Between Waters
Falkenburg, Berlin-Brandenburg, GermanyHarvard University Graduate School of Design
Harvard GSD ASLA Student Award Project Nominee (2024)
In Collaboration with Makio Yamamoto
Advised by Chris Reed and Laila Seewang
Between Waters reintroduces water to a decommissioned sewage farm in Falkenburg, situated along the border between Berlin and Brandenburg. Once part of an extensive network of sewage farms that received and filtered wastewater from Berlin, the site has undergone successive transformations, leaving behind traces of former drainage channels, settling basins, agricultural plots and treatment facilities. The project unearths, amends and redraws these infrastructural histories, proposing a new landscape in which different waters establish new relationships between waste, ecology and the public realm.
Historically, Berlin's sewage farms operated as highly ordered landscapes of water management, mediating between urban waste, agricultural production and regional hydrological systems. Following their decommissioning due to accumulated contamination, many of these sites were repurposed or abandoned. At Falkenburg, successive industrial developments have further transformed the site, disconnecting the landscape from the waters that once defined its ecological and spatial organisation.
Between Waters proposes to reactivate this condition of being between waters by redirecting three distinct water sources through the site: industrial wastewater, treated municipal water and urban stormwater. Industrial wastewater is channelled through tiered constructed wetlands that trace the geometries of former agricultural plots, before entering a reconstructed settling basin and reopened drainage canal. Treated municipal water supplies public baths, showers and gathering spaces within the footprints of former wastewater treatment facilities, with used water subsequently supporting allotment gardens and planted meadows. Meanwhile, urban stormwater is redirected into deeper constructed wetlands and natural swimming areas, creating landscapes that expand, contract and transform with changing rainfall and seasonal conditions.
Former drainage channels are reinterpreted as pathways and elevated walkways, while new planting establishes forested areas, meadows and secluded spaces for recreation. Together, these interventions transform obsolete infrastructures into an evolving landscape of filtration, ecological repair and public occupation.
Central to Between Waters is the relationship between infrastructure, bodily rituals and time. Workers monitor water quality, bathers gather after their shifts, gardeners cultivate plants nourished by reused water, and birds inhabit the treatment wetlands. These overlapping human and ecological rhythms reveal water management not simply as a technical process, but as a continuous practice of cleansing, maintenance and care.
Through the reinvention of Falkenburg's former sewage farm, Between Waters explores how living between different waters might reshape our relationship with waste, purification and the public realm, offering a new way of imagining the ecological and collective futures of obsolete infrastructural landscapes.