
Knowing and Living (in) the City – differently!
The DAAD-funded Partnership ‘Urban Transformation and Placemaking: Learning from cities in South Asia and Germany’ organized an international workshop in Heidelberg between the 2nd and the 8th of July 2023. Over 20 students from participating schools shared a week of field visits, joint fieldwork and discussions with professors, experts and stakeholders of knowledge and experience in and of the city. An interdisciplinary faculty and student group researched in disciplines such as urban geography, art and architectural history, urban planning, art, and visual and media anthropology. Questions motivating in the workshop included: What new ways of seeing are allowed by looking into the past of the city from perspectives that challenge its mainstream historic discourses? How to make cultural diversity in the city visible? What does regarding Heidelberg as a “sustainable city of knowledge” mean? And, is urban commoning possible?
Three geographical areas of the city allowed us to approach the research lines for the workshop: the Altstadt, or Historic District, was a place to question the ways in which we understand the past as a maker of the city, and how cultural diversity is allowed or restricted within it. The Bahnstadt and Patrick Henry Village, in the south, exposed the concerns, policies and priorities with which large “new” developments of the city are being constituted, claiming agencies of sustainability and the building of a city of knowledge. Residential associations and initiatives in the west presented possibilities of “commoning”: groups of people deciding to live together in community structures that defy traditional notions of property or real estate dynamics. Reflection spaces before, during, and after field visits were a space to entangle lived experience, share the sensorial impressions of the outings and propose relations, ideas and further questions. An interesting parallel workshop was held by a small student collective within the excursion, aiming to seek possible answers to the question: how does language impact the way in which we study and research urban transformation? As a result of the workshop, historical, temporal, spatial and discursive layers of the university city were excavated, which allowed to enrichen the student´s understanding of it and pose an array of new questions surrounding it.