2022
Hanover, Germany
We have invited to an interantional conference/festival/congress on experimental urban design, to the heart of Hannover - the mediocre center - which should be the starting point for a real, honest and blatant dispute about city. In our opinion, the all too often experienced and lived consensus culture at specialist conferences, between pump coffee and tarnished cheese rolls, leads not only to programmatic boredom, but also to a problematic narrowing of discourse. For we believe that only actual confrontation, friction and debate can expand spaces of thought and discourse. Only those who move out of their own comfort zone will discover new terrain. This is exactly what „ you promised me [a city] „ should be about: creating productive dissonance: Built and social spaces, imagined and made city, responsibilities, contexts and futures - that‘s what we wanted to argue about. And from different perspectives and disciplines.
But - how do we argue properly? How do we tame our unease and lack of understanding about other - supposedly wrong - perspectives and projects? Do we even understand the other side? Mostly not, and this ignorance leads to unfair and unclean conflict resolution: Hate speeches on the web, attacks on the built and intangible environment. The biggest problem, however, remains that with all the misunderstood consensus sham, any dissent, any other perspective is removed from the discussion - and with it honoring for real change.
To find out, we did not hide in a convention center, but went to the center of the city. Individual events and an international summer school were held in various locations at the beginning of the conference week. On June 10 and 11, the festival culminated in a day-long program that moved through the city like a marching band along two different axes.
Half of the festival program was created through an open call, which was directed question „What actually matters?“ to urban actors and activists nationwide and internationally, whose submissions could be voted on publicly. In the afternoons, experts from a wide range of all professions and fields of knowledge/backgrounds engaged with themselves and the audience in a series ofunseem formats. The entire program was framed by a variety of cultural productions.
More information about the program here: youpromisedmeacity.de
