REINVENTING HARBOUR CITIES I

Yvonne P. Doderer, Stuttgart:

Art as Opportunity

Art is another field than urban planning or architecture. Art bears the potential of opening up other or new perspectives on how urban space can be developed or at first on how urban space can be discussed in terms of public issues of public interventions. And thus I think art is a much more open field for raising certain discussions than architecture or urban planning. Architecture is quite narrowed down or has the need to realise something in the first step—without the consciousness. So I think the artistic field opens up the possibility to think about how to discuss issues like what is public space? How might public space function?

Art is not outstanding from society. Art is always connected to society and its discourses. Thus it makes no sense to separate art from other issues like society or planning. So I think it is a very necessary approach to include artistic methodologies as early as possible into urban development processes. This additionally widens the planning field, because from my point of view the planning profession is following mostly the need of designing with having a reflexion about the needs and the own methodology in the beginning. And to quote Niklas Luhmann: The observer is already observed while observing in a certain way. This means that the planning field has the self-impression that they are the observers without realising that they are already observed. The planning field has to open up more for artistic questions in order to find answers on what is public space and what it might be used for.