MA Design Studio, SOSE 26: Bogensee Ecologies - Disturbed Soils
Authors: Fasiha Ehsan, Johanna Menne, Baldur Baarmann, Philippe Kovacevic, and Araine Rabel.
Unruly ecologies are not untouched wilderness, but ecosystems that emerge from disturbance. Drawing on the work of Gilles Clément, Ingo Kowarik, Donna Haraway, and Anna Tsing, the project understands these landscapes as the result of changing relationships between human control and ecological processes not failures of management, but new ecologies that develop when maintenance regimes are reduced, interrupted, or abandoned. The question of maintenance has become increasingly urgent under the climate crisis. Rising temperatures, droughts, biodiversity loss, and increasing management costs expose the limits of conventional landscape maintenance, making total control unsustainable, rethinking not only how landscapes are maintained, but where maintenance is truly necessary. Beginning at Bogensee, a landscape shaped by successive political disturbances and abandonment, the project investigates how maintenance can be reimagined. Rather than asking how Bogensee could be restored, it asks: can abandonment itself become a design strategy? Fieldwork revealed that Bogensee is not an isolated condition; every landscape we inhabit today is, in some way, the product of past disturbance. This expands into a territorial vision across Berlin–Brandenburg, connecting Arkenberge (anthropogenic hill), Rieselfelder (former sewage fields), Schönower Heide (heathland), Bogensee, and Klosterfelde (military base) through a soft-mobility corridor. Each site is read through its history, soil conditions, maintenance practices, and emerging ecologies before proposing a site-specific strategy. Some require active intervention, such as soil stabilization, controlled grazing, or ecological fire management, while others require withdrawal to let ecological processes continue. Rather than applying one universal model of maintenance, the project proposes a shift from continuous control toward care as adaptive stewardship, selective, sitespecific, and informed by ecological processes. The corridor allows people to witness these landscapes as evidence of human impact, showing how minimal, strategic intervention can build resilience alongside more-than-human ecologies. Ultimately, our role is not to control nature, but to know where intervention is necessary and where nature itself becomes
the landscape‘s caretaker. Ultimately, our role is not to control nature, but to know where intervention is necessary and where nature itself becomes the landscape‘s caretaker.