The newly-opened CMS is unique in the Berlin university landscape

Restructuring at the Technical University's imposing Telefunken building at Ernst-Reuter-Platz is symptomatic of the changes which are taking place at Berlin universities as they struggle to find a way out of their financial crisis. The humanities departments which used to be there, such as the reputable Research Centre for Semiotics, have been mostly squeezed out to make room for more profitable tenants such as Deutsche Telekom.

However many visitors to the building are struck by a newly-renovated office suite on the third floor, signposted as the 'Center for Metropolitan Studies'. Is someone actually investing money in the humanities?

"We're trying not to be stuck in the depression of the Berlin university landscape," explains Katja Sussner, programme manager at the recently-founded CMS.

"Everyone agrees that the humanities are in trouble. Our aim is to show that by reconstructing traditional programmes and opening up to applied research, we can find a way forward."

Tackling the problems of the metropolis

The CMS is a joint venture between Berlin's three universities together with Columbia and NYU in New York. Supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), which supplies most of the centre's circa EUR 1 million budget, it began in October 2004, with its official opening on 7 July 2005.

Sussner explains how the CMS is an interdisciplinary centre researching the problems of today's metropolises. "According to the latest UN population report, by 2007 more than 50 percent of humanity will live in cities," she says. "The world is growing more and more into cities and often into metropolises, which causes lots of new challenges, new problems."

Katja Sussner believes the CMS can show a way forward for German universities

"In the US the borders between science and politics and civil society are not that strict. But in Germany people don't go from business to university and back, or from business to politics and back. We want to weaken that."

Sussner emphasises that the CMS is focussed on real world challenges. "One woman is working on prostitution, another on young female Muslims. We try not to write just for the bookshelf but to really offer suggestions for solutions for real problems."

A community of scholars

The core of the centre is the Transatlantische Graduiertenkolleg (Trans-Atlantic Graduate College), where 14 PhD students and two post-doctoral students from nine disciplines and six countries work together to research the problems of the modern metropolis.

As part of the programme, the Berlin-based students will spend at least three months studying in New York during their studies, and PhD students from Columbia and NYU will come to work in Berlin.

Taiwan-born Pe-Ru Tsen, who is writing her PhD on German and American stock exchanges, likes the feeling of community at the CMS. "This is really one of the first attempts to create a PhD programme with people from different disciplines working together. We learn a lot from each other."

Fellow student Florian Urban (whose appropriate name has been the source of much amusement among his colleagues), knows how lucky the students at the CMS are. "It's a pretty unique situation, which is not comparable with the situation of most doctoral students in Germany, the lonely workers in the dark library who have only their books to talk to."

The social side is also important to the students and staff, who are friends as well as colleagues. "A lot of us have just moved to Berlin," says Urban. "We go dancing together."

Bridging the Pond

One CMS student who freely admits to "embodying trans-Atlantic relations" is Max Hirsh, a bi-lingual American who spent his early childhood in Berlin.

Bilingual public transport scholar Max Hirsh embodies trans-Atlantic relations

Hirsh explains how the CMS students and staff constantly switch between German and English when speaking - a phenomenon which reminds him of attending the bi-lingual JFK elementary school in Berlin. "We didn't really learn either language very well, we just sort of spoke 'Denglish' all the time. Obviously here it’s a higher level of discourse than in elementary school, but it is true that we do switch back and forth pretty seamlessly."

Hirsh talks of a "generational change" in the German university system. "At the beginning we were referring to the CMS as a 'start-up'. The German education system doesn't exactly have a reputation as being a bastion of innovation, particularly not the Berlin universities, so the fact that they’ve been able to get this off the ground in such a context is really phenomenal.

"It's really new, there hasn't been anything like this before. It's definitely exciting."

For more information on the Center for Metropolitan Studies, see www.metropolitanstudies.de

June 2005

[Copyright Expatica 2005]

Subject: Centre for Metropolitan Studies, Technical University Berlin, higher education