Public discussion: Terra Vague: Against the Ghosts of Land
With Ellen Blumenstein (Hamburg, Berlin), Nuriye Tohermes (Hamburg), Jessika Khazrik (Beirut, Paris), Kirstin Burckhardt (Berlin), Isabelle Steinecke Soto (Hamburg, Columbia), Johanna Bruckner (Hamburg, Zürich).
For an assembly to be able to take place on a public space in Hamburg’s HafenCity, there is a high price to be paid. What does critical, cultural articulation mean in a zone that is governed by global corporations and in which public space is owned by private investors? When access and movement are regulated by military interests? How can institutions and public space work together to create infrastructures that replace regulating bureaucracies and propose differentiated strategies, in which (post-)democratic articulation is possible? The role of local praxes and interventions, as well as international models that are working on the transformation of restrictions on public expression are to be debated. Furthermore, Saskia Sassen’s strategies for ‘space-making’ in redevelopment zones are to be discussed, and, additionally, her approaches to terrains vagues, in order to be able to define in extended form the logic of use of public space, and its parameters.