MA Design Studio, SOSE 26: Bogensee Ecologies - Learnscapes
Authors: Isabel Kokke, Inês Viinikainen Soares Lema, Steffen Suhr, and Neil Jafari.
A learnscape is a spatial learning environment defi ned by interacting with your surroundings
through stewardship and appropriation. This project departs from a critique of both the contemporary school system and the historical instrumentalization of nature as a pedagogical setting. From the Waldschulen to GDR and Naziera decentralized education, outdoor learning has repeatedly served not to liberate but to isolate, indoctrinate, and sanitize the relationship between people and their environment. Meanwhile, the
conventional classroom reproduces hierarchies of knowledge that exclude as much as they teach and society is experiencing a growing disconnection from nature, a kind of generational amnesia and extinction of experience that neither model has been able to address. So, what would it mean to genuinely rethink these frameworks, spatially, socially, and ecologically?
To answer this, we explore the concept of the learnscape: an unfixed, non-institutional space for horizontal knowledge production, where learning emerges through experimentation, co-creation, and attunement to the more-than-human world. Rather than instrumentalizing nature as a backdrop, the learnscape positions the environment itself as an active participant in knowledge production. Drawing on Bellacasa‘s ethics of care, we reject both the idealization of nature and the paternalism of stewardship, working instead toward a practice of genuine accountability to living systems.
Territorially, we work with a typology of abandoned or underactivated sites across Germany — spaces marked by dissonant heritage that has, in many cases, frozen their transformation. We believe each of them holds unrealized spatial and social potential. Rather than erasing or „healing“ that history, we propose a palimpsest approach: intervening through transformation that acknowledges memory rather than covering it over. Underpinning the spatial proposals is a manifesto of seven principles: the protection of ambiguous,
unscripted space; the reconnection of people with nature; a shift toward more-than-human perspectives; inclusivity and equal access; honest engagement with site memory; horizontal and peer-to-peer learning; and a bottom-up approach that centers local communities. Each principle is developed both theoretically and spatially, producing design strategies tested across four sites — Teufelsberg, Beelitz Heilstätte, Bogensee, and Spreepark. Together, these interventions propose a model for reactivating abandoned infrastructure not
through erasure or spectacle, but through the slow, community-led interventions.