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Symposium – Restructuring the Zwischenstadt
Hochschule Bremen, November 2nd 2016



INTRODUCTION
Symposium – Restructuring the Zwischenstadt                    

The city’s potential for growth lies in its suburban areas. They may be considered the main reservoir in the struggle to achieve a sustainable city structure, because the ‘city of short distances’ is the ideal model for promoting the resource-efficient, close linkage of different uses and social groups. The mere act of setting this objective is itself a sign of progress towards meaningful urban design. A new development always unfolds in comparison to the existing situation, whose reserves have long become limited.
From an urban landscape, whose superficial appearance illustrates the consumption of landscape, we must succeed in creating something positive, something constructive. That means building something at this suburban location that surpasses the existing fabric and brings about a reinterpretation, in the sense of a re-evaluation of what we have found there. This restructuring of the Zwischenstadt (Sierverts: “in-between city“) has the goal of providing an equivalent counterpart to the city.

The Location
The proposed abandonment of a racecourse in Bremen offers an opportunity to explore fundamental urban development strategies. The site, measuring 45 hectares, is located in a typical metropolitan periphery at a distance of at least five kilometres from the western edge of the city centre. In the mid-1990s, urban planner Tom Sieverts coined the paradigmatic term Zwischenstadt for this kind of suburban location. As a progress-oriented term that defined the autonomy and “beauty of these places” in terms of their utility, it aroused controversy even at the time. With the growing move away from the car-friendly city and towards ecological urban development, as well as the cultural ‘Renaissance of the urban’, any positive connotation of his term now seems jaded.
The racecourse grounds are bordered to the north by Neue Vahr, a model housing development designed by Ernst May in the 1950s. A large estate of detached houses lies to the east, with the Bremen factory of Mercedes-Benz to the south-east. Southwards, on the other side of a four-lane road, there is a mixture of wholesale markets and garden allotments, while in the west a garden suburb, Gartenstadt Vahr completes the picture.
The racecourse, which at 110 years of age is the oldest existing spatial construct, nonetheless seems to have no relationship whatsoever to the neighbourhood. In this it is like all of the other properties, which as regards structure follow only their own logic, as though laid out on a blank sheet of paper. The obligatory analysis of the locality in the hope of finding some feature – or even a natural characteristic – to latch onto in subsequent planning, would turn up no more than the artefacts left by human activity, only to create something new in turn.

Urbanity
A basic formula for creating urbanity could be stated as: bringing together people who differ in their activities and their Suchness (how they intrinsically are) at very high density within a built-up landscape that is capable of responding to changing spatial needs.
Its prerequisites are functions that may not be recognisable at first glance, but are nevertheless of fundamental importance. The subdivision of land into parcels creates a characteristic that is fundamental to the city’s ability to evolve in a constant, independent process. The existence of parcels of sufficient size generates an appropriate scale for the ownership of property and with it responsibility, in the sense of identity and identification.
Diversity, as an essential quality of new city quarters, must be characterised by mixed use and mixed social structure. The mixture of uses is a matter of close linkage between the workplace and the home, in precisely this order. According to Hanna Ahrendt, the relationship between work, in its identity-forming aspect, and the individual’s presence within civil society is one of existential significance. She sees the urban interlocking of public and private as a foundation of this “active life”.
Economically, a mixture of uses fulfils the positive condition for a city of short distances. Multiple use ensures that roads and paths are frequented sufficiently for them to help to generate a public quality. From the sociological viewpoint, it is this that first provides the catalyst for encounters. With it comes involvement in the working world of others, while children gain all-round access to the world of adults.
A social mixture achieves its ideal state in a closely knit neighbourhood containing different classes and milieus. This promotes compassion, roll-model identification, social comparison and interaction. The settling of social conflicts, as a natural precondition of urban life, can therefore take place at a low threshold.

Settling and a Sense of Purpose
In addition to the structural preconditions for an urban development, any consideration of the social repercussions contains one particular aspect that deserves special attention. Sociability is an indicator of the amenability of a settlement. In an ideal sense, this characteristic of the urban situation is promoted by a well-balanced blend of private and public, closeness and distance, and familiarity and anonymity. The preservation of anonymity is also essential to it. One aspect of it is the treatment of foreigners and the foreigner’s impressions of life here: the topic of migration. The narrative of arriving and establishing a foothold has an almost archaic association with the city and it forms part of the founding myth of urban society as such.
The reason for raising the subject of migration is the current state of public debate, which is dangerously lopsided in that refugees are considered merely as a logistical problem. The intention is to develop a more far-reaching concept on the basis that migration should be understood as an opportunity for society and accepted as an ongoing component of urban development work. Moreover, doing so furnishes an opportunity to upgrade our planning culture and to find an affirmation for dismantling previous obstacles to design.
Inherent in the leitmotif of the ‘arrival city’ is the experience of how migration turns out to be a productive element of a society. A valuable aspect of self-reliance, as a structural feature of the city, also becomes apparent. This is important not only in connection with migration, but integration and beyond. Is there an urban structure that induces independent action – or enables, even suppresses it? The question is relevant not only to the issue of migration, but also to urban society as a whole. It is this unique property of the city that we intend to discuss.

Zwischenstadt
Can the Zwischenstadt – the ‘in-between-city’ – be changed sustainably in social and ecological respects? In establishing the criteria, social aspects should be given precedence over ecological ones. Consolidation, in the sense of urban densification at strategic locations, would be an expedient means of bringing about this change. New culmination points of an urban character could be created at a broad range of suburban locations. These would serve as nodes in a way similar to conventional city centres. They should thus relieve the current pressure of development on historic city centres. Although the ‘Renaissance of the inner cities’ is associated with a positive trend towards the ‘city of short distances’, at the moment the latter is turning out to be a resource of limited availability.
Much of what goes to make up the city is already present in the Zwischenstadt. It just needs to be brought together – bundled – into something bigger, which in our culture is accepted to be more than the sum of its parts: the city as an artefact, the product of a cross-generational process!

Speakers
At the symposium, three related topics of importance in this context will be explored in lectures and offered for discussion:
Susanne Hauser (Place and Identity) will establish the basis and describe the underlying reasons why urbanity can serve both as a criterion and as an objective for the place in which a settlement exists.
Andreas Feldtkeller (‘French quarter’, Tübingen) is a town planner who has created a new district that is unique in Germany to date, with a successful and natural mixture of uses and social backgrounds.
Julian Schubert, co-designer of the German contribution (on the theme of ‘Arrival Country’) to this year’s Architecture Biennale in Venice, will take a typological look at examples of architecture associated with the subject.
Doug Saunders, author of the book Arrival City, a global analysis of the issue of migration, will talk about his experiences, in particular about the positive influence of a society that is attuned to integration.

Organisation
Hochschule Bremen, Klaus Schäfer (chair), Anja Link, School of Architecture Bremen, Neustadtswall 30, 28199 Bremen

bremer shakespeare company
Neustadtswall / Schulstr. 26, Wednesday 2nd November 3 pm - 8 pm