A civic infrastructure for resilience questions that need shared action

Many of the pressures shaping public life are already established in public discourse and partially understood. Our great challenge is translating awareness into shared capacity for action.

Responsibility is fragmented, best practices often remain localized, and tensions – while acknowledged privately – are downplayed in the public sphere.

On Teufelsberg and at Medulla, we engage tensions that are palpable in Berlin, yet linked to larger systems: energy, AI, and water consumption; housing and climate adaptation; peace, security, and social cohesion.

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Here, resilience means more than weathering the next shock. It’s about protection what matters, anticipating change, addressing conflicts, and strengthening the foundations upon which public life depends.

The Public Vitality Camp creates a container for addressing resilience issues that affect institutions, communities, and sectors directly where Camps take place.

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Three Days, Two Campsites, One Shared Journey

The shared ascent up the Mountain marks the transition away from everyday life.

Following the welcome session, five parallel sessions ground us in Teufelsberg’s unique atmosphere and Berlin’s pressing challenges.

The descent creates space to process the experience.

In the heart of the city, we explore specific issues in depth to render their interconnections visible—ranging from climate risks and water to care, nutrition, and everyday resilience.

In the evening, the Field Assembly brings the various strands of work together.

The camp returns to the mountain.

Five sessions address concrete tensions.

In the closing session, insights, relationships, and potential next steps are brought together and subsequently carried back into the city.

The Process

Sensing

Forging transdisciplinary alliances

Camping

Laboratory for public vitality & cultural diplomacy

Embedding

From Impulses to structures and maintenance

100 days before

  • Administration meets civil society
  • Science meets neighborhood
  • Security meets culture
  • Business meets activism
Lines of conflict become visible and manageable

3 days on site at Teufelsberg

  • Storytelling formats & rituals
  • Workshops & ideathons
  • Walks & Discourses
  • Prototyping & alliances
Exchange bridges from the geopolitical to the concrete

100 days after

  • Clarify responsibilities
  • Consolidate micro-infrastructures
  • Integration into district
  • Documentation for bioregions & beyond
Ideas from the Camp are adopted on site and in the neighborhood

Working with tension

Many public challenges are called coordination problems. Often, they are conflicts.

Mandates clash. Risks are unevenly shared. People disagree about fairness, responsibility, and what should be protected.

The Camp makes these tensions visible and workable.

Speed can weaken deliberation. Community resilience can strengthen agency – or excuse the withdrawal of public responsibility. Efficiency can remove capacities that prove essential in a crisis.

These tensions are not side issues. They are the work.

What’s in It for You?

The Camp is for people who are carrying something real: a difficult tension, an approaching decision, a practice that deserves support, or a question that no longer fits its usual setting.

The Camp can help sharpen the issue, expose blind spots, build useful alliances and open a path towards a test, agreement or longer collaboration.

Come ready to test your assumptions, discover new perspectives and clarify the role you might play in what comes next.

Sign up for sessions