Topics of the day

• Water and Urban Development
• Guided tour

Free afternoon

After starting like the day before 😉 we did a short evaluation about the workshop: Our task was to reflect in small groups of 4 people, each, how we felt, what we liked or disliked and what we’d suggest to change or add in order to make it better and than wrote it onto a flip-chart to make it visible for everybody.
If it was (mainly) the opinion of one person, it was simply written down, if several others agreed, it was additionally marked through encircling or underlining…
Altogether it took not longer than about 10 or 15 Minutes – or at least it didn’t “feel” longer. So it was a really nice method to do an evaluation including common exchange and reflection, making sure that everybody was heard and seen – not like the typical exhausting reflection rounds where you’re thoughts are going somewhere else after the 15th person is talking and repeating all the stuff which was already said or – if it’s not a round – just a few rather loud/space taking people talk. So for sure this is my favorite reflection method for larger groups from now on! 🙂

After this we grabbed our stuff and walked to the “Weißensee” where the story of the leisure park Weißensee was told and filigreed with pictures, showing what happened in that place about 100 years ago.
[A nice way to get into the imagination how it might have been or felt like, regarding the meaning or importance of the lake in that times, abstracting form the own actual perspective.]
We continued to …, visited the “rotes Rathaus”, passed through the “Nicoleiviertel” and took a lot of pictures in front of the river “Spree”. Everywhere seemed to be hidden stories and connections…
More stages were a bridge, a very important former trade route, and a ship look.

I like this way of experiencing stories and connections, where I can connect unmediated impressions with additionally told information and through this make up my own “movie” in my had, which stays there for longer. The only pity was, that the group streaked so long, that not everybody could experience this, and that the cool whether made us freeze after a while. But it seems to be a good method especially for children and youth, effording them to create an own personal access to a certain topic.

Then we visited the “Brewery Königsstadt” in Senefelder Straße. It was interesting to find the answer of the question, why breweries where located on a hill and how they found their place there. Nowadays there are small handcraft-workshops and alternative cultural projects located which are auto-organized through a collective (e.G.) and which fought successful against the gentrificaton of their site.

At the Wasserturm & Windmühlenberg a few streets away more stories were told about the old times and the developments and changes until today. The Water-Tower at Water-Tower-Place in Prenzlauer Berg was the First Pumping-Station in Berlin established to promote a public water-grid in the town. In order to get a constant water-pressure in the town-pipes the tower and the water-storage was needed. Today it’s a park and in the old flats of the waterworks-workers their are normal people living. The water-storage is sometimes used as a cultural place. Old pictures showed that there were windmills located on the hill when they established the water-tower. The water-tower has as well a dark historical side, when it was used a as concentration camp during the German fascism.