Re-thinking Tempelhof: an oasis for a freed humanity.

In 2007, the percentage of the world population living in urban areas has overtaken the percentage of people that live in rural. Projections show that this trend is expected to grow in the future. This information should not surprise, as the society in which we currently live is permeated by a neoliberalist ideology, affecting an economy aimed at the unlimited growth of production of goods. The expansion of cities and urban areas, seen in this scenario as places (or non-places) that contain aggregates of commercial relations and services, plays a key role in the further expansion of capitalist system. In fact, it has an extreme need to centralize the power according to purely technical and profit-based planning. This ideology, besides limiting democracy and creating iniquity all over the world, is the main cause of all the crises that currently afflict the planet: economical, migratory, social, and, above all, ecological crisis, that will soon affect indistinctly the whole humanity on a planetary level. In this context, architects or urban designers should not be acritical towards the system in which they operate, adopting a pure solutionist approach or, even worse, mere professionalism. More than ever before, it is crucial to identify which problems are to face and how, starting to ask right questions and avoiding superficial solutions. In order to look at a wider horizon, a position that is first of all ethical and, consequently, political, has to be taken. In other terms, quoting Pier Vittorio Aureli, they should operate "within and against" the system. Hence, this thesis has followed a deductive process. It started from general considerations supported by empirical analysis, and it has concluded with a proposal that not only observes the latters, but, above all, those concerning the specific place. The choice of Berlin, and particularly the ex-airport of Tempelhof, has not been taken arbitrarily. Both have witnessed several events that have marked the history and have been invested by a wide variety of meanings over time. Moreover, in both places we are witnessing the pervasive pressure that growth-oriented economy is trying to impose on them; nevertheless, it is possible to perceive a force that is opposing this trend, the germ of a possible re-discovered form of freedom. In 2010, the airport was opened and converted into a public park of 300 hectares; in 2014, the administration called a referendum to evaluate the possibility of converting about one-fifth of the park to housing. Citytzens, afraid of another speculation, voted against any hypotesis of construction on the airfield, to constrast a growing gentrification process that had already interested other districts. The project proposes to conduct an urban experiment, creating an indipendent tiny-houses community within the airfield, in total observance of the Tempelhof Conservation Act. It could become a potential mediatic case, a replicable example not only for other cities, but also within a wider project of spatial decentralization of power, re-evaluating the neglected countryside and all the non-places created by an economical planning of the territory. Focusing on the 98% of Earth's surface that is not occupied by cities, there would be space for the rise of a confederation of libertarian and autonomous communities, aimed to contrast the growth-oriented economy and to reduce all the crises that, in case of worsening, will lead us to the extintion of human beings.