Mapping Diversity, Claiming Space

Solisur/ Ciudad Migrante instagram.com Spanische, Englische Lautsprache Solmsstrasse 18, 10961 Berlin
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Collective Strategies around Public Space for Migrant Communities in Berlin

By Ubahn. Closer stations are Mehringdamm (u6), and Gneisenaustrasse (u7).

Main language is Spanish. Possible individual explanations in english.

There is no spatial acessibility, nor enough room for changing babies. The toilet is all-gender. We have other rooms that could be adapted and used for that purpose.

The first part of the workshop takes place in the open space, we will walk around the neighbourhood. We are not expecting additional guest, we hope that everyone registers previously.

Public space in Berlin often reflects dynamics of exclusion, displacement, and hostility, particularly for migrants and racialised people. At the same time, these spaces are where we resist, create, and imagine other futures.

In this workshop, we will collectively reflect on the right to public space and safety for migrants and racialised communities.

Part 1: Claiming Space through a Neighbourhood Walk

The workshop will begin with a 2 hour neighbourhood walk through Bergmannkiez, designed as a collective exercise of reading the city through its historical and social layers. The walk will foreground migrant perspectives, weaving together narratives of events, people, and communities that have transformed Berlin’s history. Along the route, we will visit sites of memory inscribed in the city—both institutional and grassroots—that speak of other territories and struggles, sometimes contested, sometimes reclaimed.

By walking together, participants will encounter how different histories coexist in the urban fabric: from traces of everyday migrant life to monuments and initiatives that carry the memory of global struggles. This shared experience will ground the subsequent workshop sessions, situating urban practice not only as a matter of theory but as something lived, embodied, and continuously reimagined in the streets of Berlin.

Part 2: Mapping Diversity in Casa Popular Marielle Franco

Participants will work in groups with printed neighbourhood maps of different parts of Berlin. Each group will identify areas perceived as unsafe, exclusive, or hostile to them, and then reimagine these areas through collective strategies, interventions, and visions of solidarity.

The results will form a collective cartography of resistance and imagination, highlighting points of tension but also new possibilities for inclusive, joyful, and safer urban life.

Solisur/ Ciudad Migrante

SoliSur con Abya Yala is a grassroots trasnfeminist migrant collective born from resilience, rebellion, and joy. We organise against colonial and oppressive systems, amplifying silenced voices and celebrating social diversity.

Ciudad Migrante Ciudad Migrante emerged in 2023 as an initiative of the Bloque Latinoamericano Berlin, in response to experiences of exclusion, bureaucracy, and housing insecurity faced by migrant communities. It was conceived as a space to politicize everyday experiences of oppression and to build collective tools for navigating the city—particularly focusing on the housing crisis and the systemic barriers to formal residency status. The collective is composed of people from diverse backgrounds who bring with them experiential knowledge from both their countries of origin and their lives in Berlin. This hybrid knowledge production forms the basis for their self-organized political engagement. Ciudad Migrante actively resists the commodification of housing and advocates for a city shaped by its residents—a city that is inclusive, diverse, creative, and governed by the people who live in it. The collective opposes the rightward drift of urban development and instead promotes a vision of the city rooted in memory, anti-colonial practices, and transfeminist values that inform their activist practices and coalition-building in a way that reflects the manifold lessons and inventiveness proper to Latin American struggles.