Field Trip to Urban Futures is a bilateral action research project initiated by Liebling Haus, Tel Aviv and the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (HFBK). Across a three-year framework, the project explores regenerative ways to build and live, and asks what makes cities equitable, sustainable, and resilient in a time of climate change and crisis.

Phase 01 was an immersive journey into the Sinai desert (September 27–30, 2023) with 20 participants from Israel, Germany, and Austria. The desert offered a space to zoom out and rethink urban life through nature-based knowledge and new technologies. The field trip surfaced four emerging topics that now guide the project: Ambiguity Tolerance, Resilience, Islands of Sanity, and Circular Material Culture.

Phase 02 brought the research into the city through public and participatory formats, including the hybrid Urban Futures Summit: “Practicing urban resilience” (April 2024), hosted in Tel Aviv as part of the Festival of the New European Bauhaus. In collaboration with 3426, Radical, and Bezalel, the program focused on resilience as both crisis-readiness and everyday urban quality: inclusive public space, the city’s capacity to hold diverse voices, and practical low-cost interventions (“tactical urbanism”).

Phase 02 also included a lecture on material circularity (Israeli and German architectural developments) and a panel with landscape architect Martin Rein-Cano (founder of TOPOTEK1, Berlin) on urban heritage and the role of public space in shaping civic identity.

Field Trip to Urban Futures represents an evolving dialogue between cities, disciplines, and communities. Through its phased approach - from the desert to the city, from research to practice - the project creates space for alternative urban imaginaries to take shape. Across its phases, the project continues to bridge geographies and scales, building a shared language for more equitable, regenerative, and resilient urban futures.