Modulverantwortung: Peter Althaus
Lehrteam: Peter Althaus, Luca Deon, Annika Seifert, Felix Wettstein
Assistenz: Shehrie Islamaj

In this semester we will address the question of a sustainable food supply and its interaction with buildings, the city and landscape, based on the example of an inner-city industrial and commercial area in the Mattenhof-Weissenbühl district of Bern. In addition to this overall thematic focus, we are also interested in the perpetual conflict between our increasing demand for living space and its production – and the accompanying displacement process of inner-city commercial businesses and industry.

While the ongoing deindustrialization of our cities is leading to the disappearance of inner-city commercial and industrial areas, this process counteracts efforts in the food sector – food production, processing and the logistics involved – toward relying more on seasonal and, above all, regional products and processing them locally.

The location for the master thesis is one of the few centrally located commercial sites remaining within Bern’s urban area. It developed due to the situation along the railway tracks, particularly after the construction of a railway leading to the area in the 1910s. The railway was extended successively until the mid-1930s and triggered a surge in development. This established the strong logistical character of the area between Weyermannstrasse and Güterstrasse, which basically continues to this day.

The theses explores the spatial infrastructure for regionally structured supply and its effects on urban space and works on strategies on how, in a concrete urban context, the contribution of architecture to a sustainable food system could look like.