Project: Dot.City
Bauhaus Kolleg IV Dot.City
We offer participants in the Bauhaus Kolleg IV Dot.City the opportunity to view the city and the urban sphere from a different angle, and thus to develop new approaches to their own professional careers. We work as an international team on interdisciplinary projects. We ask in the Bauhaus Kolleg IV: how do urban public spheres change through information and communication technology (ICT), and how are they to be designed?
The crisis of public space has been one of the main topics in urban discourse for the last few years. ICT are accused of reinforcing this crisis. They are subject to many clichés: they allegedly destroy local characteristics, depreciate physical space, destroy the sensory of our cities, destroy personal communication, undermine human solidarity etc.
We ask, however: has the public space, which is accessible to anybody at any time without particular reasons or particular privileges, which is transparent and safe for anybody, ever existed? Has not this collective, communicative, democratic space always been a myth? We ask, furthermore: Have not ICT yet undiscovered potentials for generating urban public spheres? The first successful projects using ICT show clearly how little of these potentials has so far been researched and understood.
The increasing penetration of physical urban spaces with digital information spheres, the latter overlapping the former, forces us to reconsider public spheres as medial processes or rather as media. Urban spaces have long become hybrid; they are real both in a physical and in a virtual sense. Who attempts to design them has to broaden their perspective beyond the customary ideas of space. It becomes necessary to also look on increasingly technologically implemented networks, on their structures, on their rules and not least on the interests realized within them. Fields of action for urban designers, architects and planners have become so complex that the task at hand is better described as programming of urban processes than as urban design.
We intend within the framework of Bauhaus Kolleg IV: Dot.City to develop an adequate urbanism. Our projects consist of thorough research and analyses within a theoretical framework as well as of practical experiments on site in Dessau, Caracas and elsewhere.
We offer participants in the Bauhaus Kolleg IV Dot.City the opportunity to view the city and the urban sphere from a different angle, and thus to develop new approaches to their own professional careers. We work as an international team on interdisciplinary projects. We ask in the Bauhaus Kolleg IV: how do urban public spheres change through information and communication technology (ICT), and how are they to be designed?
The crisis of public space has been one of the main topics in urban discourse for the last few years. ICT are accused of reinforcing this crisis. They are subject to many clichés: they allegedly destroy local characteristics, depreciate physical space, destroy the sensory of our cities, destroy personal communication, undermine human solidarity etc.
We ask, however: has the public space, which is accessible to anybody at any time without particular reasons or particular privileges, which is transparent and safe for anybody, ever existed? Has not this collective, communicative, democratic space always been a myth? We ask, furthermore: Have not ICT yet undiscovered potentials for generating urban public spheres? The first successful projects using ICT show clearly how little of these potentials has so far been researched and understood.
The increasing penetration of physical urban spaces with digital information spheres, the latter overlapping the former, forces us to reconsider public spheres as medial processes or rather as media. Urban spaces have long become hybrid; they are real both in a physical and in a virtual sense. Who attempts to design them has to broaden their perspective beyond the customary ideas of space. It becomes necessary to also look on increasingly technologically implemented networks, on their structures, on their rules and not least on the interests realized within them. Fields of action for urban designers, architects and planners have become so complex that the task at hand is better described as programming of urban processes than as urban design.
We intend within the framework of Bauhaus Kolleg IV: Dot.City to develop an adequate urbanism. Our projects consist of thorough research and analyses within a theoretical framework as well as of practical experiments on site in Dessau, Caracas and elsewhere.