Imagining Urban Pondscapes: Positive Future Scenarios for Berlin’s Small Urban Waters

As climate pressures intensify and biodiversity declines, small urban waterbodies like ponds represent often overlooked yet strategic elements for more resilient and inclusive cities. In November 2025, the POUNDER Future Scenarios Workshop brought together scientists, planners, artists, administrators, and civil-society actors to co-create future visions for Berlin’s urban ponds in 2050. Through transdisciplinary scenario development, creative mapping, and narrative-based design, participants explored how these small waters could evolve from today’s fragmented and stressed systems into biodiverse, climate-regulating, and socially meaningful blue infrastructures. The German capital has more than 600 small waterbodies that support a wide range of species, provide cooling, retain water during heavy rain, and offer places of social and cultural interaction among people. At the same time, they face several challenges: declining water levels, heat and drought, poor water quality, conflicting uses, neglect, and fragmented responsibilities across administrations. These functions and challenges make small waters central for urban environmental adaptation, that is why the POUNDER project aims to understand linkages between chemical water quality and ecological dynamics and governance barriers, and aims to develop guidelines for the future management of ponds. To do so, we first need to know what kind of future we want. The Nature Futures Framework offers a useful starting point, as it highlights three different value perspectives: nature for society, nature as culture, and nature for nature. Adding a fourth perspective related to nature for prosperity, we developed four future scenarios for Berlin’s ponds illustrating different future visions. From these scenarios, we developed narratives that illustrated how, even in positive futures, urban waterbodies continue to face pressures and trade-offs. This work shows how creative and participatory methods can help integrate knowledge from different disciplines, governance challenges, and people’s lived experiences. We invited scientists and practitioners to move beyond dystopian paralysis and work with hopeful, grounded imaginations of what Berlin’s waters could become. The narratives helped participants imagine ponds as whole places (ecological, social, cultural) and not just as technical units to be managed or landscapes to be sampled; an invitation to collectively shape biodiverse and positive futures for our city.