Interventions at the interfaces of urban and digital public spheres, explorations in Düsseldorf’s urban space.

The philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre called for the “Right to the city” in 1968. The Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences and the FFT Düsseldorf (Forum Freies Theater) conducted field research along these lines. In the Re-Imagining Public Life project, they explored the urban environment through research and art.

Cities are changing and with them the public. Construction projects such as the Kö-Bogen II area in Düsseldorf’s city center with the so-called Ingenhove-Tal and the redesign of Gustaf-Gründgens-Platz promise a sustainable “repair” of the urban landscape and urban life. But what forms of the public sphere are taking place here? What role do privatisations, investment, city marketing and design play? What happens to traffic and what is ‘green architecture’? For the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences and the FFT Düsseldorf, the Ingenhoven-Tal became a field of experimentation for playful formats. In workshops, an exhibition in the foyer of the FFT, a performative city walk and a table discussion, they explored current trends in urban development and questioned the narratives that accompany urban development interventions and planning. In doing so, they did not follow the (unconscious) logic of optimisation, but re-imagined forms of a different way of living together.
With the opening of an Unbedingten Universität (Unconditional University) in the open air or the city walk Sichtgrün – Die steinernen Täler und grünen Hügel der Stadt with the performer Hauke Heumann, the photographer Jan Lemitz and the dramaturge Moritz Hannemann, they intervened in the everyday structures of the living and working world – playfully, speculatively, exploratively, performatively, also in the sense of cultural hacking, i.e. affirmatively-critically, intervening and changing at the same time.

PROJECT PARTICIPANTS:
Moritz Hannemann, Hauke Heumann, Jan Lemitz, Janna Lichter, Marcel Mücke, Laura Oldörp, Lukas Röber, Anja Vormann und Studierende der HSD Düsseldorf; sowie Kai van Eikels, Alexander Konrad und Wen Wu im Rahmen von Workshops und Klaus Englert, Sebastian Kirsch, Dagmar Pelger, Christoph Schäfer und Laura Strack iin the context of the table talk.

RE-IMAGINING PUBLIC LIFE Talks & Workshops, Social/Urban Movements

The table talk gathers artists, scientists, and protagonists from architecture and urban development to discuss current transformations in the relation between cities and the public sphere.


THE UNCONDITIONAL UNIVERSITY – TRYOUTS

The unconditional university is not necessarily nor exclusively situated within the walls of what we nowadays call a university. It is not necessarily, not exclusively, not exemplarily represented by the figure of the professor. It occurs, it seeks its site, wherever this unconditionality announces itself.” – Jacques Derrida, The Unconditional University

Anja Vormann and students of the design faculty at the Hochschule Düsseldorf experiment with the foundations of their own discipline, between the FFT and urban space. In the context of the demand for a “right to the city” (Henri Lefebvre,) in which the urban society should act as the motor for transformation within urban life, the role of design will be scrutinised and examined. How can designers, employing the artistic means at their disposal, their knowledge and their experience, do things that eschew following the (subconscious) logic of optimisation and consumerism?
It is with this question in mind that we head out: We conduct field research under the open sky, analysing the urban environment we come upon, in the production of which we are involved. The so-called Ingenhoven-Tal valley and the redesigned Gustaf-Gründgens-Platz square will become fields of experimentation for playful formats that are both work as well as teachings. Visitors are encouraged to participate in our courses and to experience the rhetoric power of design in text, imagery, and space in relation to the urbanscapes.

EXPOSED GREEN – THE CITY’S STONY VALLEYS AND GREEN HILLS
URBAN WALK

The 20th century built using exposed concrete, the 21st century builds exposed greens. The Düsseldorf city centre houses Europe’s largest green façade: On the Kö-Bogen II areal, between Schadowstraße, Hofgarten, and Schauspielhaus, a business and office building is situated, and its sides and roof have been planted with roughly 30,000 hornbeams. Trimmed to a uniform height of 1,35 metres, they form a hedge of roughly 8 kilometres in length. This architecture has been hailed as the harbinger of a tendency in urban redevelopment that has been summed up as “from baroque city to Green City” by Klaus Englert, in his recently published “Architekturführer Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Architectural Guide)”.

The Green City of the future is anything but devoid of automobiles – the traffic has been newly regulated, led through tunnels, and it has become invisible now. Instead, the mostly tubed and overbuild Düssel shall be exposed again at many sites, producing a blue-green ring of watercourses and park spaces that connect the city’s cultural hotspots in passing. In a recourse on the historic cityscape, the post-war building “eyesores”, occasionally framed as “Düsseldorf’s second destruction”, will be ironed out. And the Gustaf-Gründgens-Platz redesign transformed an inhospitable transit space into an attractive public square. The city, according to the promise, will be repaired and returned to its citizens – as a habitat that sustainably integrates and connects the needs of humans and nature, of culture and shopping, of climate and urbanism. How coherent are those narratives that complement urban development intervention and planning? While exposed concrete relinquishes the cover-up of the supporting construction, the exposed green does not only engulf the concrete masses used in building, but also the states of ownership and work that mark the emerging cityscape.

Actor and performer Hauke Heumann and photographer and artist Jan Lemitz developed an urban walk that confronts text and imagery with specific locales in urban space. The path to the city’s stony valleys and green hills makes the experience of historic projections perceptible and questions toward current urban development loud. What space is there for urban population in the face of construction processes oscillating between the imitation of nature and investment? And which forms of public life could unfold in this urbanscape?
By and with: Moritz Hannemann, Hauke Heumann, Jan Lemitz. Audioaufnahmen: Simon Nieder. Flyer design: Marian Fitz. Thanks to: Theatermuseum Düsseldorf / Dumont-Lindemann-Archiv, Katrin von Chamier / human voice studio.

The walks took place in July and September 2023.

In the podcast episode, Sophie Emilie Beha talks to project participants Anja and Moritz as well as design students from Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences about how they approached this form of urban design critically, playfully and experimentally in urban walks and workshops.