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6 - Bitterfeld-Wolfen (DE), winner - Vanished villages - Collective city > see more P.54
4 - Wittenberge (DE), runner-up - Take part in wITtenberge > see more P.102
The rules governing the field often adopt the format of a catalogue, a list or matrix of generic options that may take a position on the field, if they are selected by the players during the course of the project, which is understood as a process. The runner-up in Wittenberge (DE), Take part in wITtenberge (fig.4), follows exactly this pattern. The first step is to draw the lines on a field, creating the opportunity spaces that will eventually connect the site and the larger scale. The way
to deal with the opportunities that open up in this field is by proposing a catalogue of specific actions, as well as a management system involving public authorities, citizens and private owners, for all of them to work together to define the programme and stages of implementation. Similarly, Manual towards a clumsy city (fig.5), one of the runners-up projects for the Budapest site (HU), provides a catalogue of rules and tools which the team calls a “Manual” or handbook “towards a clumsy city”. Each of the items
in the catalogue is small within the context, with a conscious drive towards the atomized, the fragmented – the fragmentation may be literal, with spatial units being divided up, or it may be a fragmentation in the temporal dimension, with some items in the catalogue proposing alternative uses over time for the same spatial unit. Fields and catalogues are intended as the board and rules of a game which may or may not take place. This is where communication becomes essential – many of these projects require the engagement of multiple actors, which can only be persuaded through the exercise of powerful seduction. This is in fact the first part of the question enunciated at the beginning of this text. How do we trigger change and evolution? Most of the proposals seek to achieve this by means of a strong narrative, a description of the actions and a possible plot development, deliberately avoiding the construction of any characters. The story needs to be engaging, but the characters must be left vague so that the different viewers can see themselves in the field.
