City Forum Berlin
The Stadtforum Berlin is a conference on urban development in Berlin that takes place at irregular intervals .
history
1991-1996
The Stadtforum Berlin came into being in 1991 out of the need to come up with an overall plan for the city very quickly. Both East and West Berlin had both developed their own plans that became obsolete overnight after the fall of the Berlin Wall . As early as September 1990, the German Werkbund Berlin, together with the Protestant Academies East and West Berlin, organized a full-day public symposium in the French church, which was devoted to the question of how the upcoming plans could ensure a democratic inclusion of the different interests.
At this conference, Helga Fassbinder , Professor of Urban Planning and Urban Management in Eindhoven and Hamburg , proposed a city-wide public forum which, through a consensus-oriented discussion, formulates approaches that can be presented to the politically responsible as recommendations.
The then Senator for Urban Development and Environmental Protection Volker Hassemer took up this suggestion and institutionalized the city forum as a council assigned to its department. This committee consisted of 60 permanent members, who were grouped together in so-called “banks”, made up of personalities from all major groups in the city as well as representatives of the various specialist disciplines involved in urban development. The meetings were prepared and evaluated by a steering group made up of a small group of experts from different areas of experience and with different planning views, supported by a secretariat.
The meetings of the city forum took place at very short intervals in the first three years: fortnightly on Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings, later the cycle became monthly. The sessions were open to the public and were attended by an average of 250 people. A preparatory collection of texts and short contributions from well-known speakers served as an introduction to and diversification of the most important positions on a topic. The topics of the sessions ranged from the dimension of regional and urban development to the project scale and referred to both fundamental and political issues. Among other things, the concept of Berlin urban development, the perspectives of the new zoning plan , the renewal of the inner city areas in the eastern part, the handling of the prefabricated housing estates , the capital planning , aspects of commercial investor projects, the traffic management and the design of the public space were dealt with.
The Stadtforum Berlin worked in the manner described from 1991 to 1996. It attracted a lot of attention from planners and local politicians at home and abroad. It was assigned a model character for a new form of communicative, public planning. In this sense, the Stadtforum saw itself as a pioneer in the development of a new, contemporary planning process, in which urban planning and urban development become the task of direct social cooperation. The own approach was periodically discussed from a methodological point of view. The results were published in the magazine published by the Stadtforum itself as well as in numerous specialist publications by Helga Fassbinder, who, as a member of the steering group, explained and evaluated the development of the Stadtforum. The city forum found successors in various European cities, where city forums were (temporarily) also set up (including Jyväskylä , Hanover , Amsterdam ). Planning forums / city forums as an efficient, time- and cost-saving form of preparing and accompanying plans have since become part of the tools of modern urban planning .
After 1996
After 1996, the character of the city forum was changed under the successor of Volker Hassemer, Peter Strieder . It was initially supposed to be abolished, but was then continued due to large protests from all sides, including from the Senate's own administration. However, it was only called together at long intervals and largely reduced to the form of lectures and status reports from the planning administration known from usual conferences and colloquia.
Only after another change in the senatorial office, under Ingeborg Junge-Reyer , did the city forum regain the beginnings of its original concept at the end of 2004 and once again became a forum for discussion - albeit with a much lower frequency -, albeit not one in which structurally the exponents of the various social groups and the various specialist disciplines struggle with one another for solutions.
literature
- Helga Fassbinder: Stadtforum Berlin. Practice in cooperative planning. Harburg Reports on Urban Planning Vol. 8, TU Hamburg-Harburg, Hamburg 1997, ISBN 3-9804592-5-X
- H. Kleger, A. Fiedler, H. Kuhle (eds.): From the city forum to the city forum. Developments and perspectives of the Stadtforum Berlin. Berlin 1996, ISBN 90-5708-010-9
credentials
- ↑ a b Archived copy ( memento of the original from June 28, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
