Inaugural lecture by visiting professor Ben Pohl, Research Group Urban Transformations (winter semester 2025/26), Research Group Sustainable Cities and Communities (summer semester 2026)

Entangled Action Learning – Urban Learning Processes for Socio-Ecological Transformation

Germany, Europe, and Switzerland are largely built up—that is the good news. But what does it mean for planning, architecture, and urban development when the focus is no longer on the new, but on the existing? What changes when the existing fabric reveals itself as a complex matter—a fluid interplay of people, objects, living beings, norms, cultural codes, and economic processes—that knows no external vantage point from which to conduct “neutral” research and planning?

Ben Pohl uses these questions as an opportunity to introduce a new concept for discussion: Entangled – Action – Learning. In doing so, he brings together three conceptual frameworks. He interprets “Entangled” as an understanding of space as a co-constitutive, relational context for action. “Action” refers to the distributed, accountable work within it. And “Learning” refers to the insight that transformation is less about applying knowledge than it is about continuous learning through action. From this perspective, planning appears as a form of co-creation that must continually challenge one’s own assumptions. Using examples from the Swiss practice of Denkstatt sàrl, Ben Pohl demonstrates how a learning-oriented planning culture can constructively address the complexity, uncertainty, and resistance inherent in existing situations, and explores which tools, attitudes, and approaches are necessary to ensure that climate-just, ecologically, economically, and socially sustainable.

Ben Pohl (M.Sc. in Urban Design, Dipl. Des.) is a member of the interdisciplinary team at Denkstatt sàrl, a firm specializing in urban transformation processes based in Basel, Switzerland. Denkstatt pursues a practice focused on the use of urban spaces and oriented toward the common good, which takes into account not only the materiality of the built environment but also everyday, social, political, organizational, and economic contexts of action. Ben Pohl studied urban design at HafenCity University Hamburg and design, photography, and film at HTW Berlin, among other subjects. He was a senior assistant at ETH Zurich (Studio Newrope, D-ARCH, 2019–2020) and a research assistant at HafenCity University Hamburg (2012–2015). Since 2025, he has been a visiting professor of Urban Transformations and Sustainable Cities and Communities at the University of Kassel. He also teaches at the Ko:Lab at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. In collaboration with Denkstatt and the Basel Institute for Applied Urban Research (B/IAS), he conducts research on the structures of learning-oriented planning processes and strategies for public-interest-oriented urban development.