The August visit of the Architektoniczki group supported by the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation to Berlin was not only marked by feminist urban planning but also by communal, or perhaps one should even say community, architecture.

The architects began their week-long visit to the German capital with meetings with the fem arc collective, whose members focus on an intersectional perspective in their work. They also draw on their artistic backgrounds in their projects while organising performances or exhibitions. On the first day, they participated in a workshop organised by the collective and a joint tour of a block of flats (gallery building).

Among other things, the workshop was devoted to the seemingly pejorative gossip, more specifically, the so-called Gossip Town, a phenomenon illustrating how gossip in the city creates not divisions but community. Gossip evokes rather negative epithets, and ‘gossip’ is a term that acts as an unfair and unjust label applied to women to accentuate their supposed envy or to trivialise their conversations. The fem arc collective seeks to disenchant the notion of gossip, pointing out its etymological history and its function over the years. When women came together and ‘gossiped’ while embroidering, preparing meals or caring for children together, they built authentic communities and strengthened bonds.

Architektoniczki also took part in a workshop on the issue of separating the various spaces in the city and how to work in thematic areas such as memory (street names), representation and politics, authority spaces, neighbourhood of concern (work), mobility, and personal safety. The tasks were accompanied by Fem*map, a feminist map of Berlin, analysing the entire city from a gender perspective, which was developed by TU–Berlin–Technical University of Berlin. The architects also met with representatives of Coopdisco, an organisation whose overarching goal is to develop, plan, design and implement places that are used, needed and protected as commons. These are spaces in which the possibility of user participation is embedded and which are affordable, accessible and permanently protected from privatisation and speculation.

An extremely interesting stop on the Berlin trip turned out to be FLINTA, the largest space in the city created for women. Among the rooms, there were workshops for female representatives of professions generally considered stereotypically masculine. Undoubtedly, the experience gained by the Architektoniczki in the area of celebrating diversity and creating equal, accessible spaces for all will be beneficial on Polish soil.