SUPERMARKT began in 2010, emerging from a year-long phase of negotiation and fundraising and was stewarded by Ela Kagel, David Farine and Zsolt Szentirmai. The physical space opened its doors one year later, in 2011, followed by the Grand Opening in spring 2012. The abandoned grocery store in Berlin-Wedding, along with four retail units in the direct neigbourhood, became home to coworking studios, a cafe and an event space. SUPERMARKT was a community experiment, a living laboratory at the crossroads of technology, culture, economy, and new ways of working & living together. Born in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, SUPERMARKT was a response to a world in flux: a place to explore alternative economies, self-organisation, and participatory culture while the digital economy began to reshape our daily lives.

At the time, Berlin offered the perfect conditions: affordable rents, supportive local politics and a vibrant cultural scene ready to experiment. SUPERMARKT became a hub where anything could happen: exhibitions, deadline sprints, concerts, dinners, conferences, DIY masterclasses, booksprints, money talks, fashion shows, shop-in-shops – you name it. It was also a space where the initiators tried to shift the usual cultural norms: panels featured women as a matter of course, marginalised voices were given a platform to speak for themselves, and horizontal approaches to cultural production, such as shared exhibitions without curators or collaborative book projects, were tested and refined. They explored coworking not just as a trend but as a phenomenon with broader implications for how people work, organise, and collaborate today.

SUPERMARKT also captured the spirit of movements emerging from the financial crisis, from Occupy Wall Street to local initiatives of self-organisation, equality, and codes of conduct. At the same time, we were watching the rise of Airbnb, Uber, Amazon Cloud, and Google – platforms that promised participation but often delivered extraction. SUPERMARKT was a small-scale, human-centered space to explore and critique this emerging digital ecosystem. While the corporate “sharing economy” was celebrating its worldwide success — a success many only later recognised as exploitative — the community space in Wedding offered alternatives, hosting initiatives like Leihbar as a shop-in-shop. Regular event programming ranged from open-source tech workshops and DIY masterclasses to early experiments with local currencies and community credit systems.

The legacy of SUPERMARKT lies not only in the events it hosted but in the ethos it embodied: fostering imagination, collaboration, and risk-taking. Cultivating inclusive participation and creating a model for community-driven innovation. It demonstrated that spaces at the crossroads of digital culture and alternative economies could thrive, inspire, and shape new approaches to work, culture, and community in the city.

Since 2010, Berlin has undergone significant transformations. Culturally, the city has become more commercialised and gentrified, with rising rents and the displacement of many grassroots creative communities. Economically, the boom of the tech and startup ecosystem has shifted focus toward venture-backed growth and profit-oriented innovation, while coworking and alternative workspaces have become mainstream. Financially, speculative investment in real estate and the digital economy has increased, making it harder for experimental community projects to secure affordable spaces. Politically, the city has seen both supportive policies for creative and social enterprises and increased regulation that can challenge bottom-up initiatives. Together, these shifts mean that while Berlin remains a hub for innovation, the environment for experimental, community-driven projects like SUPERMARKT is far more constrained and competitive than it was in 2010.

Yet even though the conditions have changed, the need for spaces of collective experimentation may be greater than ever. The crises of today demand new infrastructures of mutual support, learning and solidarity. And while maintaining a large, central space like the original SUPERMARKT might be difficult in the Berlin of 2026, new versions of what SUPERMARKT once embodied are already emerging in more distributed and adaptive forms: CASINO for Social Medicine on Sonnenallee in Neukölln, Sorge ins Parkcenter as a model for reclaiming abandoned malls or the Kreisler repair shop and other community-led spaces that subvert mainstream cultural and economic logics in their own way. Each moment in time produces its own formats of resistance and its own architectures of care.

Perhaps the community center of the future will not be a single physical space at all, but a constellation of locally rooted hubs, connected through shared values and collaborative infrastructures. What matters is not the form it takes, but the ongoing commitment to cultivating commons-based digital culture, economic alternatives, and collective agency. In that sense, the spirit of SUPERMARKT has not gone. It’s just differently shaped and manifested in new, decentralised ways. What truly matters is that we keep building shared futures – together.