Whose labor keeps the line in place? Division is not a natural feature of a city; it is built, enforced, and—above all—maintained. This studio reads the divided city through a feminist analysis of infrastructure: not only how a line is drawn, but whose continuous, largely invisible work keeps it in place.

Nicosia is the field site, walked. Mitrovica and Belfast are held against it as desk research. These are not three case studies side by side; they are one contour traced across cities that share the same condition, a division whose legitimacy is itself contested.

The studio is forensic before it is speculative. In Phase 1, each student takes one infrastructural system—water, electricity, transit, waste, sanitation, housing tenure, cemetery geography—and reconstructs how it was shaped around the line, documenting the maintenance labor that compensates for what the formal city withholds. The feminist transect is walked twice, by day and at dusk. In Phase 2, students design one infrastructural system, in one zone of adjacency, that works honestly within division: it serves both sides without requiring political resolution, makes the cost of division visible, or creates conditions for encounter without demanding it.

Ask a machine to describe a place. Who is missing from the answer?

A generative AI system does not describe a settlement. It recites what was written about it, by whoever wrote it. This research seminar makes that gap its object.

Each student works on two settlements: one they know from lived experience, one they do not. They pre-register a prediction, run the same three plain questions—spatial structure, daily water, the rhythm of the year—in clean, memory-off sessions, verify every source, and read each answer through two lenses: whose account is this, and who is missing? The known settlement supplies the ground truth that makes the machine’s omissions visible. The unknown one stages the real stake of the discipline: designing for a place one knows only through someone else’s account. Pooled across the group, the runs reveal what no student can see alone, the template the machine imposes on every place.

The seminar is inductive. Students see the machine fail on a real place before they read the theory that explains it: Wynter, Haraway, Katz, Simone, Birhane, D’Ignazio and Klein, among others.

Output: a paired atlas—the machine’s account drawn against the place as it is—and a short written reflection.

No prior experience with AI required.

Bäume sind Superhelden: Baustoff, Energielieferant, Kulturgut, Wunderwaffe gegen den Klimawandel – und doch einfach in ihrem Funktionsprinzip.

Das Seminar geht drei Fragen nach: Ist der Baum eine bedrohte Art? Ist er das Allheilmittel gegen den Klimawandel? Ist er der Baustoff der Zukunft?

In Vorträgen, mit Literatur, auf Kurzexkursionen und in eigenen Referaten erarbeiten Sie ein Porträt dieses außergewöhnlichen Wesens und eine Antwort auf die Frage, wie wir mit dem Superhelden umgehen müssen.