Learning from one another
Planning processes are always simultaneously processes of social and
cultural learning and qualification. The focus is on learning from one
another: planners from citizens, politics from science, business from
culture, etc.. This always involves the mobilization and networking of
existing knowledge and specific qualifications. In this understanding,
planning goes far beyond classical design processes and requires a
special procedural creativity and the composition of customized
cooperative processes and organizational structures.
Just as planning always has the task of stimulating developments and
daring the new, questions of process and procedural organization are
about finding specific ways of bundling forces in the development of
city and space. Against the backdrop of the challenges ahead, the
culture of urban and spatial development thus increasingly requires a
willingness to explore new, and certainly experimental, paths - in
questions of concept development as well as in questions of activating
civil society involvement or communicating and disseminating
knowledge. Ideas are needed on how concepts can be developed, how
processes can be designed, how people can be encouraged to participate
and how (building) cultural processes can be initiated and accompanied.
This requires appropriate occasions and platforms for brainstorming,
communication, exchange, and learning from one another. And that
requires a particularly creative atmosphere and the courage, enthusiasm
and capacity for enthusiasm of urban developers from planning, politics
and civil society.
The Research Unit of Local Planning (IFOER) is located in this
exciting intersection of urban planning, urban development and spatial
planning, design and process design. In teaching and research, we work
on the project- and task-specific shaping and development of
instruments, methods and processes in urban development and the
production of space.
