Water Commoning: Testing the Bille River in Hamburg as a Space for Collaborative Experimentation

With our cities growing and becoming consolidated, open spaces designated as public space are under pressure. Parks, squares, waterfronts, but also environmentally valuable wastelands are increasingly suffering from being developed, privatized or commercialized. Therefore, in the past years, civil society movements have slowly started to evolve, reclaiming and appropriating not only spaces on land but also urban water spaces to transform them into places for new social and spatial practices. However, local authorities do not yet seem to be able to incorporate these bottom-up initiatives into their top-down planning strategies for the development of urban river spaces. By considering the neglected Bille River and its adjacent canals in the industrial neighborhood in the east of Hamburg as a “real-world laboratory”, as a social space on water, a testing ground for exploration and experimentation was set up in a cooperation between HafenCity University and a local non-profit association. The laboratory on site aims at empowering local actors and changing structural conditions at the level of the various local authorities who need to be involved in the planning and approval of activities. A collaborative process applying different tools of investigation, debate and experimentation was started to support community-based knowledge production and to initiate and generate new collective practices of water appropriation.