Space and design may not immediately come to mind in political debates, but political architecture, a concept that focuses on the spaces that are made part of political strategies, is at the heart of a new publication edited by BUA Fellow Leander Nowack. The open-access volume, titled Territorial Control: Case Studies on European Borders, reflects Nowack’s participatory approach to critical architecture research, underpinned by the diverse actors and opportunities that represent Berlin’s academic landscape.

Having first moved to the city to study architecture at Universität der Künste Berlin, the scholar has developed a strong familiarity with the city’s academic and societal diversity. Alongside his roles at a cooperative architectural practice and an association supporting people on the move, Nowack is determined to maintain critical reflexivity on his profession by pursuing his own research at the Technische Universität Berlin. Here, in his words, he focuses on “spatial governmentality and the architectures of the executive, specializing in the relationship between dominion and architecture,” most recently examining European border installations as case studies.

Featuring insights from undergraduate and master students of BUA, the publication “brings together various approaches to the topics of border space, architecture, technology, surveillance, and violence,” remarks Nowack, “as discussed and developed during seminars at Technische Universität Berlin between April 2024 and July 2025.” Nowack secured BUA funding in 2024 and 2025 to design and lead an X-Student Research Group, Mapping Governmental Architecture: New German Borders and Border Hinterlands, in which more than 20 students participated. Contributions from NGOs Rolling Safespace e.V. and Blindspots e.V., and other researchers who held guest lectures at the seminars, also appear in the newly-released book, next to some of the students’ work from the seminar.

The X-Student Research Group is a format of BUA’s Student Research Opportunities Program, which contributes to strengthening the link between research and teaching. The X-Student Group “allowed me to broaden the scope of my work and engage deeply in my field alongside many students,” reflects Nowack, which “which greatly diversified the perspectives and approaches available to me.” Students in Nowack’s seminar joined him in research, discussions, talks, and more throughout the course of the academic year, and were even able to participate in field trips to territories at both the urban and rural German-Polish border to conduct mappings, notations, and fieldwork.

Amid a process of redefinition and increasing financial pressures, research in architecture faces major challenges, so the successful outcome of this project relied on various factors unique to Berlin’s research scene. “Berlin University Alliance and its funding and networking initiatives have been invaluable,” Nowack observes, “enabling the pursuit of innovative and interdisciplinary research approaches, the inclusion of students, and the formation of networks to address present and future challenges.” Getting the book to press relied on support from the Open Access Publication Fund by TU Berlin and Berlin University Alliance, the publisher Books People Places, and graphic designers Jonas Gerber and Lea Verholen.

To celebrate the volume’s release, the project team held a small conference, discussion, and reception at TU Berlin in February. The event brought together students from the X-Student Research Group, other contributing authors, NGOs, and interested members of the public to discuss current developments of the EU’s border regimes and possible future scenarios. Nowack is already thinking about where to take this research next, he discloses, setting out “to expand the network even further by collaborating with international legal scholars to explore the intersection of law and space at European borders.”

Nowack also shares that, beyond its academic value, Berlin has become a home for him and he feels accustomed to the city’s complex and contradictory condition. Teufelsberg, an artificial hill built on the remains of a Nazi military university with rubble from the Second World War and since functioning as a site for leisure and tourist spectacle, is a place that exemplifies this. From the obsolete Cold War listening station atop the hill, Berlin’s motifs, “of layered histories, overwriting reuses, and contradiction,” in Nowack’s words, come clearly into focus.