Shrinking Archipelago is a 10-day workshop that uses Berlin as an open laboratory, exploring the city through experimental publishing and critical discourse. 50 years after OM Ungers and Rem Koolhaas proposed The City in the City: Berlin as a Green Archipelago (1977), Berlin finds its urban condition inverted. The original manifesto responded to the then urgent pressures of urban degrowth and depopulation by instrumentalising selective erasure: a few dense urban 'islands' were to persist as the city sublimated into a green field. What Ungers conceived as a strategy of survival within a shrinking metropolis has reversed: Berlin now faces a paradox through scarcity growing outward through sprawl while hollowing inward through financialisation, speculation and commodified vacancy. 

This workshop mobilises experimental publishing and discourse practices to interrogate the forces shaping contemporary architecture and urbanism, grounding its work in The City in the City: Berlin as a Green Archipelago and its timely relevance to contemporary debates on degrowth, selective urbanism and the politics of the void. Conventional architectural frameworks are countered with propositions that expand collective and individual imagination, using the OMU (Oswald Mathias Ungers (1926-2007)) Archipelago framework to envision the city otherwise.

Rather than relying on retroactive narratives that justify form after the fact, the Shrinking Archipelago programme foregrounds speculative architecting: embedding arguments and stories at the centre of its publications and conversations. Here, design shifts from the finished object to the reasoning, conflict and speculation that bring it into being – always returning to, and departing from, The City in the City as a guiding reference.