in Marzahn-Süd.

Download poster here.