An inter-neighbourhood knowledge exchange: Nordbahnhof, Stuttgart - Jessy Cohen, Holon.

Ein Wissensaustausch zwischen den Nachbarschaften: Nordbahnof, Stuttgart - Jessy Cohen, Holon.

.פרויקט לחילופי ידע בין שכונות, נורדבאנהוף, שטוטגרט וג'סי כהן, חולון

glocal.neighbours(at)gmail.com

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Monday, November 10, 2014

Wasteland Twinning Project: A first draft

Inspired by the lecture about the Wasteland Twinning project, we, Stephan and Liv from the Nordbahnhof group, decided to work out an idea to participate by twinning wastelands in Nordbahnhof and Jessy Cohen. In both neighbourhoods there are still open lands. There is the Nordlichtung garden which has been an urban garden for the past four years and now has been turned into building land:

Image of the picnic place and some flower beds of the Nordlichtung from "Auf der Nordlichtung".

And there is the wasteland in Jessy Cohen which is very close to the Digital Art Center:

Image of the wasteland close to the Digital Art Center from Google Maps.


The future of both areas is unclear. It is also not in our hands. We are not even allowed to trespass on the Nordlichtung anymore. That got us thinking: Why is not allowed anymore to step on land we were working on before? Doesn't modifying something, feeling responsible for something mean that you have certain rights to this land? Why does someone has more rights to land they paid for and build a fence around than someone who lives close to it and can really use it? Isn't that strange? Why do we think this is normal?

Well, from this starting point, our thoughts swirled even further. What is normal anyway? What is normalcy? What is normal in society? Realizing that the society itself has its own mind, we also started thinking about swarms and the intelligence of swarms which is a fascinating topic. Some swarms act seemingly intelligent by having a few set of rules for every individual. For example, a school of fish can swim around some barrier by the simple rule that they have to have a distinct distance to everything (except water). Thus, they not only don't crash into underwater cliffs but also not into their neighbour fish.

All these mashed up and mixed with the third glass of a good red, lead us to the first draft for our Wasteland Twinning project.

Everyone who likes to participate gets this basic set of rules:
  1. Go to the wasteland as close as possible and look at it.
  2. Think about the question "Is this normal?" for some time.
  3. Document your thoughts.
  4. Put your results on the blog.
What is your opinion? Do you like the idea? Would you change something? Do you think this would make us more intelligent than fish?

School of fish image from pixabay.

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