Floating university berlin through (rearticulated) three ecologies: More-than-living ecosystem, assemblage of tectonics, and pedagogical network

Abstract

This article offers a comprehensive investigation of Floating University Berlin (F U B) as a habitable praxis situated within a post-industrial wetland and operating beyond the institutional boundaries of formal higher education. It asks how F U B articulates ecosystemic, spatial, performative, and even micropolitical forms of divergence under neoliberal academic conditions. Methodologically, the study examines F U B as a primary case in juxtaposition with the Institute for Lightweight Structures, enabling a critical assessment of how spatial and organisational configurations mediate learning, interaction, and collective agency. Mobilising Félix Guattari’s “three ecologies”—environment, social relations, and human subjectivity—as analytical axes, the article rearticulates them as a more-than-living ecosystem, assemblages of tectonics, and a pedagogical network. This framework structures a multi-layered “meta-narrative” that integrates theoretical analysis with visual and spatial interpretation. Through a layered cartography composed of curated quotations, atmospheric collages, mapping-based inferences, and diagrammatic expressions, the study renders entangled relations and de-hierarchised processes sustaining F U B’s pedagogical universe. Within this meta-narrative, “flows of identifiers” trace methods, tactics, qualities, and positionalities, while “impalpable frameworks” foreground accumulative architectural interventions, participatory approaches, multispecies associations, and experimental, critical-compassionate modes of learning. By advancing the concept of habitable praxis as an ecosystemic and spatial mode of pedagogical production, the article contributes an original analytical model for understanding learning environments as dynamic, generative, and open to transformation.