Bernd Kniess is an architect and urban planner. In 2008, when he was appointed to the professorship of Urban Design at the HafenCity University Hamburg, he founded the M.Sc. program of the same name. Shortly after, together with a team of colleagues, he began to take on the project University of Neighborhoods. He is interested in understanding the contemporary city as a produced assemblage, its agencies in different modes of having become-ness and becoming, its translation into forms of diagrammatic representation and its transfer into procedures of relational practice. A particular focus of Bernd Kniess is the conception, design and realization of Living Lab projects such as the University of Neighborhoods (2008-14), Building a Proposition for Future Activities (2015-18) and Zukunftsstadt Friedrichstadt (2016-22). Bernd Kniess teaches in the formats Urban Design Project: Research and Design, Theoretical-Conceptual Foundations, Methodology, Intercultural Practice, Diagrammatics and the Hamburg Open Online University teaching and learning platforms ‘WohnWissen übersetzen’ and ‘Urban Types – of Houses and People’. In 2019-20 he held the Graham Willis Professorship at Sheffield School of Architecture. He has been a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts since 2009.