New Stakeholders of Urban Change: A Question of Culture and Attitude?

Perspectives in Metropolitan Research IV
Published with the kind support of the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius
Advisory Board Members
Annette Bögle (Professor of design and analysis of structures, HCU)
Ingrid Breckner (Professor of urban and regional sociology, HCU)
Gernot Grabher (Professor of urban and regional economic studies, HCU)
Jochen Schiewe (Professor of geoinformatics and geovisualization, HCU)
Klaus Sill (Professor of drafting and building theory, HCU)
Gesa Ziemer (Professor of cultural theory and practice, HCU)
The series “Perspectives in Metropolitan Research” is edited by the Vice President
for Research at HafenCity University, Gesa Ziemer
HafenCity Universität Hamburg
Referat für Forschung
Überseeallee 16
20457 Hamburg
forschung@hcu-hamburg.de

Contents
In the City Where I Live
Maria Tetzlaff
6
Introduction
New Stakeholders of Urban Change:
A Question of Culture and Attitude?
Hilke Marit Berger/Gesa Ziemer
11
Working Together: How to
Organize Governance
Transitional Geographies: On Locality, Copresence, and
Conflicting Fields in Open Workshops
Bastian Lange/Valentin Domann
23
Digital Governmentality:
Citizen Power, Digital Culture, and City Development
Ramón Reichert
36
Co-Designing Cities:
Urban Gardening Projects and the Conflict between
Self-Determination and Administrative Restrictions
Andrea Baier/Christa Müller
47
Foto Series I
Transforming a Leftover into Public Space: A Photographic
Interview with Laura Sobral about the Largo da Batata in São Paulo
Martin Kohler
60
From Dialog to Doing
A Walk along the Professional Periphery
Frauke Burgdorff
73

Why Is Taking Action Beautiful?
Explorations for Actionology
Barbara Holub
80
Renegotiating Art and Civic Engagement: The Festival 7hoch2
as a Hands-On Platform for Co-Creating Urban Life
Sandra Chatterjee/Siglinde Lang
94
Foto Series II
Today There Is More Space Than I Saw Yesterday
Alexandru Pasca
108
New Actors and Institutions
Working in between: Die Stadt von der anderen Seite sehen
Where Urban Planning Meets Artistic Practice
Isabel Finkenberger/Eva-Maria Baumeister
119
Performing Arts, Martial Discourse: Berlin’s Struggle in
Becoming a Non-German City
Tobi Müller
130
Embrace Your Illusions
Holger Bergmann
140
Permanent Negotiation: Artistic Self-Organization between
Self-Determination, Cultural Policy, and Urban Development
Gabriel Flückiger/Rachel Mader/Peter Spillmann
148

Preface of the
ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin
und Gerd Bucerius
Perspectives in Metropolitan Research
Vol. IV: New Stakeholders of Urban Change
“Together we create the city of tomorrow, starting today!” — the motto of the City
Makers Summit in May 2016 shared an impressive do-it-yourself (DIY) and do-itwith-others
(DIWO) attitude. On the opening day of the summit, May 27, 2016, the
conference room at the Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam was hopelessly overcrowded
with 600 urban innovators from 150 European cities. Still, the organizers
did not give up the idea of having everybody sitting at the same long table both for
discussion sessions and meals. The City Makers came to the Netherlands to meet,
connect, learn, and act together. At the same time, the Dutch presidency of the
Council of the European Union took on a new Urban Agenda for the EU. The goal
was to strengthen the position of the urban stakeholders in the European integration
— to make the City Makers more visible and influential.
The fourth volume of “Perspectives in Metropolitan Research” results from the
fascination for this new category of urban actors, their innovative work, as well as
strong agency and informality. One can experience this fascination during such
events as the City Makers Summit, but also while observing diverse forms of participation
in the everyday life of our cities. The present edition studies cooperation
8 Perspectives in Metropolitan Research

and co-production in the cities, discusses differences between dialog and common
action, and examines the performative character of the cultural institutions. Academic
and artistic contributions reflect the transdisciplinary orientation of the
journal initiated at the HafenCity Universität Hamburg.
On behalf of the ZEIT-Stiftung, I would like to thank the editors of the volume —
Hilke Marit Berger and Gesa Ziemer — for their very timely and engaged interest in
urban participation and the inspiring exploration of academic and artistic perspectives
on this rapidly changing social field. They help us to understand better how
the new groups of the City Makers enter into the urban landscape and interact
with cultural and social institutions.
Hamburg, May 2017
Anna Hofmann
Program Director Research and Scholarship
ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius
New Stakeholders of Urban Change
9

10 Perspectives in Metropolitan Research

New Stakeholders
of Urban Change:
A Question of
Culture and Attitude?
Hilke Marit Berger/Gesa Ziemer
The publication series Perspectives in Metropolitan Research discusses current issues
in metropolis research from interdisciplinary perspectives. One topic, which
has been focused on more and more frequently in recent years by protagonists of
cultural science, artistic practice, various citizens’ initiatives, and urban developers
can be described as follows: due to the increasing densification of cities, the main
focus has shifted to the diverse city. However, citizens not only want to be involved
in the discussion but also in the design of the city. In Europe's urban centres, topdown
planning often meets with resistance. Citizens actively intervene — organised
as representatives of art, the neighborhood, (political) activism, science, as initiatives,
or in unorganised, spontaneous, informal ways. The topics are manifold,
ranging from housing construction, transport planning, or accommodation for refugees
to the design and utilisation of public spaces. Citizens want to play a role in
shaping the city.
Of course, civic participation is not a new phenomenon. No democratically organised
municipality or city would carry out large building projects today without
civic participation. Since the 1960s, there have been regulated processes, both in
Germany and abroad, which incorporate citizens in the planning and realisation
processes. There are also a series of nationwide and international research projects
New Stakeholders of Urban Change
11

Working
Together: How
to Organize
Governance
22 Perspectives in Metropolitan Research

Transitional
Geographies:
On Locality,
Copresence, and
Conflicting Fields in
Open Workshops
Bastian Lange/Valentin Domann
Open workshops and transition processes
Our contribution focuses on socio-spatial contexts of the protagonists of open
workshops and the ways in which their practices take up positioning and location
in urban contexts. During multiple crises in the financial sector, food production,
climate change, the crisis of political legitimacy, participation, and natural resource
destruction, as well as useless consumption, many protagonists have started to install
so-called open workshops worldwide.
Open workshops (e.g. screen printing, bicycle workshops, repair cafés, FabLabs,
etc.) are becoming increasingly important and provide valuable impulses when
hopes are placed on urban innovation processes (Lange et al. 2016): craftsmanship,
repairing technologies, and DIY-attitudes, the original practice of open workshops —
that means transforming old goods to practical and usable ones — predestined these
as places of alternative consumption and production practices (Baier et al. 2016).
Working Together: How to Organize Governance
23

Working
Digital
Governmentality:
Citizen Power,
Digital Culture, and
Together: How
to Organize
Governance
City Development
Ramón Reichert
The convergence of mobile media, wireless networks, digital data visualizations,
and social web applications have led to a radical change in our experiences of urban
settings. Today, more than ever, the city of the future is evolving at the interface
of mobile media practices, digital infrastructures, and web-based networks. The
formation of digital infrastructures and networks (Castells 2000, p. 15) thus creates
a key foundation for the sustainable development of the informational city. As they
create a media-induced space of social experience and connections, digital information
and communication networks, satellite navigation systems and real-time
connectivity and navigation are transforming the city. In view of this, a number of
social analyses have used mobile and platform-based network media as a guiding
indicator for evaluating urban change. In this context, the Networked Readiness Index
(NRI) is an established indicator for the statistic evaluation of the informational
city. Using the index, a city’s digital networking can be measured empirically by
means of these indicators: “number of internet users,” “number of broadband connections,”
and “number of mobile broadband connections” (Baller et al. 2016).
36 Perspectives in Metropolitan Research

Cities investing in the development of digital infrastructures and services can
expect an exhaustive reshaping of their political and administrative actions consistent
with open government, and an improved regulation of the cooperation and
codetermination among social institutions, companies, and citizens. In terms of urban
planning, these expectations of the informational city can be understood as an
indicator of an extensive reorientation of urban ways of life. Against this background,
the following questions are central to this study: what significance does
the development of the informational city have in forming new kinds of social and
cultural interaction in a digital society? To what extent can the digitalization of the
urban be understood as a societal gauge? In response to these questions, I would
like to closely examine the infrastructures of media technology, and its potential
applications, to map out its effects on all actors involved.
Models of the informational city
Discourses on the informational city often center on a mobile and platform-based
urban culture to depict visions of the urban human of the future. This notion
breaks with the vertically hierarchical model of urban machine bureaucracy (Best
and Wade 2005). Superseding it is the web-like model of the power of the “market”
as an organizational structure and its novel forms of participation (Lessig 2004,
Benkler 2011). Network structures, communication practices, and project management
signify the versatile linking of heterogeneous structures of knowledge, power,
and subjectivity (Andrejevic 2011, pp. 278–87). The space of mobile and dynamic networking
has nothing to do with a ‘natural,’ pre-existing geographic or physical ‘container.’
Rather it regulates situational contexts, probable actions, and opportunities
and is characterized by a specific entanglement of knowledge, power, and subject
relations. This metaphor of the new digital urbanity ranks among the hegemonic
metaphors of contemporary society (Vattimo 1997, pp. 3–5). It signifies a trend toward
the dissolution of the boundaries of social belonging by illustrating the gradual
breakdown of institutions and the emergence of hybrid structures. Dynamic
networks with flexible structures form the new social morphology of city development:
“Hypertext is the technology for the theory, the implementation of deconstruction
and postmodern multiplicity with technological means” (Simanowski
2000, p. 137).
In the context of near-continuous smartphone or tablet usage, the city turns
into a hypertextual space overladen with information. While the networking structures
this facilitates expand opportunities for experience, action, and interaction in
urban usage; they remain susceptible to a solidification of technological media options.
Thus, the central question is: to what extent are citizens being integrated into
the digitally networked transformation of the city? Are citizens being addressed
only as application users, or are they able to go beyond mere userhood to co-create
the city? Will the city of the future turn into an interface that manages and regulates
certain applications, or will its residents and visitors be given the chance to
Working Together: How to Organize Governance
37

ship with the surrounding city. They demand real participation, which for them
must involve a redistribution of creative power. They do not want to become site
operators.
Lack of recognition
The case of Bremen makes the different positions clear. It shows, among other
things, how inexperienced all parties still are in dealing with each other. From the
perspective of the urban gardeners, in one instance the city wants to transfer too
much responsibility to them, but in other instances it gives them too little freedom
of action. The city authorities, operating according to the principles of rationality,
are not in a position to simply recognize urban designers who, in their view, lack
legitimacy. Often, they do not yet trust the “new kids on the block,” as can be seen
from the temporary or short-term usage contracts that they issue them. This forces
the projects to repeatedly submit new applications, which takes a lot of time and
effort.
When it comes to areas in so-called “socially disadvantaged” parts of the city, by
contrast, the cities themselves sometimes approach the garden activists — as in the
case of the “Wesertor” garden project in Kassel. The garden is on a busy street, opposite
a discount store with the obligatory parking lot in front of it. The people living
in the area have low incomes and many problems, including issues with alcohol.
The 2,000m 2 area only had one playground: “Noone wanted to go there. At best a
couples of winos sometimes sat on the bench there.” (Interview, K. Winnemuth, Essbare
Stadt Kassel e.V., Kassel, January 2017)
This was the first time that the city itself had approached the Essbare Stadt Kassel
association. The garden group took on the challenge of revitalizing a neglected,
run-down area and, in so doing, revitalizing the neighborhood and thus transforming
a (theoretical) common good into a (real) common.
There was great joy when, during the first gardening season, it was announced
that the gardening group was also eligible for funds from the Soziale Stadt (“Social
City”) initiative for further raised beds and a tool shed. That the money did not actually
materialize at first was seen by the gardeners as symptomatic of the city's
dealings with engagement by civil society. From their perspective, this is what happens:
first they submit a concept, then they rework it as requested, then it is held by
the authorities for weeks before anything happens. Finally, the city hires a building
company to carry out the remodeling work. The gardeners believe that they could
easily have done the necessary work themselves. They are also annoyed that there
is money available to hire a building company, but none to pay for their education
work in the area, for example.
In conclusion, Kassel resident Karsten Winnemuth notes that he has developed
“a healthy basic suspicion” (ibid.) after many years of experience with city planners
and administrators. But he also recognizes that good relationships have developed
with certain bodies and specific people — and that it is worth sticking at it. In any
54 Perspectives in Metropolitan Research

case, he says, they have now found a way to work with the Parks
Authority in the “StadtFruchtgeNuss” project: “Our approach now
is always to present our projects to the Ortsbeiräte (local councils).
They are always very enthusiastic and even make funding available
— and then we coordinate with the Gartenamt (Parks Authority).”
(ibid.)
This vignette shows that the activists’ experimental approach
is not confined to land management, but that learning processes
also occur when dealing with municipal governance, in this case,
the interaction between local political and administrative bodies.
The activists figure out that the municipality itself is not a monolithic
bloc, but is divided into different departments and divisions,
some of which act in opposite directions (a classic case is the conflict
between business departments and environmental departments)
or may compete with one another and in so doing block
each other. Individual employees, as well as entire departments
within the municipal administration, can, despite their goodwill,
get caught in the crossfire and fail to realize their declared goals. It
also happens that individuals within the administration understand
the projects and want to follow their rationale, but their
employment regulations do not permit them to do so.
Figures 3 and 4: Essbare Stadt (Kassel)
© Christa Müller, © Daniel Münderlein
Processes of negotiation
The activists in Cologne also found that municipal decision-making
processes should be regarded as “polycentric events” that do
not follow a single, logical system. The community gardeners from
the NeuLand project got involved in the citizen participation procedure
for the design of a new area of the city, including a park
Working Together: How to Organize Governance
55

into Public Spa
Transforming a Leftover
into Public Space:
A Photographic
Interview with
Laura Sobral about the
Largo da Batata in
São Paulo
Martin Kohler
Transforming
60 Perspectives in Metropolitan Research

When I first visited São Paulo, it seemed to me to be a city full of
wonders and horror. I came from Europe full of pictures and stories
of the crime-ridden Brazilian cities and the city I found was a
monstrosity. But not so much a monster of violence and inequality;
more a monstrous creature of high-rise buildings and huge
streams of cars and buses. Cafés, museums, apartments, office
spaces, and bars — it was an archipelago of secluded islands, connected
by cars. Public transport was something no respectable
person would use, unless they had to. Confusing bus lines, chaotic
transit stops, and generally slow stop-and-go traffic made it a notso-perfect
mode of transportation, only walking and cycling were
worse in comparison. This was basically due to the pitiful state of
the streets and places. This city has been built for cars, not for anything
else. What was meant as public space was in fact very often
unclaimed, leftover pieces of land which were unusued, creating
opportunities to claim and privatize those spaces.
One especially infamous place among these leftover spaces
was the Largo da Batata, a place I found in the middle of a journey
from Rio to the apartment of a yet unknown friend in Vila Madalena.
Arranged by a mutual friend, he had offered me a place to
sleep for a few nights. Walking around, getting lost in the middle
of the night, the city led me down to the river, where I walked by
an old cemetery and through streets full of brothels and hookers,
until I was spilled out by the city into this large clearing in the urban
jungle. On one side, the old houses I had just been passing
through, on the other, a row of glittering large new office buildings,
in the middle: nothing. Even the buses seemed to avoid the
a Leftover
ce
place, roaring around only at the edges. If noise and uncomfortable
chaos is your thing, this place nailed it. To me, it made me end
the journey and take a cab.
In the meantime, I learned that Largo da Batata, the grand
empty opening at the end of Faria Lima, a bustling shopping
and business avenue, means “Square of the potato.” On the
flood plains of the Pinheiros River, the new migrants from the
Northeast of Brazil arrived for work and city life in the rapidly
urbanizing city of São Paulo and populated the area. At this
spot, an informal market sprang up. A place that brought together
and made visible the goods, life, and food of the newcomers.
During dictatorship, the place was cleaned and cleared,
leaving a huge open space, covered in concrete with a sole function
remaining: coordinating the traffic flows of bus lines, a
point to change buses.
Transforming a Leftover into Public Space
61

68 Perspectives in Metropolitan Research

For me, these impromptu interventions look very much like
something I call “Berlin-style.” Does that term make sense to
you? Would you describe it differently?
It makes sense, I think that is a strong influence on these kinds of actions all around the world.
Transforming a Leftover into Public Space 69

From Dialog
to Doing

A Walk along
the Professional
Periphery
Frauke Burgdorff
The new always comes from the borders and not the centre. “The
centre is petrified … Thinking that comes from the periphery is
dynamic.” 1 When I first read this on the book cover of a biography
of Hannah Arendt, this statement by Agnes Heller on Hannah Arendt
made me, a philosophically otherwise relatively clueless urban
planner, curious.
Through studying some writings on and by Hannah Arendt, I
learned she is still politically relevant, beyond her specific intellectual
culture. Her statements on the “rule by nobody,” the role of
power in the polis, and the essence of the political are in a way
fundamental for our democracy and also for land-use planning,
so I want to take the risk here of relating her thoughts to my profession.
To all those who accuse me of dabbling by doing so, I want
to declare loudly and decidedly at the start: “Yes, I am a lay-person!”
My stance on philosophy is like that of Zadie Smith’s father
on art criticism in viewing the Venus of Urbino. I describe her
beautiful body without being acquainted with the categories that
enable me to evaluate the painting itself. 2
So, take a walk with me through a select trove of quotations
from Hannah Arendt. And take a look with me at the finds I discovered
for myself, with twenty years of reflective practice at my back.
1 “Hannah Arendt: Das Wissen um die
Fehlbarkeit.” Derstandard.at. Accessed
April 27, 2017. http://derstandard.
at/2263721/Nachlese-Hannah-Arendt-
Das-Wissen-um-die-Fehlbarkeit
2 Zadie Smith, “Meine Zeit als junge
Frau ist vorbei”, FAZ. Accessed April
27, 2017. http://plus.faz.net/evr-editions/2017-02-11/42744/319071.html.
From Dialog to Doing
73

From Dialog
Renegotiating
Art and Civic
Engagement: The
Festival 7hoch2 as
a Hands-On Platform
for Co-Creating
Urban Life
to Doing
Sandra Chatterjee/Siglinde Lang
“7hoch2 is not a typical festival or cultural project. It aims to initiate processes at the
intersection of art, cultural participation, and the concrete concerns of citizens, to
generate impulses for (modes of) participatory urban development.”
How can people’s desires to actively shape their immediate and everyday surroundings
be articulated? How can such civil potential be transformed into impulse(s) for
urban development? How far can artistic processes contribute to converting urban
spaces into arenas of cultural negotiation and civic action? Questions such as these
were starting points for 7hoch2 — Festival für zivile Auftragskunst, 1 which tried to
explore new kinds of intersections and relationships between citizens(hip), artistic
practices, and civil engagement. By creating a discursive and hands-on platform
94 Perspectives in Metropolitan Research

where concrete civil concerns and artistic practices meet in shared
and dialogic processes, the initiative aimed to generate impulses
for locally specific transformations and activate the city space as a
living environment.
We understand citizens — in this case the people living in a particular
urban space — as experts, who can contribute specific knowledges
to shaping their urban living environments. Often, they
know exactly where there are deficits, where change is necessary,
where there is unexplored potential and what kind of renewal
they want to see in and for “their” cities or neighborhoods. However,
incentives to become active and the necessary tools to intervene
in their immediate environments are frequently lacking.
7hoch2 was intended to provide a public platform to explore
civic potential for urban processes of transformation and aimed to
multiply academic, civic, and artistic expertise. Based on our notions
of and questions about citizenship, art making, and modes
of participation, we designed a process in which photographs of
places exhibiting a potential for change were submitted by people
living in Salzburg. Seven places were selected to be temporarily
transformed through artistic interventions. In collaborative
constellations consisting of an artist, engaged citizens inspired to
participate by their local, thematic, or artistic interests and — if
possible — the person who submitted the photograph(s) of a chosen
place, artistic approaches in response to the submitted impulses
of change were developed and realized.
Conceptual starting points: urban, cultural and artistic citizenship
7hoch2 was inspired by recent debates on citizenship in the context
of cultural and artistic co-production alongside our theoretical
and practical pursuits. 2
Expanding upon Marshall’s concept of citizenship, 3 the notion
of cultural citizenship articulates cultural practices as civil rights
and as means for citizens to partake in society’s symbolic resources
(Klaus and Lünenborg 2004): cultural citizenship emphasizes culture
as dynamic and negotiable, “the status of culture as discursively
constructed” (Delanty 2002, p. 64) and highlights the potential
effects of civic participation on power relationships. Thus,
cultural citizenship is defined as a discursive process that comprises
“a set of strategies and practices to invoke processes of empowerment
in order to subversively listen and to speak up in the public
sphere” 4 (Klaus and Lünenborg 2012, p. 201) and, as Leehyun Lim
emphasizes, “locates the substantial meaning of citizenship in the
1 ‘7hoch2//Festival für zivile Auftragskunst’
was one of ten projects awarded
core funding by Zukunftslabor Salzburg
20.16 (“Starke Unterstützung für innovative
Ideen aus Salzburg.” Zukunftslabor
Salzburg. Accessed May 20, 2017.
https://zukunftslabor-salzburg2016.
at/). It was conducted between October
2016 and May 2017. 7hoch2 literally
means 72. i.e. seven to the power of two.
Festival für zivile Auftragskunst roughly
translates as ‘festival for art commissioned
by the public (civil society).’ For
the remainder of the article we will be
using the German short title 7hoch2.
2 The festival was initiated and curated
by the authors who have both been
straddling theory and practice in
their work, Sandra primarily in terms
of artistic (choreographic) practice
and scholarship, and Siglinde in
terms of participatory arts management,
curation, and scholarship.
3 Marshall sees citizenship as a
set of civic demands in the context
of legal, political, and social
rights (Marshall 1965/1992).
4 According to Klaus and Lünenborg’s
understanding of cultural citizenship
(Klaus and Lünenborg 2012, p. 208)
these rights as practices are: Right
to information (as access to, but also
transparency of, data, facts, information,
in order to arrive at a collaborative
decision-making base); Right to
experience (as space in which diverse
ways of living and identity concepts
are or can be expressed); Right to
knowledge (as introduction of prior
knowledge and claims to competence,
necessary for making independent interpretations);
and Right to participation
(as an active and open forum for
the expression of opinion and interpretations)
(see also Lang 2017, p. 141).
From Dialog to Doing
95

Figure 2: Pictures of the collaborative
interventions based on the concepts
of the artists: top row Romana Hagyo,
Christopher Woschitz alias ChrisCross,
middle row Cornelia Böhnisch,
Julia Schwarzbach, Elisabeth Schmir,
bottom row Stefan Heitzinger,
Dorit Ehlers. © Festival 7hoch2 and
Johannes Pichler
104 Perspectives in Metropolitan Research

From Dialog to Doing
105

I've got the chock and the board. Please tell me if you need them.
With love, Martin.
The fun is over! Please use the toilets in the East and the middle West. Thanks!
Please knock at the door, and enter only if you hear a “Yes, come in.”
Thanks.
114 Perspectives in Metropolitan Research

I couldn't carry it out alone. Please don't throw it away. I will take it out first in September.
All the best, Christian
I borrowed the white board for the party in the
basement. I will bring it back on Tuesday.
Greetings, BOB
Today There Is More Space Than I Saw Yesterday 115

New Actors
Performing Arts,
Martial Discourse:
Berlin’s Struggle
and Institutions
in Becoming a
Non-German City
Tobi Müller
This essay is about an artistic director who became a symptom of Berlin’s urban
change. It is a story that plays out in the open, but also beneath the surface of the
idea of what a city is. It is a story about the Belgian museum man Chris Dercon who
became a byword for urban change. Up until spring of 2017, Dercon was one of the
artistic directors of Tate Modern in London. In 2015, it was announced that he had
been appointed to the top job at one of Germany’s most renowned municipal theaters,
the Volksbühne at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin. This personnel matter was
the target of much protest — against the man, to be sure, but also against the role
the arts play in the process of change in a city. When we talk about Dercon, we talk
about the spectre of neoliberalism. Or about its influence on the minds of the predominantly
white, male and Eurocentric artistic elite that operates in Berlin. This
text will place Dercon’s transition — from the so-called fine to the performing arts,
from projects to repertory, from London to Berlin — within the frame of larger questions
that many inner cities are facing. What city do we want to live in, what role do
the arts play in the process, and who the hell are we anyway?
Chris Dercon is in his late fifties, sports a well-groomed beard and, from the look
of his hair, probably visits a hairdresser’s once a month. And he likes scarves. Some
130 Perspectives in Metropolitan Research

of the ones he wears look like silk, but not all of them appear to be
expensive. You have to know a little something about textiles in
order to spot the quality. Dercon was born in Flanders, the
Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, in an area famed for its woven
fabrics and cloth. It runs in the family too; his mother was a cutter.
We have an appointment in London where he is curating his last
show as one of the directors of Tate Modern. It is a solo exhibition
of work by Wolfgang Tillmans, the German photographer. Dercon
is waiting to board a plane to Kolkata when I call him to set the
time of our interview at the Tate. Two weeks later, we meet at the
staff entrance. My Swiss genes mean that I cannot help being ten
minutes early. But Dercon is already there to meet me.
Everything in this last paragraph would be unlikely to apply to
a German theater boss. The look, the heritage, the fine arts, and
definitely the fact that there is no gate-keeping secretary who politely
asks me to wait outside. Possibly that will change soon. In
September 2017 Chris Dercon will head up the Volksbühne in Berlin,
a big venue at the heart of the well-funded German theater
sector.
One of Dercon’s favorite artists is Hélio Oiticica, a visual artist
from Brazil, who combined the aesthetics of modernity with environmental
art and with what would soon be called Tropicalia. Like
so many non-American, non-European artists, Oiticica was not
discovered by the global art world until very late, in his case after
his untimely death in 1980 aged 42. His current fame is partly
down to Chris Dercon. During our interview 1 in London he takes
great pleasure in reminiscing about his colleagues back in the day
who denounced him by saying his interest in Oiticica was fueled
by “Brazilian women, carnival, and cocaine!”
Tate Modern has played a vital role in rewriting art history for
quite a while. This began well before 2011, when Dercon answered
London’s call and went from director of Haus der Kunst in Munich
to the large museum on the south bank of the Thames. At Tate
Modern, many shows have let the attention wander outside of Europe
and negotiated a more diverse heritage in doing so, which
also means: a less male heritage. (Re-)discovering South American
art and re-evaluating female positions has become vital not only
for museums and biennials, but also for the market. So even
though Tate Modern may not have initiated this shift all by itself,
the institution has been prominent in promoting the tendency
towards diversity. Changes of this scale in the artistic field have
knock-on effects in social ideas involved in city planning. The Lon-
1 Interview, C. Dercon, Director of Tate
Modern, London, February 2017.
New Actors and Institutions
131

SchlimmCity © Björn Stork
Why is the field between vacancy and renewed leases,
gentrification and socio-spatial boundaries so important?
What we can see in a project such as SchlimmCity is the current
attempt within the performing and visual arts to set themselves
against a notion of art that emphasizes the artwork and the individual
creator, and to espouse one that emphasizes the diversity
and process orientation of creating. This occurs sometimes more,
sometimes less, explicitly with reference to artists such as those
involved in the Fluxus movement, Situationists International, or
the further elaboration of social sculpture in the tradition of Joseph
Beuys. Many artists’ forms of expression have changed in
this way in years gone by. The central motif of these developments
can, with utmost caution, be described as a “turn towards the
real.” This is substantiated as follows: while culture used to be understood
as a structured symbolic relationship to be read and investigated,
the assumption today is that culture is generated in
the execution of collective action and can accordingly only be researched
in action. Culture is like a large-scale performance in
which the utterances generated, consciously or unconsciously,
create a reality. Digital transformations elaborate upon these performances
in virtual reality, engendering a transformation in
144 Perspectives in Metropolitan Research

viewers’ perspectives that poses new challenges to our cultural institutions. The
role of the spectator/visitor in theaters and museums is all too often an anachronism
in a context of immediate feedback and global availability. Artists and cultural
institutions are acting upon these changes in the form of urban actions, performative
installations, live art, and participatory projects. With their art, over decades,
they have allowed the nature of their work to evolve, so it becomes more about art
as the experience of a space, and less about art as a viewable object. Along with the
expansion of art into virtual spaces, one could describe this trend as immersive art.
To recap, the following three aspects are important for my thinking:
1. the visibility of diversity as the basis of negotiation processes and the
basis of democracy
2. artistic experimental arrangements as test runs for city and community
developments
3. continual aesthetic development, aiming at art being truly/genuinely
contemporary
With such an artistic practice, my concern is to create aesthetic formats that include
socio-political, architectural, and socio-spatial fields of action. Under my artistic leadership,
the city games (e.g. SchlimmCity, Ruhrzilla, and 54. Stadt (54th City)) created
events that provided space and regional attention for current formats and their contemporary
aesthetic, and incidentally created intercity collaborations across genres.
Formats, artistic strategies, marketing, and art are hardly distinct. They create a
temporary collective sphere in which users — artists, visitors, employees, local actors,
and inhabitants — experience and shape a collective performance. Everyone
performs their own actions, and these (often unconscious) actions create reality.
Urban dwellers in central Europe always understand their lives as a conscious staging
process, in which everything is, to a certain extent, “constructed”. This includes
the architectural spaces of the city around us, the style of décor in our apartments,
our “eventized” leisure time and even our bodies, which we alter with aesthetic surgery.
In this vein, reality is always understood as a performance, as a conscious embodiment.
The border between reality and fiction blurs, and art as experience gradually
supersedes art as artwork. What Guy Debord and the Situationists anticipated
in 1967 as a “society of the spectacle” is today a reality. It defines the citizen or resident
of such a society as a spectator for whom the entirety of public and political
life becomes a spectacle. This is how illusory space and public urban space become
more and more intertwined.
The performative artistic practice described reacts to this by approximating
performance art in its technique and modes of representation. The theater scholar,
Hans-Thies Lehmann, describes this convergence of theater and performance as
the “incursion of the real into theatrical fiction” (Lehmann 1999, p. 176). The desire to
New Actors and Institutions
145

New Actors
Permanent
Negotiation: Artistic
Self-Organization
and Institutions
between
Self-Determination,
Cultural Policy, and
Urban Development
Gabriel Flückiger/Rachel Mader/Peter Spillmann
In the spring of 1988, Basel’s electorate voted to reject a proposal for a new culture
and ecology center, the Kultur- und Naturpark St. Johann, thus bringing the interim
use of the Alte Stadtgärtnerei (Old City Nursery) to a bitter end. For almost two
years, this urban community project had stood in for both the youth movement
and the short-lived Autonome Jugend Zentrum (AJZ, Autonomous Youth Center). It
was a place that brought together a wide variety of protagonists and biographies —
from “political activists and esoterics to junkies and unhinged artists” (Kocher 2012,
p. 280) — in a strictly non-commercial and democratic, grassroots environment.
Modern-day commentators have rightly referred to it as a “viable alternative to a
society of consumption and growth” (ibid.). As owners of the site, the municipal
148 Perspectives in Metropolitan Research

authorities had endorsed the experiment, though this was never
conceived as anything other than a temporary arrangement. The
Basel Building Department had agreed a fixed-term contract with
the Alte Stadtgärtnerei interest group, an association of artists
and musicians, granting them use of the land until the end of
1987. 1 Having obtained more than 5,000 signatures, their proposal
for the Kultur- und Naturpark St. Johann had been put to a referendum
as an alternative to the city’s plans for a representative
municipal park. 2 The idea was to preserve at least some of the dynamism
and openness that had characterized the interim use of
the site. Although a continuation of the project in the same form
looked unlikely — its organizational structures were minimal;
there was a general assembly but no steering group, statutes, or
regulations (Koechlin 1988) — the initiatives of the various groups
active on the site did have the support of green and leftwing politicians.
In a contribution to the partisan paper of Basel’s Green
Alternatives, Martin Schaffner said it was “grotesque to want to
build a traditional landscape garden in St. Johann.” Instead, he advocated
more minimal, cautious interventions that would take
the various existing interests into account, since there was “no intact
living space” anywhere else in Basel (Schaffner 1987, p. 1).
The referendum defeat deprived the Stadtgärtner (‘city gardeners’)
of any legal basis they might have had. Having been occupied
for months (See figure 1.), the site was officially cleared by police early
in the morning of June 21, 1988. 3 There were riots in Basel for the
next few days. These resulted in injuries, damages running to
six-figure sums, and the police promising to “promptly stamp out
1 The interim use of the Alte Stadtgärtnerei
site officially began with the project
“Begegnung bildender Kunst mit
neuer Musik” (Visual Art Meets Modern
Music) in June 1986. More than 30
artists and musicians from Basel and
elsewhere in Switzerland participated.
The interest group consisted predominantly
of these cultural workers.
2 These plans went back to a Grand
Council decision of April 10, 1980.
3 For the police clearance in particular,
see Geerk 1988.
Figure 1: Call for squatting Alte
Stadtgärtnerei, leaflet, 1988,
© Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv
Figure 2: Call for squatting Cinema
Union, leaflet, 1988, © Schweizerisches
Sozialarchiv
New Actors and Institutions
149

Figure 4: Werkraum floorplan
Schlotterbeck, 1991/92, first published
in: D. Häni et al., ed. Werkraum
Schlotterbeck, Basel.
Markus Ritter was able to secure a three-year contract for temporary
use of the site.
In retrospect, all parties on both sides of this negotiation describe
the initial position as one of considerable distance and mutual
skepticism. The artists’ definitive project concept and concrete
support structures were only developed in the course of the
negotiation process and in parallel with the owner’s changing attitude
and willingness to enter into the experiment. The Werkraum
Schlotterbeck served primarily as a workshop for art and
craft production, but it was also an events venue and soon became
a showcase for interim use (see figure 4). But at the same
time, the fact that a group of cultural workers had approached a
bank and were relying on a broad base of support — they had actively
sought to involve people from art institutions and the municipal
departments of culture and building — led to some discontent
and division among the former Stadtgärtner.
Nonetheless, this project seemed to stand a better chance of
winning a majority, not least because of its organization, which
was far clearer than that of the Alte Stadtgärtnerei and had various
personal responsibilities and a fully elaborated business
model. As Roland Wüthrich put it: “Suddenly they were saying
154 Perspectives in Metropolitan Research

these ‘artists and anarchists can actually keep contracts too!’” 15
Another definite aim of the Schlotterbeck project was the longterm
continuation of such collaborations. Jakob Tschopp, president
of the Schlotterbeck supporters’ association, encouraged
public and private sponsors and members of the public to support
future work spaces and cultural centers as if they were “established
institutions of high culture.” The 1980s were in the past
and alternative artists were no longer conducting “their experiments
in isolation from established society” (Tschopp 1991). Attitudes
that favored cross-pollination and learning from one another
had now moved center stage.
15 Wüthrich cited in Spehr 2015.
On the need for constant negotiation
So, the calls to provide space for alternative culture were no longer
exclusively focused on the question of inclusiveness in the art system.
Artistic discourse in Schlotterbeck circles opposed materialized
concepts of work with the notion of “work on the subject” —
art was to be a catalyst for the development of individual capacities
with the aim of finding creative solutions together. 16 The focus
of artistic practice shifted toward social, structural, and organizational
engagement through project participation, an approach
that would become paradigmatic for many initiatives in the
1990s. 17 Even during the three-year interim use of the site, the
Schlotterbeck supporters’ association was already talking to investors
and architects about successor projects. Starting with the
Warteck project, which still exists even now, these discussions created
a ripple effect of subsequent interim uses (Frobenius, Bell,
the NT-Areal).
Municipal interest in cultural interim uses such as these was
not always based entirely on economic considerations. On the contrary,
when faced with growing interregional competition, local authorities
increasingly recognized how important a diverse cultural
scene was for the atmosphere of a city. A strong cultural image
could be a potentially game-changing advantage when it came to
attracting new businesses and their employees to the area. Or as
one commentator has said of the empty industrial buildings that
were used by cultural workers in Zurich-West in the early 1990s: “Attractive
apartments soon started to appear on the site, and they
weren’t exactly cheap” (Wehrli-Schindler 2002, p. 6).
This sort of enhancement of entire urban districts was problematized
under the concept of gentrification, which criticized the
bias toward wealthier residents. This new debate on gentrifica-
16 On this see also Markus Ritter’s
remarks on engagement at Schlotterbeck
and its proximity to Joseph
Beuys’s concept of art, Ritter 1993.
17 It is not for no reason that the
Werkraum Schlotterbeck is now cited
as the beginning of a self-fulfilling
“creative economy” and a culture of
start-ups in Basel; see Ritter 2013.
New Actors and Institutions
155

Contributors
160 Perspectives in Metropolitan Research

Authors
Andrea Baier is a senior researcher at the research foundation
anstiftung. She studied sociology in Bielefeld and taught
at Oberstufen-Kolleg/University of Bielefeld. She
undertook research in Indonesia and Germany. Her current
research interests: subsistence theory, gender studies, and
sustainability studies.
Eva-Maria Baumeister works as a director and curator. She
studied theater direction in Amsterdam and at the
Folkwang-Universität. As a director she worked at several
theaters, inculding the Schauspielhaus Bochum and the
Schauspiel Graz. In 2006 she founded the Kaltstart-Festival
in Hamburg and in 2013/14 led the “Junges Theater in
Göttingen.” Since 2015 she is artistic director of Die Stadt
von der anderen Seite sehen at the Schauspiel Köln. www.
evamariabaumeister.de
Hilke Marit Berger is a research assistant at HafenCity
University in Hamburg, with a focus on cultural theory,
urban studies, and public art. She developed, coordinated,
and worked for several artistic and scientific projects for
festivals, theaters, and universities in Berlin, Leipzig, and
Hamburg. With her dissertation: Handlung statt
Verhandlung. Kunst als gemeinsame Stadtgestaltung she
was a member of the post-graduate program: Assemblies
and participation: urban publics and performances.
Holger Bergmann, managing and artistic director, lives in
Berlin. He was a founding member and from 2002 until
2014 the artistic director of the theatrical production
venue Ringlokschuppen Ruhr.He also worked on his own
productions at independent theaters and many projects
with artists and artist collectives from independent
theater, frequently in collaboration with municipal
theaters or international festivals. He was a curator and
Capital of Culture representative for the city of Mülheim.
He holds teaching assignments at a number of
universities and works as a cultural policy consultant. He
developed urban space projects such as SchlimmCity and
54. Stadt. Since 2015, he has curated the Urbane Künste
Ruhr and have been artistic director of the theater festival
Favoriten 2016. In January 2016, Holger Bergmann was
appointed managing director of the Fonds Darstellende
Künste in Berlin.
Frauke Burgdorff is an experienced urban planner with
expertise in alternative project development, neighborhood
development, and process design. She worked as an urban
planner in Antwerp, as a futurologist in Gelsenkirchen, as
the head of a building culture initiative in Northrhine-Westfalia,
as Executive Board Member of Montag Stiftung
Urbane Räume, and founded her own agency for
cooperative urban development — Burgdorff Stadt — in 2017.
As such she is designing integrated urban development
processes and public participation and is moderating
complex development processes and events. She always
seeks inspiration in adjacent disciplines such as the arts,
education, and organizational development.
Sandra Chatterjee is a choreographer and scholar, who teaches,
researches, performs, and organizes art/cultural projects
at the intersection of theory and practice and with a focus
on gender, postcolonial, and migration studies. She is a
founding member of the Post Natyam Collective, a
multinational, internet-based coalition working in live
performance, video, and scholarship.
Valentin Domann has studied geography and regional studies
at Humboldt University Berlin and University of California,
Irvine. His professional interest is urban sociology with a
focus on cultural political economy as well as issues of
gender-equity, urban diversity, and anti-discrimination
policies.
Isabel Finkenberger is an architect and urban planner. After
stops in Hamburg, Berlin, London, Stuttgart, and Sydney
she now has her own office Studio if+. Office for urban
development and spatial transformation in Cologne,
working on the interface between planning, curating,
research and teaching. Since 2015 she is artistic director of
the biennial pilot project Die Stadt von der anderen Seite
sehen at the Schauspiel Köln. www.studioifplus.org
Gabriel Flückiger is an art researcher and artist. He studied art
history, social anthropology, and fine arts in Bern and
Zurich. He is a research assistant at the Lucerne University
of Applied Sciences and Arts and was a guest lecturer at
both Zurich University of the Arts and at the School of
Visual Arts, Berne/Bienne.
Contributors
161

Barbara Holub/transparadiso, is an artist and architect, lives in
Vienna. In 1999 she founded transparadiso with Paul
Rajakovics as a transdisciplinary practice promoting “direct
urbanism.” 2004 Schindler Award, Los Angeles; 2007
Otto-Wagner-Städtebaupreis (Urban-Developement-Award)
for “Stadtwerk Lehen/Salzburg.” Barbara
Holub has been president of the “Secession Wien”
(2006–2007); Visiting professor at the University of Illinois/
Chicago. She teaches at the University of Applied Arts
Vienna. www.transparadiso.com, www.barbaraholub.com
Siglinde Lang is a Senior Scientist at the focus area “Wissenschaft
& Kunst/Humanities & Art” (University Salzburg/
Mozarteum, Austria) and works as curator, arts manager,
and lecturer. Recent studies and publications include
Participatory Arts Management, Artists as Entrepreneurs,
and Arts in rural areas. Lang is co-editor of the E-Journal
www.p-art-icipate.net.
Bastian Lange, Dr. phil., studied geography, ethnology and
urban development in Marburg and Edmonton and
obtained his doctorate at the Johann-Wolfgang Goethe
University, Frankfurt am Main, at the Institute for
Geography in 2006. He has since been Guest Professor at
the Humboldt University in Berlin between 2011 and 2012.
In 2017, he is finalizing his habilitation at University of
Leipzig.
Rachel Mader is an art researcher; she has been director of the
research focus Kunst, Design & Öffentlichkeit (Art, Design &
the Public Sphere) at Lucerne University of Applied
Sciences and Arts since September 2012 and directed Die
Organisation zeitgenössischer Kunst. Strukturieren,
Produzieren und Erzählen (Organizing Contemporary Art:
Structure, Production, and Narrative) at Zurich University
of the Arts from 2009 to 2014.
Christa Müller is a sociologist and committed to research on
postmaterial lifestyles and on sustainable concepts of
prosperity. She was awarded a PhD in sociology by the
University of Bielefeld and received the Research Award
for Ecological Economics. She has undertaken fieldwork in
Costa Rica, Mexico, and Germany. Currently she is director
of the research foundation anstiftung in Munich.
Tobi Müller is a freelance writer in Berlin. Born in Switzerland,
he was a critic and an editor at daily newspapers in Zürich
and wrote about theater, pop music, and cultural politics.
In Berlin he started to work freelance for print and radio,
also presenting many panels and curating conferences,
e.g. on surveillance in Munich, January 2017. He has
written various semi-documentary plays with his brother
and realized a film.
Ramón Reichert, 2009–2013 Professor of New Media Studies
and Digital Media Culture at the Department of Theatre,
Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna. He is
the head of the post-graduate master’s course Data
Studies at the Danube University Krems. Since 2014, he
has been an co-editor of the journal “Digital Culture &
Society” (a peer-reviewed journal). Currently he is a senior
lecturer of Media Studies at the universities of Fribourg
and St. Gallen (Switzerland). Since 2017, he is an European
Project Researcher for the Erasmus+project “Visual/video
literacies.”
Peter Spillmann is an artist, cultural producer, and curator. He
teaches and conducts research at Lucerne University of
Applied Sciences and Arts, where he has directed the MA
Fine Arts research focus Art in Public Spheres since 2010.
Projects: “Viet Nam Diskurs” exhibition and events program
at the Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm, 2016; mapping.
postkolonial.net, education and communication project in
collaboration with [muc] münchen postkolonial, 2013.
Gesa Ziemer is vice president research and professor of cultural
theory at HafenCity University in Hamburg. She is director
of the City Sience Lab, a cooperation with the Media Lab at
MIT in Cambridge and member of the accreditation
committee of the German Science and Humanities
Council. Her research focus is: digitalization of the city,
citizen participation, and collaboration.
162 Perspectives in Metropolitan Research

Photographers and Illustrator
Martin Kohler is a photographer and urbanist. He studied
landscape architecture and environmental planning at
the University of Hannover and at the Southern Australia
University, Adelaide. He has taught urban photography at
HafenCity University, Hamburg, since 2003 and has founded
and curated several art projects in public spaces such
as the Hafensafari (2009). He has deployed photography
as a research method in various projects including a series
of “urban transects” in London, Seoul, Istanbul, and the
Ruhr area.
Alexandru Pasca studied photography at the Bauhaus-University
in Weimar. Since then, he realized different projects
all over the world, most of the time around Europe. He
understands photography as a personal tool, to deal with
complexity and to communicate the different layers of it.
He is also working as a photo editor at Stern magazine. He
lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin.
Maria Tetzlaff is an illustrator and comics artist. She studied illustration
in Hamburg at the University of Applied Science,
Department Design where she graduated with a Bachelor
of Arts in 2016. She is currently working on her art projects
as an “artist in residence” in Canada/British Columbia.
http://www.mariatetzlaff.net/
Contributors
165