WELTSTADT

© DAZ

by Sebastian Moll, Journalist and Weltstadt Correspondent in New York

If you happened to pass by the German Architecture Center (DAZ) during the first weekend of May, you might have felt as though you had stumbled upon a remote committee session of the United Nations. Assembled in the courtyard of a re-purposed, early 20th century factory near the Spree river in Berlin Kreuzberg was a dizzying variety of nationalities. Urban planners, architects, designers and political activists from places as far flung as Ulaanbaatar, Dakar, Seoul, Sao Paolo, Belgrade and Bangalore filled the exhibition hall and conference rooms, sharing experiences and common concerns.

The occasion was the summit conference of the Goethe Institute’s global “Weltstadt” project, exploring ways in which citizens participate in shaping contemporary cities around the world. The gathering was a small multicultural utopia with the participants finding an immediacy of understanding with surprising ease. The presentations and discussions amounted to a global comparison of notes on strategies of participation in the face of challenges that are strikingly similar across cultures and continents.

This type of intercultural dialogue was of course the stated intention of the sponsoring German ministry of environmental affairs and urban development (DMBUB). As Marta Doehler-Behzadi, of the ministry said during her visit of the conference. “We want to learn from the world.”

What the German government wanted to learn from the world, with the help of its global Goethe Institute network, was which processes actually drive the way cities develop. The assumption, of course, was that the real forces that shape our cities are not necessarily the formal ones of politics and official urban planning. As Mitch Joachim, the representative of the New York Weltstadt project said in his presentation in Berlin,“City design was an oxymoron from the inception of the term by Walter Gropius. As designers we can dream up whatever we want. But what actually happens in cities is entirely beyond our control.”

© DAZ

Grand theories of the city have clearly lost their utility as tools for understanding urban environments, especially in our globalized age. The better path to learning about our cities is the one chosen by the BMUB, namely to explore and compare practices. This was where the infrastructure of the Goethe Institutes came in handy. These cultural outposts of the German government around the world were uniquely positioned to report on projects and issues at their respective locations and to establish contacts with the local actors.

In organizing the dialog between all these players at the meeting in Berlin, curators Matthias Böttger and Angelika Fitz took a decidedly un-theoretical approach. The conference and accompanying exhibition revolved around themes and issues that emerged in the process of collecting materials and stories in the various locations. Among these themes were topics such as the new civil society, informal formal strategies, the new middle class, the city as collective performance as well as self-organization and public administration.

In the panel on the new civil society for example Mitch Joachim from New York talked about the re-use of the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a haven for a new manufacturing-based economy in New York City; Davis Kanepe shared his experience with the creation of a cultural center in Riga in an abandoned neighborhood and Purev-Erdene Ershuu from Ulaanbaatar spoke about informal settlements in the Mongolian capital which have to accommodate the immense influx of a rural population as well as the forms that life that have emerged in their transition from a nomadic to a settled lifestyle.

Purev-Erdene Ershuu from Ulaanbaatar © DAZ

Similarly, in the panel on the new middle class, delegates from Sao Paolo, Seoul and Bangalore compared notes on the challenges faced by large cities in what are often called emerging countries when their populations start to be better educated and begin to desire a higher standard of living Finally in the discussion of self-organization and public administration, a lively discussion ensued around what happens when the authorities come face to face with private initiatives that claim and transform urban spaces.

The spirit of the two days in Kreuzberg felt utopian: Here were people from widely varied cultural contexts , united in efforts to make a difference in their communities. These were people who not only care deeply about their environments but who have taken action to improve it for the people who live there.

Yet the Weltstadt conference was anything but naïve. The curators and players were acutely aware of the powers and forces that shape urban environments everywhere and that citizens have to contend with. When asked who, at the end of the day, truly creates the city, curator Angelika Fitz said, “The most honest answer is money.”

What emerged from the dialogue in Berlin, however, was a strong sense that citizens are not powerless and that even small interventions—like performance art in the streets of Dakar, a community center and neighborhood newspaper in Johannesburg or a repurposed construction site in Madrid— can make a tremendous difference in the urban fabric. It was an encouragement to urban dwellers everywhere to take ownership of their environment as well as for authorities to listen to them and enlist them in shaping the places where they live.

Jonas Büchel from Riga © DAZ


Luciana Royer from São Paolo during Naresh Narasimhan's presentation on the New Middle Class in India © DAZ

N'Goné Fall (Dakar/Paris) and Ivan Kucina (Belgrade) during the conference © DAZ

Luciana Royer and Ícaro Vilaça from São Paolo © DAZ