UD-M-101-100 Urban Design Project 1: Urban life in-between

Instructors: Britta Arends; Prof. Dr. Regula Valérie Burri; Prof. Dr. Monika Grubbauer; Dr. Hanna Katharina Göbel; Prof. Bernd Kniess

Event type: Project

Org-unit: Urban Design

Displayed in timetable as: UD: Project 1

Crediting for:

Hours per week: 3,7

Location: Hamburg

Language of instruction: German

Min. | Max. participants: - | 30

Grading:

Beschreibung:
Annual theme UD 2023/24 | Liminal Cities

Faced by a multiplicity of global crises, urban life today has reached a tipping point. Most pressingly, an accelerating climate catastrophe calls for feasible social and ecological alternatives beyond western capitalist hegemony and its dependence on profit-oriented production and excessive mass consumption. Equally, the resurgence of military conflict in and beyond Europe combined with the worldwide renaissance of right-wing and fascist movements and parties ask for the active re-invention and creative re-appropriation of collective practices of solidarity across all domains of urban life. Finally, decades of neoliberal rule and entrenched globalisation have left behind deeply fragmented and highly individualised societies now reflected in a planetary urban landscape of unprecedented global interdependency. Situated at the crossroads of these and other current global challenges, today’s city emerges as a city in transition – a liminal city.
Originating in 20th-century European ethnography, the idea of liminality refers to an intermediate stage in rituals and rites of passage in which participants shed their old identities before having arrived at fully formed new ones (Varvarousis 2022: 24). Liminality, in this sense, opens up a space of political potentials, hope and fear, anxiety and anticipation. Turning its attention to sites of urban in-betweenness, this year’s theme wants to explore the city in its multiply liminal dimensions. Where does the liminal character of the contemporary city break to the surface most visibly? What does it mean to experience liminal in-betweenness on an individual, collective or even societal level? What, as a consequence, are the political potentials of liminal practices “from below” and where, in reverse, can we detect possible pitfalls, impasses and blind spots of liminal urbanism?

UDP 1: Urban Life in-between

The ongoing privatisation of space, fulfilling capitalist interests, and the fast-paced nature of urban development calls for alternative ways of designing our cities, to still being able to creating spaces for the common good: designing from and for the cracks, interspaces, glitches, undergrounds, spaces of the informal, spaces of resistance and spaces for alliances.
Against the thematic background of “Liminal Cities”, UDP1 turns to the lived reality of urban everyday life and the multiple tensions – social and political, temporal and spatial – that arise from unresolved situations of “urban life in-between”. We will seek out traces of historic change, explore sites and places, examine institutional frameworks and map networks of actors and everyday practices that re-negotiate the limits of the urban in-between. We will focus on liminal sites across recreation, education, production and reproduction: class rooms and playgrounds, street festivities and concerts, refugee shelters and prison complexes, harbours and hotels, factories and families. How does urban everyday life emerge, at these and other sites, as in-between, suspended between the old and the new? Who are the actors that are able to define and reshape the contours of the urban in-between? Who is absent or even excluded? What are the political, spatial and temporal tensions that are produced at these sites and how do actors address and negotiate them?