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Medulla — Turning shared urgency into collective capacity

Welcome

Turning shared urgency into collective capacity.

How do we change the systems we depend on and what do we become in the process? Medulla is a place, a community, and an experiment in that question. Based in Berlin, we cultivate the relationships, practices, and infrastructures through which people shape desirable futures in unsettling times.

Our members work where institutional responsibilities, specialist knowledge, and everyday experience meet. At these intersections, problems cross boundaries faster than organisations can respond, and ideas need people with different mandates to make them possible.

Through different formats, we explore what can be done together and how our responses shape what becomes possible next.

Take part

Purpose

Cultivating the freedom to become

Resilience is an entry point: preparing for disruption, caring for one another, and sustaining what matters. It also raises harder questions. What are we sustaining? At whose expense? With what capacity to change course?

Every response leaves conditions for the next. It can develop skills, deepen trust, restore ecosystems, and open possibilities. It can also exhaust people, concentrate power, and lock institutions into costly dependencies. A response that works today deserves scrutiny for what repeated use makes of us.

Our ambition is to expand the practical freedom of people and institutions to shape their futures within ecological limits. That freedom depends on shared provisions and relational options: a trusted counterpart, accessible knowledge, functioning public infrastructure, time to learn, and the authority to act.

From Berlin, we ask what Europe can contribute to a planetary capacity. Its institutions, infrastructures, cultural life, and resources carry possibilities for cooperation and responsibilities rooted in history. This gives our work a long horizon and a demanding everyday test: does becoming more capable today leave us more capable of becoming tomorrow?

Programme

Questions with somewhere to go

Medulla’s programme connects public conversations, workshops, and project development. We are building continuity between them so that a question can acquire collaborators, a practical test, and a next decision.

Climate adaptation is an early field of work in Berlin, with emerging connections to other cities. Heat makes interdependence tangible: bodily vulnerability, emergency preparedness, neighbourhood relationships, public space, and investment meet in the same streets. Progress depends on how those responsibilities connect.

The Public Vitality Camp established a broader inquiry into our capacity for viable futures. Other gatherings have examined civic infrastructure, institutional change, bioregional governance, and healthy neighbourhoods.

We are now developing selected strands through programme partnerships and practical experiments. The task is to establish clear commitments, examine what changes, and share learning that others can question and use.

Upcoming events · Past gatherings

Community

Distinct commitments, shared ground

In a quiet Kreuzberg courtyard, Medulla offers room for focused work, public exchange, and the conversations that continue between them.

The ground floor hosts salons, workshops, and gatherings. Upstairs, organisations and independent practitioners pursue their work in a shared setting.

Berlin grounds the work in particular institutions, neighbourhoods, and tensions. Relationships with other cities, regions, and international networks expose it to different experiences and questions.

Medulla’s organisations and independent practitioners have different histories, methods, and fields of expertise. Working alongside one another creates opportunities to exchange knowledge, challenge assumptions, and recognise where a joint effort is worth pursuing.

Currently in the space

and independent practitioners

Our name refers to the medulla oblongata, a part of the brainstem involved in sustaining breathing and heart rate. It directs attention to the processes that keep life going—and everything that becomes possible because they do.

Approach

Working with what lies between us

Organisations have different rhythms, obligations, and resources. The same word can mean three things around one table. Agreement on the conditions for collaboration is usually where the difficult work begins.

At Medulla, we attend to what matters to each person, where authority sits, and what people can realistically commit to. We weave connections and establish the arrangements that give them substance: time, resources, clarity, and ways to address disagreement before it becomes a reason to withdraw.

Our practice combines systems thinking, strategic design, civic technology, and human and organisational development. Together, these approaches allow us to trace dependencies, make assumptions testable, and examine how people learn and exercise judgment.

This hard work can be joyful, too. Humour is welcome. So is changing your mind.

From the personal to the systemic

  1. Personal and relational

    Attention, bodily experience, judgment, trust, and the ability to stay engaged through strain and uncertainty. These shape what people can actually carry.

  2. Collective and institutional

    Preparedness, professional practice, organisational learning, and cooperation across responsibilities. These shape whether individual effort becomes dependable collective action.

  3. Systemic and planetary

    The economic, political, technological, and ecological conditions that distribute resources, power, risk, and future possibilities.

Learning happens across these dimensions. Experience in a neighbourhood can expose a gap in policy. A regulatory change can open room for local action. We examine what travels, what needs adapting, and what depends on the particular conditions of a place.

Join us

Take part in the work

An operational difficulty, an artistic inquiry, a research question, or a technical experiment can be a starting point. We welcome people prepared to engage with other perspectives and take responsibility for what follows.

You can arrive with an unfinished idea. Be ready for it to change in good company.

Events

Celebrating Life — a shared celebration, Saturday 7 November (more on Luma). Amazon Meets Berlin: How Communities Protect the Amazon's Rivers — with Ka'a Harmony Foundation, Friday 6 November (more on Luma). Slow Listening: Sounds from the Planetary Compendium, Wednesday 28 October (more on Luma). Amazon Meets Berlin: Women-Led Solutions for the Cocoa Bioeconomy — with Ka'a Harmony Foundation, Friday 16 October (more on Luma). Berlin 2050° — Building a City-Wide Heat Resilience Ecosystem, Thursday 8 October (more on Luma). Public Vitality Field Assembly — patterns, blind spots and emerging connections, Friday 18 September (more on Luma). Life Repair Kit: Tools for Tough Times — with Lia Meißner, Friday 18 September (more on Luma). Planetary Berlin: Governing Hydrological Continuities — with Prateek Shankar, Friday 18 September (more on Luma). Risiken im Zusammenspiel — with Johanna Siebenlist and Caroline Paulick-Thiel, Friday 18 September (more on Luma). Investing in civic infrastructure — with Dark Matter Labs and Politics for Tomorrow, Tuesday 4 August (more on Luma). One Resilient Earth: Berlin Community Get-Together, Wednesday 15 July (more on Luma). Transforming public sector from within — Book launch with Lindsay Cole, Tuesday 9 June (more on Luma). Governance Beyond Alignment — Bioregioning and the work of holding difference, Friday 12 June (more on Luma). From Lines to Loops: shifting beyond the dominant rhythms of time, Thursday 2 July (more on Luma). Medulla Show & Tell: Lunch with Edgar Pieterse, Thursday 2 July (more on Luma).