​When Speed Meets Public Voice

​Designing participation into accelerated housing decisions

​This session is part of the Public Vitality Camp 2026 and is convened by Carrie Puyuan Yang with nextlearning e.V.

​Germany’s Bau-Turbo (§246e BauGB) gives municipalities new ways to accelerate housing delivery by allowing projects to depart from regular planning procedures. This responds to a real need for speed, but it also changes where public voice, local knowledge and oversight enter the process. The challenge is not simply to choose between faster decisions and participation, but to understand what meaningful involvement could look like when time itself becomes a design constraint.

​How can meaningful public voice become part of fast-track housing decisions without recreating the delays the Bau-Turbo is meant to overcome?

​In this embodied working session, participants physically map the decision chain around a plausible housing case, making influence, trust, dependencies and missing connections visible. The group then identifies one critical moment where speed and public voice come into tension and uses Forum Theatre to rehearse alternative responses. Together, participants test what could keep residents, administration, developers and other actors meaningfully involved while decisions continue to move.

​Welcome perspectives

​The working language is English, with openness to contributions in German. We particularly welcome perspectives from:

• ​municipal planning and building authorities

• ​housing developers and architects

• ​residents and neighbourhood organisations

• ​tenant and housing-rights organisations

• ​planning and administrative law

• ​public participation and participatory design

• ​urban planning and housing policy

​No prior experience with embodied facilitation or Forum Theatre is required. Particularly valuable are perspectives from people who encounter the tension between timely housing delivery and meaningful public involvement in practice.

​Important notes

​The Camp format is a volunteer-developed prototype and intentionally simple in how it is organised. Please bring your own food and drinks, and feel free to bring something to share.

​Please register as well for the walk up and walk down from S Heerstraße to Teufelsberg of this day. So you can participate in the held structure of the camp, we can tune in together and cross pollinate across the sessions.

​The Public Vitality Camp is a shared learning space for people already working on societal, institutional, technological and ecological challenges. Across the sessions, we work on concrete questions and tensions and explore what enables people, institutions and communities to remain capable of acting under increasingly difficult conditions – and how decisions made today expand or constrain future possibilities.

​Here you can discover further sessions and register or apply to participate.