Berlin, October 2021

The third Emerge Gathering took place in Berlin across the weekend of 9–10 October 2021, with an informal welcome the evening before. It was the first time the network had gathered in person since Kyiv in 2019. The pandemic had intervened; the world had shifted; and the question that had always animated Emerge – how do we form a 'we' capable of responding to what we are facing? – had become both more urgent and harder to answer.

Around 250 people came, from across Europe and beyond. The gathering was arranged by Perspectiva and supported by the Berlin Senate, produced by Anna Katharina Schaffner and organised jointly with Ivo Juriaan Mensch, Tomas Björkman and Jonathan Rowson. The facilitation core – Indra Adnan, Elizabeth Debold, Pamela von Sabljar, Thomas Steininger and Phoebe Tickell – shaped two days at the bUm space in Kreuzberg.

A bigger 'we' is regularly called upon to address our burning global challenges – yet even the climate crisis has not brought us closer together.Berlin 2021 · welcome text

The gathering did not resolve that paradox. It held it across three registers – imagination, presencing and practical innovation – resisting both utopian abstraction and tactical short-circuiting. Among those gathered: John Vervaeke on the meaning crisis; Elizabeth Debold on the collapse of the modern social imaginary; Phoebe Tickell on a rigour of feeling; Indy Johar on systems change and urban infrastructure; Jamie Bristow on mindfulness and policy. The weekend generated a cluster of essays on whatisemerging.com, including Rowson's 'The Impossible We?' and Tickell's 'Moral Imaginations'.

There was something particular about being back in a room together after two years of isolation. The pandemic had not paused the questions – if anything it had sharpened them, made the civilisational stakes harder to ignore and the limits of purely digital connection more apparent. People arrived at bUm carrying that weight, and it was present in the room in a way that was difficult to name but impossible to miss. The conversations had a different quality from Berlin 2018 – less exploratory, more pressured, more aware of what was at stake. The field had grown. The world had changed. And the question of whether a coherent collective we was possible felt less like an intellectual provocation and more like an urgent practical matter.

Berlin 2021 marked the moment the field began to take stock of what it had built – and what it still needed to become.