The “new knowledge needed” may emerge from the bordering, conflicting areas between well-established research disciplines; borders between disciplines, viewed as the transition of phase spaces, are discontinuous fields with an open topology, more adequately dealt with through a variety of superposed and homogeneous metrics. In this seminar, participants were seen as owners of specific metrics, both disciplinary and cultural, that needed to be part of the network and to become part of the dialogue. The Berlin landscape was our connecting ground. In our local Anthropocene ethnographic experience in the Lichtenberg district, we tried to connect local and global, past and future, community and world system. Our goal was to bring the global down to a human dimension—to experience it as a neighborhood and as a landscape—and to observe the global-geologic sedimented history of our selected landscape while simultaneously seizing the long-term consequences of short-term events and local behaviors.

As a preparatory task, participants were asked to select an “individual case study” representing their vision of an anthropogenic landscape, showing evidence of long-term transformation enacted by social and environmental processes relevant to the Anthropocene in some way, which they were asked to document and support in terms of socio-cultural, economic, ecological, and geological evidence.

As a second step, participants were asked to select a specific perspective to investigate and describe their own case study, a conceptual crosscut through the multiplicity of entangled meanings that constitute the anthropocenic relevance of their selected examples. We called this selected perspective a “conceptual tool,” and the aim was to use it in an attempt at a focalized understanding of the seminar’s main case study.

Finally, the fieldwork: a short but intense external tour brought the participants to explore, experience, interview/record, and touch the reality of the former VEB Elektrokohle Lichtenberg site. Initially established in the predominantly agricultural district of Lichtenberg, just outside the city limits of Berlin, it was then taken over by the Siemens company—a synonym for Germany’s rapid growth during the Industrial Revolution. The area was used as a socialist manufacturing plant by VEB Elektrokohle during the era of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, 1949‒90). Today, the highly contaminated site is characterized by two concrete towers—all that remains of VEB Elektrokohle after its demolition—and by the Dong Xuan Center, a shopping district mainly catering to the Berlin-based Vietnamese community. Vietnamese workers were invited to Berlin in the framework of long-term programs of workforce training and exchange that existed between the GDR and Vietnam in the 1970s and 1980s. The community remaining in Berlin after unification continued to grow, and developed peculiar strategies to appropriate and transform the former industrial site, mediating between legal, economic, identity, and environmental issues.

A theoretical driver provided by ecology to seize the relevance of the Vietnamese community in transforming the former industrial space is the “niche-construction” process. We wanted to read the Lichtenberg district in its multiplicity of anthropocenic meanings, landscape potential, and niche-construction effects.

While anthropocenic issues in general demand large spatial and temporal perspectives, we selected a rather narrow example: our case study focused on an area in a specific district of Berlin, a relevant but not a crucial or vital case. Why select a small-scale example? Is it a productive choice? Is small-scale a synonym of an easier scale? And/or is it a synonym of a faster transformative process, somehow perceived as an easier process to grasp?

Scales decide the meaning and the reliability of models: we asked whether the study of small-scale examples can help to construct larger pictures, and what the larger impact of an “ecological niche” like ours might be: Does Berlin as a cultural context affect and feed back the relevance of a small-scale experiment? Finally, can a small-scale example be easier to study while at the same time be highly instructive?

In answering all of these points, the seminar was a successful challenge. Groups of randomly assembled participants explored the former VEB site in Lichtenberg, wandering through the remains of the industrial plant, the Vietnamese covered market, the Pakistani restaurants, the “swimming pool” construction site, and the hills of debris seeded with cotton. Groups pursued different observational goals: some planned according to the conceptual network of tools commonly discussed, and others assembled new gazes negotiated with the unexpected. Information was gathered by following improvised or well-trained informants we met on site, collections of multiple recordings took shape in the form of videos, photos, sound, objects, impressions, and (un)pleasant emotions.