Public Vitality Lab “Prototype Healthy Neighborhoods”

On June 12 from 3:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., we invite you to BHROX bauhaus reuse for a hands-on Public Vitality Lab as part of the New European Bauhaus Festival Week.

The focus is on a simple yet urgent question: How can healthy neighborhoods emerge in everyday life—even under conditions of heat, heavy rain, social pressure, scarce resources, and complex responsibilities?

The Lab builds on the results of one year of applied research in Berlin districts. On this basis, we will jointly examine which decision-making pathways, data landscapes, existing tools, legal leeway, procurement approaches, and cooperation patterns are relevant for making healthier neighborhoods practically developable, testable, and translatable into administrative workflows.

The afternoon marks the beginning of a shared prototyping process. The aim is not simply to collect individual ideas, but to clarify the conditions under which public administration, urban society, civic tech actors, and AI/data expertise can work together meaningfully: Which problems are already well understood? Which tools already exist? Where are interfaces missing? Which requirements emerge from real administrative workflows? And which prototypes would be sufficiently connected to existing practice to be tested and further developed?

Development requires particular care wherever digital tools, AI systems, and interoperable software come into contact with data, interfaces, or infrastructures of public service provision. Security, traceability, data protection, technical robustness, and clear responsibilities are therefore not downstream checkpoints, but part of the early process design.

The Lab connects the Berlin workshop series “Urban Health as a Development Path—Leeway for Responsible Administrative Action” with the theme of Public Vitality and the learning energy surrounding the Creative Bureaucracy Festival Week. The further process is intended to create a framework in which technical possibilities can be considered alongside administrative reality, public value, and security-related requirements.

This NEB Satellite Event transforms Ernst-Reuter-Platz into a temporary development agency for an afternoon: We translate ambitious public goals into concrete courses of action so that the administration can work with them, urban society benefits, and things start to move in the neighborhood.

Berlin’s districts are under growing pressure: heat stress, heavy rainfall, aging infrastructure, strained housing conditions, and social stress shape the daily lives of many neighborhoods. At the same time, administrations are expected to bring together health, climate resilience, inclusion, and affordable impact—often with little time, limited capacities, and hardly any room to experiment.

This is exactly where the Public Vitality Lab comes in. We look not only at new ideas, but also at the pathways that make them possible: Who needs to be involved, and when? Which decisions require which foundations? Where is there legal leeway? Which routines help, rather than creating additional bureaucracy? We work on real-world cases from Berlin’s districts. This results in transferable prototypes, for example for:

  • better decision-making processes in everyday life,
  • legal and procurement-related levers,
  • collaboration between departments,
  • concrete interventions in urban space,
  • viable next steps for healthier neighborhoods.

In the end, you’ll have not only good discussions but concrete results:

  • a small selection of initial prototypes for further development,
  • a joint protocol: who tests what, by when, with what support,
  • public documentation of the most important findings and transferable approaches.

We welcome people from Berlin’s district and senate administrations, particularly from health, urban planning, environment, green spaces, mobility, housing, budget, procurement, and economic development.

Also invited are:

  • civil society organizations committed to health equity, climate adaptation, and neighborhood cohesion
  • stakeholders in the housing and built environment sectors (cooperatives, public housing authorities, SMEs) committed to affordable housing and life-cycle-oriented renovation
  • Cultural and educational institutions interested in building administrative capacity under crisis conditions
  • Other municipalities and public institutions outside Berlin that wish to reflect on their own experiences and are open to transferable practical approaches.

Registration

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