Grammar of Residue— Field Studio Berlin
Winter Semester 2025/2026, Block Seminar 

@Guerilla Architects Studio, Berlin

Lecturer
The city can be read as a practice of selection: planning routines, property regimes and optimisation logics generate residues — spatial, practical and narrative remains that fall outside the grid yet continue to act. They thicken where capital flows stall, responsibilities slip, security policies reorder space, and care work holds together what would otherwise come apart. Residues are symptoms and archives at once: they bear the imprint of planning, capitalism and exclusion while preserving traces of appropriation, maintenance and small counter-economies (vacant lots/empty premises, infrastructural leftovers, provisional arrangements, informal maintenance, micro-economies, trace marks, desire lines).

Grammar of Residue approaches these phenomena as legible signs — an alphabet of edges, rhythms, thresholds and returns. Reading these signs reveals implicit rules: who gets access, who remains, who is displaced; which arrangements stabilise and which tip; where exclusion sediments and where room for manoeuvre opens. Residues sit between order and use: quiet indicators of urban inequality and, at the same time, starting points from which other uses, publics and futures can be assembled.

Literature selection

Bauman, Zygmunt (2004): Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts
Easterling, Keller (2014): Extrastatecraft
Foroutan, Naika (2019): Die postmigrantische Gesellschaft
Huyssen, Andreas (2003): Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory
Jackson, Steven J. (2014): Rethinking Repair
Larkin, Brian (2013): The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure
Latour, Bruno (2010): An Attempt at a Compositionist Manifesto
Latour, Bruno (2018): Das terrestrische Manifest (Down to Earth)
Mogel, Lize / Bhagat, Alexis (eds., 2008): An Atlas of Radical Cartography
Roy, Ananya (2005): Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning
Simone, AbdouMaliq (2004): People as Infrastructure
Spacetimes Matter (2023/24): A Collection of Mapping Methodologies

Sequence used on mainpage and as stills on poster: Dirk Koy, “Construction / Deconstruction,” 2019 © Dirk Koy. Courtesy of the artist. dirkkoy.com

 TH Lübeck
Guerilla Architects





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