Dear Basin,

I am not writing to you as a person to an enchanted place,
but as a living system to another.

What began as a functional retention basin
is now much more than the rain that flows through,
from the roof of the former Tempelhof airport to the Landwehr Canal.

Your inhabitants have made a rich kingdom out of you.
Fenced in, but still embedded in the breath of the city.
Where others prioritise the technical function above all else, you beings take over in a chorus of whispering and humming.
Where others are repelled by the waste in the water-waves, you find refuge.

The researchers of the Floating University – which is not allowed to be named as an university –
have also recognised this.
They arrived not with answers, but with questions.
Not as conquerors, but cohabitants.
With scaffolding and ideas.
They built not monuments, but invitations.
To think, to gather, to experiment:
With water, with thought, with togetherness.

Their work is part architecture, part care-taking,
and wholly conversation.
Workshops, research, lectures, slow walks,
all stitched into the damp air above you
and the secrets you keep underneath.
You became a stage of ideas
and a classroom of mud and sky.

Through their hands and minds,
you became visible to the city again.
Not as a seamlessly functioning infrastructure,
but as a promise of what Berlin could still become:
fluid, wild, co-operative – and aware of its depths.

May the frogs remain the guards of your beauty.
May your puddles hold wisdom.
And may those who find you,
leave with the soft weight of wonder.

In connection and consideration,
A Friend of the Living City