The Seminars
Folke Köbberling
COMMONS KITCHEN
Commons kitchen is a temporary forum, like a TV cooking show, in which the relationship between the city, food, supply and urban infrastructure is expressed in a practice-orientated way. Unlike the Frankfurt kitchen, the focus is not on rationalizing individual work, but on communitizing care work: communal cooking, canteens, commercial kitchens, soup kitchens, dumpster diving—in short, the urban food infrastructure as a social and political structure. The preparation leads to the most diverse forms of expression. All conceivable materials can be used: Building and craft materials, various media and texts. The result can be a description, a performance, a satire, a suggestion for improvement, or a dish for the city dwellers as a statement that goes beyond the usual forms of criticism. The performative format of the commons kitchen is created through construction processes, video recordings and live actions.
Paola Alfaro d’Aloncon
RESOURCES: EXISTING BUILDINGS AS COMMONS
How can the housing estates of the New Frankfurt be conceived as commons today – in solidarity, accessible, communal? Based on the New Frankfurt, we will test new scenarios for urban living in simulation games. The seminar combines design practice with socio-political issues. The focus is on developing own spatial scenarios and planning games at the interface between architecture and social practice. How can the housing estates of the New Frankfurt with their gardens and housing stock be designed for the future? What needs were the focus then and what are they today? What forms of community were built for? What forms of coexistence will we need in the future? The focus is on dealing with the built stock as a common resource: How can it not only be preserved, but also further developed in the sense of a new culture of conversion and the common good?
Elke Krasny
ELEMENTS OF CARE: PRACTICING URBAN CURATING
At the turn of the century a new practice of engaging with the urban was proposed by architects, artists, and urban planners: urban curating. The seminar explores how urban curating is shifting from a ‚social turn‘ to an ‚elemental turn‘, engaging with air, fire, earth, and water. The elemental turn is a critical diagnosis of the contemporary condition of life. This turn highlights the urgent need to care for these elements as vital and autonomous parts of (urban) life. Urban curating today explores therefore practices of care and repair. Together, the seminar aims to understand how the four elements can be understood as elements of care. Identifying sites in Frankfurt that are of interest in relation to elements of care, the seminar aims to develop ideas and concepts of how urban curating could work with these sites in care-ful and reparative ways.
Gabu Heindl
CRITICAL INHERITANCE FOR A MORE SOLIDARY CITY
ABOUT LAND POLICY, VACANCIES AND HOUSING AS A COMMON GOOD
Social housing, a city that can be celebrated as a ‘social city’, redistribution through a house rent tax and land provision through expropriation programmes – which utopian ideas of the ‘social economy’ of New Frankfurt from the 1920s are still effective today, and which have been forgotten? What can be learnt from these ideas for today’s context? The new social city already exists: if we could make use of the vacant space in our cities – including in Frankfurt, where two million square metres stand empty. Based on the exhibition contribution “Found Futures. Das neue Neue Frankfurt” (Found Futures: The New New Frankfurt) by my department at the University of Kassel, we will dedicate ourselves to walks, exhibition visits and conversations with activists as well as a joint examination of images, concepts and achievements of past urban utopias in order to conceptualise a more collective and solidary future.
