New meaning for a city's (derelict) industrial sites: designing places of emancipation?

Multifaceted transformations of a city’s spaces that take shape through the interplay of discourses, imaginaries,

the construction of materialities, and everyday life, reinforce the interpretation of public spaces as places where

strategic and unintentional practices of producing meaning take place. The summer school puts specific

emphasis on (an increased perception of) the importance of everyday (cultural) practices in both discursive and

material appropriation of space, which aim at creating spatial assets for private benefits or at providing spaces

for residents’ empowerment. In line with this argument the summer school views public spaces as a medium

where (new) knowledge is being generated through the dialectics between everyday life and scientific practices

directed at depicting and designing a city’s space. Therefore it employs a pedagogical model that promotes the

student-society interaction from a learning as well as an individual empowerment perspective. This means that

participants are encouraged to self-reflexively inspect practices of obtaining and transferring knowledge, by

reflecting on discourses on social innovation and relational learning in public spaces. This pedagogical model

thus aspires to enhance trusting relations between participants from diverse professional fields and participants

and local people of various social or cultural backgrounds, with the objective of exploring the capacity of

individuals and groups to directly engage in local planning activities.

The summer school is designed as a real space-time laboratory aiming at delivering an action research project at

one of the archetypal places of post-fordist transformations, a redundant gas production plant. A former

gasworks in Leopoldau, in the ownership of the public company Wien Energie, have been standing vacant since

2006 and have been thus far undergoing the process of transformation of meaning from the place of

manufacturing into industrial heritage. Two seemingly opposite planning paradigms meet at this place, one

aiming at turning the place into post-fordist space of consumption, and the other, calling for emancipation of

planning volunteers, local residents and the implementation of alternative urban visions. The city’s government

embarked upon a communication-based planning process inviting a variety of actors from the domain of urban

design and planning, ranging from privately owned offices, over public institutions such as universities, to

performative planners, activists, and residents. This approach as well as this particular space reflect the city’s

broader endeavours to reconcile its almost a century long tradition of promoting social-democratic imaginary and

materiality with its more recent discursive reference towards post-fordist non-material economies (e.g. attention,

knowledge as well as symbolic economies). While the former is often related to mobilization of local resources

and active promotion of spaces for public life and action, the latter tends to reduce city’s spaces to mere

commodities, subject to (enforced) reinterpretation of meaning, and planning promoted as a depoliticized

practice, as it is detached from practices of emancipation. In a fierce competition for capital and talent, people’s

creativity and urban cultures in an undifferentiated understanding ranging from cultural institutions to everyday

practices, are treated as a commodity, thus blurring the line between strategic place promotion and practices of

producing meaningful places.

Gasworks Leopoldau serves as a study case for gaining a comprehensive understanding of global and local

processes that produce new meanings for cultural practices thus transforming a city’s spaces. Theoretical inputs

and discussions are to be complemented by practical intervention that approaches planning from the antiauthoritarian perspective encouraging local initiatives and everyday cultural practices. The summer school

revolves around an action research project pertaining to gasworks Leopoldau in order to examine three aspects

concerning potentials and limitations of planning of public spaces as a means of designing emancipation: The

first aspect points to the critical inspection of transformative nature of post-fordist configurations of power, actors,

and space in Vienna. The second aspect concerns the production of knowledge as learning from everyday

(cultural) practices across boundaries of different disciplines, as well as from local people who get involved in

action projects and convey their everyday knowledge pertaining to space. This aspect is closely related to the

critical reflection of the role of such an action project for the altered knowledge transfer, social innovation and the

production of a city’s publics. The third aspect puts focus on the exploration of practices of emancipation, both

individual and collective, and discusses possibilities and limitations of planning as an empowering catalyst for the

constitution of city publics. What are the means and ways of emancipation of a collective (cultural practice) in a

context determined by the discursive hegemony of creativity strategies? Participants are supported to critically reflect on the aspiration of both public and private actors to turn less formal realms of the society into the

economic domain, as post-fordist economies recognize and aim to employ almost all urban practices in the

strategic construction of a city’s space. This opens a fruitful ground for the debate on the impact of (cultural or

creative) actions that are not formalized planning instruments, such as performative planning, on the outcome of

planning processes. Through dialectical approach students and experts from the planning disciplines and those

from the humanities reassess often overlooked potentials of planning as a non-dogmatic and non-determinist

facilitator for processes of spatial learning and emancipation. In this process of mutual knowledge production, the

first group learns how to obtain knowledge from everyday life with help of the humanities, while the latter learns

about translating social visions and utopia into a spatial practice.

The investigation of the materiality of urban cultures, as well as related production of meaning through planning

and discursive practices, is relevant for a broad spectrum of students, practitioners and activists, who are

interested in processes of shaping public spaces. The summer school is therefore conceived as a

transdiciplinary dialogue reflecting on a changing role of planning practitioners, volunteers and (empowered)

local residents in creating new urban realities. As such it is open to various disciplines, theoretical frameworks

and perspectives that explore the interrelations and inter-dependances of everyday life and planning practices.

The overall approach is based on the relational conceptions of space, which render public spaces both a medium

of social relations and a complex social product that affects social relations. This framework is complemented by

theories in the tradition of the critical political economy, which interpret a city’s space as a showground of postfordist transformations, and by non-representational theories and a broader field of cultural geography pointing to the transformative nature of practices in embodied space. Precisely this dialectics between a city’s space as an outcome distilled through complex circuits of various actors, interests, projects and policies, and a city’s space as a medium for emancipation is in the focus of participants’ research and intervention.