Cities in Motion: Play, Sports, and Memory

Urban Play Memory

This workshop investigates how urban memory can be created, activated, and exhibited through movement, play, and temporary spatial interventions, rather than through permanent monuments. Responding to contemporary shifts in urban design toward temporality, participation, and embodied experience, the workshop positions streets, open spaces, riverfronts, and Tempelhofer Feld as 24-hour urban landscapes shaped by sports, street games, and flexible exhibitions. Participants will work hands-on within a selected Berlin site, engaging directly with the city through observation, mapping, prototyping, and full-scale testing. Movement patterns, walking, running, cycling, skating, and informal play, are used as primary design tools to generate spatial structures and narratives. Memory is addressed not as a static object, but as a living, adaptable exhibition, emerging through repeated actions, spatial rituals, and time-based occupation. The workshop addresses the emerging trend of performative and temporary urbanism, where cities are increasingly shaped by events, active lifestyles, climate adaptation, and short-term interventions rather than fixed masterplans. By merging sports urbanism, playable streets, and exhibition design, the workshop offers a contemporary framework relevant to urban designers, landscape architects, and planners. The value of this workshop lies in its practice-based methodology, strong Berlin specificity, and direct engagement with real urban conditions. It equips participants with transferable skills in designing active public spaces, experimenting at full scale, and working with time, movement, and social interaction as core design materials.