Foreword

from FRINGES Design for Creative Networks in Wendland

Wendland and Elbe Valley

// FOREWORD

Jörg Schröder

With its vivid creative scene far away from metropolitan cores, the Wendland region in the middle between Hannover, Hamburg, and Berlin is establishing new ways of living and working in the periphery. The FRINGES urban design project is aiming at a spatial exploration of remarkable assets of cultural and social initiatives, craft and manufacturing economy, the cultural heritage of 100 Round Villages and a series of Country Towns, as well as the background of alternative activism since the 1970ies. A possible contribution of urban design towards creative networks is starting from a double meaning of FRINGES: as cultural and social opportunities arising from margins in one of the most remote areas of Germany, threatened by abandonment and neglect. Inventions for the creative and cultural economy and for new ideas of living in Wendland are at the core of the urban design project. Spatial visions, branding, and transformations processes address the interactions between a regional scale, a scale of small towns and villages, and architectural interventions—including new housing and working models, cultural and productive spaces, and new mobility.

The book FRINGES is aimed to display creative perspectives developed in the urban design course, but also to illustrate the underlying research and design methodology, as well as the pleasure we had in discussing and arguing with many experts and people in Wendland throughout the course work. Many thanks to all of them for ideas, debates, information, and a true spirit of engagement. The project ideas presented and all errors or (hopefully) utopias are nevertheless on our students and us. Some special thanks need to be stated here: to Nicole Servatius, the head of the office for regional innovation processes of the District LüchowDannenberg; to Michael Seelig for the connection to Grüne Werkstatt Wendland, and especially for the inspiring evening at Werkhof Kukate, in exchange with the participants of Wendland Design Spring and Jens Christof; to Daniele Weinand and the team of PostLab Lüchow, and to Eva Danneberg from Werkhaus; to Adrian Greenwood from Rundlingsverein and Katrin Karmann, artist in Diahren, for guided tours and interesting discussions; and to Hubert Schwedland, mayor of the association of municipalities Samtgemeinde Lüchow. Special thanks to Marie Schwarz for the tour into places and history of what she calls “Atomic Wendland”; and also for the design and layout of this book. Thanks to Federica Scaffidi, project manager of the urban design course and co-editor of this book, and to Riccarda Cappeller for the organisation of the excursion and workshop in Wendland. And finally, but most important, many thanks and huge compliments to our students for their engagement and fine work on the FRINGES. 5

The FRINGES Urban Design Studio reflects on the rethinking and redesign of rural-urban spaces as origin of new energies and systems of innovations able to activate a peripheral area. The selected context of work is the Wendland region, a place located in the fringes of Germany—as the title suggests—where social and cultural issues coexist. The creative understanding of this peripheral condition itself, though connects with several criticalities, will be shown as a potential to lead to imagine innovative future perspectives for its development.

Das Studienprojekt FRINGES zielt auf ein neues Verständnis und Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten ruralurbaner Räume, im Hinblick auf kreative Energien und systemische Innovation, die periphere Gebiete aktivieren können. Die dafür ausgewählte Region des Wendlands, in vielerlei Hinsicht eine Region am Rand – wie im Titel hervorgehoben – verbindet in besonderem Maß gesellschaftliche und kulturelle Fragestellungen. Das Projekt will zeigen wie gerade ein kratives Verständnis der peripheren Situation, auch wenn sie sich in vielerlei Hinsicht kritisch darstellt, zur Vision einer von innovativen Entwicklungsperspektiven führen kann.