video: skatepark in Halle Neustadt

Here is my first attempt at making a video...

It is made up of clips from about 10 minutes I spent one day at the skate park in Halle Neustadt. Although my film-making is completely amateur from a cinematography point of view, I think I could fit into the "visual anthropology" mold, using still and moving images to observe and document the way a space is used, who uses it, its life at different times of day and year, etc...

post #1

project and context...

My project is about how planners and other people working to improve cities use artistic and cultural projects or interventions as part of a revitalization strategy.

My host institution is the International Building Exhibition (IBA) Sachsen-Anhalt 2010. The IBA concept has been used in Germany since the early 20^th century to generate and exchange ideas about the possibilities for cities and regions in terms of planning, design, architecture, community, and development. It uses a sort of laboratory style approach – picking a location and a theme to focus on and then setting a time frame of usually a decade or less to form partnerships and try out new ideas. The IBA office I’m working in is focused on the state of Sachsen-Anhalt, which is in East Germany, and which has lost approx 15% of its population since reunification in 1989, due to a number of reasons including unemployment, aging populations and decreasing birth rates. Given that population numbers are projected to continue declining, the 19 cities in this IBA project address the challenge of improving the quality of life for residents in “shrinking cities”. Each city has unique characteristics and each has chosen to approach this challenge differently.

Multi-functional parking lot in Aschersleben

Curated "Drive-thru Gallery" exhibits paintings that
fill empty spaces along the ring-road in Aschersleben

In Dessau, low-maintenance landscapes gradually take over where buildings once stood

There are physical and spatial issues as well as social ones. Most towns have a context of oversized infrastructure and undersized resources – so a typical problem is how to maintain and keep in operation a transit system for a population that still lives in all of the neighborhoods but with less dense population in all of them. Another common question is how to offer quality education – and in this case it often means creating facilities that are centralized and serve the whole town. Education – up to and including the University level - can be a source of stability and quality of life. Quality educational resources give families a reason to stay and create a reason for college students to move in.

Halle Süd - streetcars passing vacant buildings

on deliverables...

I’m still in the early stages of figuring out/playing with what shape my deliverables can take, what scale they’ll be, who the audiences are, and what kind of small-scale ongoing products I should be producing. For now, I’m going to start with blogging and maybe write an article or two and try to present at a conference later in the year. I’m keeping lots of field notes and taking photos, trying to do some sketching, and also starting to collect sound clips. We’ll see what it all adds up to in the end. I’m brainstorming possibilities for a creative product. I was inspired by the animated documentaries I saw over the weekend in Leipzig – when done well, they can be a powerful medium for communicating a story in a concise format that has a potentially broad appeal and reach. The animated documentary form also has the potential to bring together a bunch of things I’ve been inspired by – audio-guides and sound portraits, street art, video and photography, sketching, the idea of narratives in urban planning, and community portraiture.

A few photos I like...

I took this photo in Berlin

This is a shot from the train to Dessau. The two guys are laughing because they were hamming it up when they noticed I was taking a photo. (Click photo for larger version)

In Halle, a mother with a carriage in the "Hochstraße" underpass.
You can see the blur of a cyclist in the foreground.
I like the colors and repeating lines of light and shadow in this photo.

some themes I’ve been thinking about...
I've been thinking about the way Deborah Frieden (Cultural Project Planning Consultant in Oakland, CA and former Project Director for the deYoung Museum in San Francisco) categorized public art projects into different groups - high profile glamour projects, civic district initiatives, community centered projects, and ephemeral events or happenings - as well as the way public art, economic development, and tourism often come together and how improving quality of life on a local neighborhood scale can be included or excluded from that mix.

Halle an der Saale...

I’m taking the first 1-2 months to focus intensively on the city of Halle an der Saale, which struggles with several forces - the pull of tourism and questions of how large-scale to get with it, not enough resources for all the needs, high-profile versus low-profile projects and the tension over what really impacts "quality of life"...

Halle turned 1200 years old a few years ago. In 1970, Halle Neustadt – a town of its own - was built next door as a place for chemical industry workers and their families to live. In 1990, the centuries old Altstadt and the young Neustadt were united to create one city, admittedly physically divided by a river (the Saale), but still intended to function as a unified entity. The differences between the two sides are plain to see and also hidden under the surface, but they are still the source of much discussion as the city loses population and figures out what that means in terms of whether and how and which places are used. When it comes to Halle and its various neighborhoods, there's lots of emotion and energy - pride, resignation, tension, creativity, etc...

View of the market square in Halle's Altstadt on a sunny day

View of the market square in Halle's Altstadt on a cloudy day

A former department store (built 1901) in Halle's Altstadt

In October it was used as an info-center and exhibit space for a media-art festival

Mix of old and new facades along pedestrian shopping street in Halle Altstadt

Shopping center in Halle Neustadt

Market in Halle Neustadt

A clinic in Halle Neustadt - built 1974, still in use, now the Halle Neustadt Health Center

Restored buildings in Halle Neustadt - mixed-use with senior housing

current projects in Halle...

There is a variety of projects in Halle that are recently completed or that are in progress. One is a skatepark in the Halle Neustadt city center, which is technically a landscape-architecture project for an open-air recreation facility, but it also has a lot to do with culture in the sociology sense (as opposed to the fine arts sense). It’s interesting because it is both outward reaching – trying to be attractive as a destination for the national/international Skate scene – and very local, trying to create a use that will keep and attract young people. Another is a project that was a pretty simple community participation project to renovate a fountain, called the Tulpenbrunnen, in an apartment complex in Neustadt and to involve the residents there in designing the tiles to go around the fountain. There will be another “Action” next summer, where artists and residents will do temporary sculptural installations in a little green strip called the “Grüne Galerie”. I’m going to try to get involved in that one.

The skate-park in Halle Neustadt

Am Tulpenbrunnen - fountain in an apartment complex in Halle Neustadt

Urban gardening project in Halle's Glaucha neighborhood

Grüne Galerie in Halle Neustadt

welcome

Welcome. The purpose of this blog is to assemble my thoughts on my year-long project in Germany.  I keep field notes, reading notes, interview notes, and journals. I take photos and do some sketching. I am still forming lots of ideas about what shape this research will take. This blog is one more exercise in documenting and presenting my work so far - I will keep it informal and experimental and see where things lead...

       I look forward to comments and responses.

       I will update this blog on a (loose) monthly basis.