02 Wissenschaft und Kultur allgemein
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Urban design played a central role for the European dictatorships during the 20th century, it served to legitimate the regime, to produce agreement, to demonstrate power, efficiency and speed, it communicated the social, as well as design projects, of the dictatorial regimes domestically and internationally, it tied old experts, as well as new, to the regime. Dictatorial urban design also played an important role after the fall of the dictatorships: It became the object of structural and verbal handling strategies: of demolition, of transformation, of reconstruction, of forgetting, of suppressing, of re-interpretation and of glorification. The topic area is, therefore, both historical and relevant to the present day. The discussion of the topic area is, like it or not, always embedded in the present state of societal engagement with dictatorships.
In order to even be able to discuss all of these aspects, different conceptual decisions are necessary. In retrospect, these may seem to many as self-evident, although they are anything but. Our thesis is that there are three methodological imperatives, especially, which allow an expanded approach to the topic area “urban design and dictatorship”. First and above all, the tunnel view, focused on individual dictatorships and neglecting the international dimension, must be overcome. Second, the differences in urban design over the course of a dictatorship, through an appropriate periodisation, should be emphasised. Third, we must strive for an open, flexible, but complex concept of urban design. The main focus lies on the urban design of the most influential dictatorships of the first half of the 20th century: Soviet Union, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, including the urban design of the autarky periods in Portugal and Spain.
After all, urban design is not just a product of specific historic circumstances. It is a form that continues to have long-term effects, which demonstrates its usefulness and adaptability throughout this process. The urban design products undoubtedly still recall the dictatorial rule under which they were created. However, they are more than a memory space. They are also a living space of the present. They can and should be discussed with respect to their spatial and functional utility for today and tomorrow. Such a perspective is a given for the citizens of a city, but also for city marketing, having marvellous consequences. Only when we do not exclude this dimension a priori, even in academic discussions, can we do justice to the products of dictatorships.
And finally, the view of the urban design of dictatorships can and must contribute to the questioning of simplified and naive conceptions of dictatorships. With urban design in mind, we can observe how dictatorships work and how they were able to prevail. In Europe, these questions are of the highest actuality.
Those who ask how social entities relate to the past, enter a field defined by competing interpretations and contested practices of a collectively shared heritage. Dissent and conflict among heritage communities represent productive moments in the negotiation of these varying constructs of the past, identities, and heritage. At the same time, they lead to omissions, the overwriting and amendment of existing constructs. A closer look at all that is suppressed, excluded or rejected opens up new perspectives: It reveals how social groups are formed through public disputes upon the material foundations of heritage constructs.
Taking the concept of censorship, the volume engages with the exclusionary and inclusionary mechanisms that underlie the construction of heritage and thus social identities. Censorship is understood here as a discursive strategy in public debates. In current debates, allegations of censorship surface primarily in cases where the handling of a certain heritage constructs is subjected to critical evaluation, or on the contrary, needs to be protected from criticism or even destruction. The authors trace the connection between heritage and identity and show that identity constructs are not only manifested within heritage but are actively negotiated through it.
Since the end of the 1950s, Italy has focused part of its modernization on the erection of public works. Due to corruption, mafia, and further malpractice, this form of development has occasionally failed, producing a high number of constructions that have remained unfinished for decades. In 2007, the group of artists Alterazioni Video constructed an informal survey in the form of an on-line tool open to public contributions, which revealed that there are 395 unfinished public works in Italy from which 156, approximately 39.5%, are located in Sicily alone. In view of such a statistic, Alterazioni Video opted to coin the term ‘Incompiuto Siciliano’ – literally ‘Sicilian Incompletion’ – to refer to unfinished public works as a formal architectural style. This re-interpretation, which aims to convey the recovered dignity of these ‘modern ruins’, considers unfinished public works a type of heritage with the potential to represent the entirety of Italian society. Furthermore, it goes as far as to say an unfinished public work is ‘Incompiuto Siciliano’ despite being located in another of the Italian regions.
This doctoral dissertation embraces the artists’ argument to develop a complete study of Incompiuto Siciliano by embedding this architectural style/artistic project within the main debates on modern ruins at present. This is important because it is expected to contribute to the revalorization and eventual recommissioning of unfinished sites by validating Incompiuto Siciliano in the realm of academia. Furthermore, this work aspires to be a worthwhile source of information for future investigations dealing with cultural interpretations of incompletion in any other context – a not unreasonable goal considering how unfinished works are one of the key urban topics after the 2008 financial crisis. Hence, this doctoral dissertation uses Incompiuto Siciliano to discuss a different perspective in each of the five chapters and, though these can be read as independent contributions, the objective is that all chapters read together, form a clear, concise, continuous unit. And so it must be said this is not a dissertation about unfinished public works in Italy; this is a dissertation about Incompiuto Siciliano as an artistic response to unfinished public works in Italy – which clearly requires an interdisciplinary analysis involving Urban Studies, Cultural Geography, Contemporary Archaeology, Critical Heritage and Visual Arts.
Housing estates were fundamentally conceived upon state socialist utopia ideas to provide standard housing for citizens. While former state socialist housing estates have been extensively researched in the field of architecture, urban and sociology studies, there is still a gap in identifying how production processes affect morphological changes during the post-socialist era. This thesis compares the processes in the production of the largest housing estates of Marzahn in GDR and Petržalka in Czechoslovakia from 1970 to 1989 through contextual analysis of primary and secondary sources, which include visual maps, diagrams from professional architecture and planning journals, government documents and textbooks, as well as academic journals, books and newspaper articles. Then it discusses how these processes inadvertently created conducive conditions affecting their development in the market economy after 1989. It then interprets the results through application of Actor-Network Theory and Historical Institutionalism, while conceptualising them through David Harvey’s dialectical utopianism theory. Harvey (2000) delineates two types of utopia, one of spatial form and one of process. The former refers to materialised ideals in physical forms whereas the latter refers to the ongoing process of spatializing. The thesis aims to show how the production of Marzahn in GDR was more path dependent on policies established in 1950s and 1960s whereas Petržalka was a product of new Czechoslovakian policies in 1970s, changing aspects of the urban planning process, a manifestation of a more emphatic technocratic thinking on a wider scale. This ultimately influences the trajectories of development after 1989, showing more effects in Petržalka.
Welche Zukünfte?
(2017)
For decades in Germany, historical research on dictatorial urban design in the first half of the 20th century focused on the National Socialist period. Studies on the urban design practices of other dictatorships remained an exception. This has changed. Meanwhile, the urban production practices of the Mussolini, Stalin, Salazar, Hitler and Franco dictatorships have become the subject of comprehensive research projects. Recently, a research group that studies dictatorial urban design in 20th century Europe has emerged at the Bauhaus-Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur und der Planung. The group is already able to refer to various research results.
Part of the research group’s self-conception is the assumption that the urban design practices of the named dictatorships can only be properly understood from a European perspective. The dictatorships influenced one another substantially. Furthermore, the specificities of the practices of each dictatorship can only be discerned if one can compare them to those of the other dictatorships. This approach requires strict adherence to the research methods of planning history and urban design theory. Meanwhile, these methods must be opened
to include those of general historical studies.
With this symposium, the research group aims to further qualify this European perspective. The aim is to pursue an inventory of the various national historiographies on the topic of “urban design and dictatorship”. This inventory should offer an overview on the general national level of historical research on urban design as well as on the level of particular urban design projects, persons or topics.
The symposium took place in Weimar, November 21-22, 2013. It was organized by Harald Bodenschatz, Piero Sassi and Max Welch Guerra and funded by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service).
Granite on the Ground: Former Nazi Party Rally Grounds, Nuremberg/Germany. A brief introduction
(2015)
For decades in Germany, historical research on dictatorial urban design in the first half of the 20th century focused on the National Socialist period. Studies on the urban design practices of other dictatorships remained an exception. This has changed. Meanwhile, the urban production practices of the Mussolini, Stalin, Salazar, Hitler and Franco dictatorships have become the subject of comprehensive research projects. Recently, a research group that studies dictatorial urban design in 20th century Europe has emerged at the Bauhaus-Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur und der Planung. The group is already able to refer to various research results.
Part of the research group’s self-conception is the assumption that the urban design practices of the named dictatorships can only be properly understood from a European perspective. The dictatorships influenced one another substantially. Furthermore, the specificities of the practices of each dictatorship can only be discerned if one can compare them to those of the other dictatorships. This approach requires strict adherence to the research methods of planning history and urban design theory. Meanwhile, these methods must be opened
to include those of general historical studies.
With this symposium, the research group aims to further qualify this European perspective. The aim is to pursue an inventory of the various national historiographies on the topic of “urban design and dictatorship”. This inventory should offer an overview on the general national level of historical research on urban design as well as on the level of particular urban design projects, persons or topics.
The symposium took place in Weimar, November 21-22, 2013. It was organized by Harald Bodenschatz, Piero Sassi and Max Welch Guerra and funded by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service).
Ausgehend von der Bemerkung des Philosophen Jacques Derrida, dass Erbe immer auch eine Aufgabe sei, widmet sich der dritte Band der Schriftenreihe des Graduiertenkollegs „Identität und Erbe“ den sozialen und kulturellen Praktiken der Bezugnahme auf Vergangenheit(en) und Identität(en). Mit einem (kulturellen) Erbe soll und muss etwas getan werden, um es überhaupt hervorzubringen. Es konstituiert sich erst im Akt des (Nicht-)Erbens, das heißt im Wechselverhältnis mit den mit und an ihm ausgeführten Praktiken. Gleichwohl ermöglicht erst deren Verbindung mit den materiellen Überresten und Überlieferungen des Erbes eine Aneignung oder Ablehnung der Vergangenheit sowie die Fort- und Umschreibung eines bereits bestehenden Erbes. Diese Vorgänge sind nicht willkürlicher Natur: Die Möglichkeiten zur Interpretation und Deutung werden durch die sozialen, politischen, kulturellen, ökonomischen und technischen Bedingungen der Gegenwart sowie durch die Geschichte und Materialität des Erbes beschränkt, erweitert und gelenkt. Erbe und Erbeprozesse müssen deshalb notwendigerweise miteinander in Beziehung gesetzt werden.
Mit Beiträgen von Simone Bogner und Michael Karpf, Stefan Willer, Giorgia Aquilar, Jörg Springer, Bernd Euler-Rolle, Elizabeth Sikiaridi und Frans Vogelaar, Verena von Beckerath, Alexandra Klei, Oluwafunminiyi Raheem, Ronny Grundig, Özge Sezer, Anna Kutkina, Inge Manka, Karolina Hettchen und Monique Jüttner sowie Julian Blunk.
For decades in Germany, historical research on dictatorial urban design in the first half of the 20th century focused on the National Socialist period. Studies on the urban design practices of other dictatorships remained an exception. This has changed. Meanwhile, the urban production practices of the Mussolini, Stalin, Salazar, Hitler and Franco dictatorships have become the subject of comprehensive research projects. Recently, a research group that studies dictatorial urban design in 20th century Europe has emerged at the Bauhaus-Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur und der Planung. The group is already able to refer to various research results.
Part of the research group’s self-conception is the assumption that the urban design practices of the named dictatorships can only be properly understood from a European perspective. The dictatorships influenced one another substantially. Furthermore, the specificities of the practices of each dictatorship can only be discerned if one can compare them to those of the other dictatorships. This approach requires strict adherence to the research methods of planning history and urban design theory. Meanwhile, these methods must be opened
to include those of general historical studies.
With this symposium, the research group aims to further qualify this European perspective. The aim is to pursue an inventory of the various national historiographies on the topic of “urban design and dictatorship”. This inventory should offer an overview on the general national level of historical research on urban design as well as on the level of particular urban design projects, persons or topics.
The symposium took place in Weimar, November 21-22, 2013. It was organized by Harald Bodenschatz, Piero Sassi and Max Welch Guerra and funded by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service).
This report details the development of Horoskopos, a virtual planetarium for astrology. This project was an attempt to develop a learning tool for studying astrological concepts as connected to observational astronomy. The premise that astrology and observational astronomy were once inseparable from each other in ancient times guided the conceptualization of this tool as an interactive planetarium. The main references were existing software and applications for visualization in astrology and astronomy. Professional astrology teachers were consulted in order to understand better the state of astrological teaching and learning, as well as existing tools and practice. Horoskopos was built using the Unity3D development interface, which is based on the C# programming language. It also relied on the Swiss Ephemeris coding interface from Astrodienst. The development process was experimental and many of the needed skills were developed as needed. Usability tests were performed as new features were added to the interface. The final version of Horoskopos is fully usable, with many interactive visualization features and a defined visual identity. It was validated together with professional astrologers for its effectiveness in concept and visualization.