Get to know Edna Peza-Ramirez, who is specialized in the creation of safe public spaces through bottom-up solutions and human-scale approaches. For her, city making is defined by the degree in which cities tend to the safety of their most vulnerable users.
Profile: Marlene Welzl | Social Entrepreneur
Meet Marlene Welzel, social entrepreneur and founder of the Vienna-based housing platform Wohnbuddy. For her, city making is about being innovative, about creating and providing solutions to the challenges you are identifying – and also about communicating, getting in touch with people from different organizations and gaining new insights.
Profile: Sonja Broy | Urban Architect & Storyteller
Meet Sonja Broy, who is working at the intersection between urban architecture, city development, science, art, culture and journalism. Being a city maker for her means to interact and change arguments, visions and inspirations with all kinds of different people – and to shape the future of living areas and communities.
Daniel Zhang – The future will be made by millions of citymakers
Daniel Zhang is an architect based in Changsha who studied architecture at Carnegie Mellon University in the US and continued a doctorate in India and Germany. He is also the founder of P8 Community in Changsha.
Reading the Traces of a Place 读书地方的痕迹
What are the topics and objects that catch your interest in the PLACE? Why? How are you interacting with the place? How are people using the place? CITYMAKERS China – Germany´s WU Yimeng and Katja Hellkötter co-created a booklet – Reading the Traces of a Place 读书地方的痕迹 – as a tool for an alternative spatial cognition.
Dialogue with 8 city makers at the Social Entrepreneurship Lab
In this podcast series, Kika Yang spoke with CITYMAKERS Lab participants about their personal motivations and background as city makers and invited them to brainstorm about the potentials of the CITYMAKERS platform.
Laura Bruns – “Just do it”
Laura Bruns, co-founder of StadtStattStrand, speaks with Kika Yang about the project “Urbane Liga”, the importance of lobbying and building trust as well as their publications launched to empower citizens to ‘just do it’. This podcast is part of our series recorded at the CITYMAKERS Social Entrepreneurship Competence Lab.
Erik Ackner – Start it up
In this podcast, Kika Yang talks to Erik Ackner, Country Manager at Startup Grind and former organiser of Startup Grind in Chengdu, about the innovation ecosystem in China. This podcast is part of the series recorded against the background of the CITYMAKERS Social Entrepreneurship Competence Lab.
Jah Ying Chung – Change makers exchange ideas
With her broad experience within start-ups and social organisations, Jah Ying Chung identified a gap that she is now dedicating her time to fill: Her consultancy “The Good Growth Co” helps companies after their successful launching period to develop a consistent strategy for their development. This podcast is part of our series recorded at the CITYMAKERS Social Entrepreneurship Competence Lab.
Andrea Weigt & Cyrus Khazaheli – Projektraum Drahnsdorf
Combining their backgrounds in stage design, architecture and movement-based expressive arts, Andrea Weigt & Cyrus Khazaheli offer an environment in which people can connect with nature and with themselves – and generate new ideas. They see themselves as a part of a movement towards a new model of community life in the countryside. This podcast is part of our series recorded at the CITYMAKERS Social Entrepreneurship Competence Lab.
Wohnbuddy – Matchmaking platform for elderly and young people to live together
Marlene Welzl shares with us what inspired her to create the concept of WOHNBUDDY, a matchmaking platform for elderly and young people to live together. This podcast is part of our series recorded at the CITYMAKERS Social Entrepreneurship Competence Lab.
Jonas Schorr – Enabling innovative solutions between startups and institutions
Jonas Schorr talks with Kika Yang about his journey: From growing up in East Berlin to moving to West Germany and then step-by-step turning into a cosmopolitan social entrepreneur with his recently founded company, Urban Impact. This podcast is part of our series recorded at the CITYMAKERS Social Entrepreneurship Competence Lab.
Round Table Discussion on Social Entrepreneurship and Citymaking
How to make sure to hear and harvest all the interesting individual stories of participants and make them available to a larger audience? We set up a one-to-one dialogue space hosted by CITYMAKERS-editor and architect Kika Yang. Our key questions of interest: What motivates and drives you personally as a city maker? What was your particular interest in joining this lab? What potential do you see in the CITYMAKERS-platform? Here we share results from these conversations with Laura Bruns, Sebastian Schlecht, Jah Ying Chung, Jonas Schorr, Marlene Welzl, Andrea Weigt & Cyrus Khazaheli through a series of podcasts.
Sebastian Schlecht – All that is needed are participatory programs
Sebastian Schlecht is an optimist: He believes that we have the necessary resources to generate, test and implement new solutions to sustainable built environments. In his talk with Kika Yang he shares how enriching it can be to experience different perspectives of particular processes. This podcast is part of our podcast series recorded at the CITYMAKERS Social Entrepreneurship Competence Lab.
WENWU 文物 – THOUSAND STARS ON MY MAP
In September 2018, YANG Fan from CECP (China Endangered Culture Protectors) and Silvan Hagenbrock, urbanist and editor of CITYMAKERS, travelled together for 10 days from Xi’an to Taiyuan tracing cultural relics sites. Why go to all these places?
LI Mingjiu 李明玖 – Personhood in a Healthy City
For sociology M.A. student LI Mingjiu, healthy city-making means enhancing human rights instead of adhering to neoliberal concerns. For him it is paramount that the individual person is centered as the end to urban health initiatives and not mobilized or discarded as an instrument in the name of urban stability and “harmony.” Read this analysis to learn about his thoughts on healthy city making.
Oh Du (un)gesunde Stadt!
Für mich ist die gesunde Stadt so etwas wie eine Riesin. Ein lächelndes Wesen, welches den Autos vor den Stadttoren den Weg versperrt, die Dächer der häuslichen Gewalt aufdeckt, sexistische Werbung abreißt und eine Mixtur an Düften ausatmet, die die Städter:innen ganz verrückt macht nach dem Urbanen und Ländlichen.
6 Fragen an Maja Linnemann
Maja Linnemann studierte Sinologie in Bremen, Chengdu, Hamburg und London. Sie lebte 14 Jahre in Peking, wo sie u.a. als Redakteurin arbeitete. Unser Team begleitet sie seit 2017. Maja spricht in diesem Interview über den chinesischen Stadtraum, Sprache, Schrift und Friedhöfe.
“Lifestyled – Health and Places”
Health concerns and the built environment have an intertwined history. In fact, health is the topic which has greatly shaped the profession of urban planning, landscape planning and modern architecture for one-and-a-half centuries. What was the concern yesterday and what is it today? And how about the context of China? CITYMAKERS-Guest Author and researcher in Architecture Theory at RWTH Aachen, Zhen ZHANG, presents some of the answers through reviewing the newest research in the book „Lifestyled – Health and Places“, a 2016 publication of research at Harvard University.
Urban Sports Club
Die Neuberlinerin und Urbanistin Kika Yang hat die Plattform Urban Sports Club ausprobiert. Damit hat sie sich nicht nur fit gehalten, sondern auch die Stadt neu entdeckt.