International Summer School 

HOSPITAL + THE CITY

An interdisciplinary approach to hospital planning in the urban context

From 20 to 24 July 2026, Berlin hosted the international Summer School

HOSPITAL + THE CITY, led and organised by

Prof. Cor Wagenaar, Prof. Ralf Pasel, Michelle-Martine Wittmer and Mena Theißen-Helling of ENAH.

Over five intensive days, participants from a wide range of professional and academic backgrounds came together to dig into one of the most pressing questions facing German healthcare today: what does the future of hospital and healthcare architecture look like, and how must urban planning adapt to meet it?
 
  The Summer School 2026 turned its attention to ambulatory care — and to a bigger question underlying it: how can healthcare provision be reimagined beyond the traditional hospital model? Outpatient facilities hold real promise here, easing pressure on inpatient care while making treatment more accessible and improving the overall patient experience. But as these facilities grow in scale and complexity, they raise their own architectural challenges: how to design for flexibility, streamline workflows, support interdisciplinary collaboration, and weave healthcare more naturally into the fabric of the city.
 
To explore these questions concretely, participants were set a real design challenge: developing conceptual proposals to transform two existing Berlin buildings into contemporary ambulatory care centres. The first was the heart clinic at Charité Campus Virchow-Klinikum; the second, a former Karstadt department store at Leopoldplatz in Wedding. Two sites, two very different architectural, social and urban contexts — and, correspondingly, two very different sets of design questions to work through.
 
Across a programme of lectures, discussions, workshops and site visits, participants examined how healthcare architecture can respond to shifting medical, social and environmental demands while strengthening its ties to the surrounding neighbourhood. Particular emphasis was placed on the role healthcare facilities can play in fostering social integration and everyday urban life.
 
The week culminated in the presentation of the participants' conceptual proposals — a fitting demonstration of how the adaptive reuse of existing buildings can pave the way toward healthcare environments that are more sustainable, more resilient, and more socially embedded in the city around them.