During these challenging times of a pandemic, we not only hope to maintain and stimulate the open exchange within our community, but we also want to contribute to the broader discourse around the creation of sustainable cities during the pandemic and beyond. This is why we asked the members of our Ruhr community to continue our dialogue and share their thoughts and observations on the current corona crisis and its impact on citymaking through video messages and video interviews.
As first part of this video series we shared the individual messages from our community members Dr. Annette Erpenstein, Rebecca Wessinghage, Keru Feng and Noémie Koenig. You can watch them all here. For the second part, CITYMAKERS-Fellow Annette interviewed four experts from the fields of urban planning, urban research as well as urban cultural studies and asked them to share their main take-aways from this crisis.
Her first video guest was architect, landscapist and urban planner Dr. Andreas Kipar. He is the Founder and Creative Director of the international landscape architecture studio LAND with offices in Germany, Italy and Switzerland. Though he currently lives in Milan, Italy, his long-lasting ties to the German Ruhr region drove him to become an active member of our CITYMAKERS Ruhr network. In this (German language) interview, he tells Dr. Annette Erpenstein about his individual experience in hard-hit Northern Italy while focusing on the positive sides and overall learning experiences for urban planners and landscape architects:
Born in Taiwan, educated in the U.S. and now living between the German cities of Köln and Hamburg, Chih-Wei Chang has 12 years of experience working internationally as a landscape architect and environmental consultant. His practices focus on high performative landscape in the urban environment. In his talk with Annette, he covers many different aspects on potential learnings and take-aways and also asks the very important question of how our actions can make a difference in the lives of underpriviledged communities. Listen to the whole interview here:
Six years ago, Prof. Dr. Alexander Schmidt from the University Duisburg-Essen packed his things and escaped from the dense city to the countryside. From a perspective that knows both the urban and the rural, he is sharing his reflections on the pandemic’s influence on urban planning and citymaking:
Jens Martin Gurr is professor of British Literature and Culture at the University Duisburg-Essen. His scientific focus includes Literary Urban Studies as well as Urban Cultural Studies. Listen to what he has to say about the current corona crisis and his take-aways regarding future urban life:
We hope these video interviews have given you some inspiration on how to use this crisis for sustainable change. We thank all participants for contributing their thoughts and observations!