In the 1870s, the Municipal Council of Berlin initiated the largest experiment in urban circularity with its public water supply and sewer system. Water was located far beyond view of Berliners, was filtered as it was extracted through Berlin’s sandy soil, held in reservoirs that mediated between hydrogeological and social times in the industrializing city, used by new apparatuses such as WCs and showers, then pumped out to Berlin’s periphery as sewage. Using the Emperor’s rights to Eminent Domain, the Municipality purchased enormous feudal estates in the countryside upon which to build its sewage farms, tripling the size of Berlin and making the City the largest agricultural producer in Brandenburg. Sewage percolated back through the sandy soil and returned, theoretically clean, to groundwater. The design and construction of these systems shaped not only views about hygiene, and introduced public toilets and showers in urban space, but required a constant supply of potable water to flush the city’s waste.

It is the contemporary legacies of these systems that this studio will explore. The aim is to make these systems visible in urban space by first exploring the overall metabolic cycle that exists in today’s Berlin, and then by asking students to propose interventions that build upon the relationship between city, water, and body in one of two sites: public spaces of commuter activity in the city (Metro plazas, train stations, etc.) that require private spaces for bodily hygiene; and a selection of the contaminated sewage farms that today form a green “ring” of landscape restoration, low-grade agriculture, and exhibition spaces around the city. The aim of the proposals in any of these sites is to make the relationship between the “ends” of the system–the natural resources tapped in the countryside–legible in the center of the system and at the scale of the body. Through these interrogations, we will contribute to a discourse on circularity today by learning from the aspirations, mistakes, and opportunities of yesterday (hence “post-FLUSH”).