Floating University
Hangry Neighbours, 2025
What forms of participation are possible when local planning fails to serve the public good? Led by Jeanne Astrup-Chavaux, Sarah Bovelett, and Licia Soldavini of Floating University, Hangry Neighbours unfolds within the contested site of Kristiansholm in Bergen, where major development threatens to reshape the neighbourhood and its shoreline.
The public programme of across, with, nearby runs alongside a trajectory course led by Floating University at Bergen School of Architecture, focusing on the politics of local planning and development, with Kristiansholm as its central case study. Building on earlier site-based investigations carried out as part of the Cross Courses, as well as Floating University’s experience of Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin as a space of resistance, Hangry Neighbours aims to bring the neighbourhood into dialogue with the messy politics of urban transformation, exploring how architecture can act with others in moments of disruption.
The project is oriented around three public lunchtime gatherings — ‘Hangry Lunches’ — and culminates in a participatory procession in the area. Together, these public formats create shared moments of learning and dissent, proposing new tools for community-led engagement. Bridging speculative design and civic interruption, Hangry Neighbours asks: ‘what can be learnt from past experiences in Bergen and elsewhere to ensure that critical voices are heard and dissent made visible?’, and ‘what does it mean to be a good neighbour in a changing city?’
Floating University (founded 2018, Berlin) is a self-organised platform for collaborative learning, ecological reflection, and urban practice. Originally initiated as a temporary project, it evolved into Floating e.V., an association that maintains and activates a reclaimed rainwater basin on the grounds of the former Tempelhof airfield in Berlin. This basin, a human-made environment that has been reclaimed by nature, serves as a living laboratory where polluted water and diverse ecosystems coexist with academic and community activities. Floating brings together practitioners from across disciplines to imagine and test alternative futures for urban life. Rooted in site-specific engagement and a politics of care, its activities range from public programming to gardening, infrastructure maintenance, and neighbourhood collaboration. Through its Fields of Knowledge and Action, Floating fosters non-disciplinary, radical, and collective approaches to education, space-making, and environmental justice.
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Kristiansholm
Kristiansholm,
5035 BergenOpen during events
