With the focus on Urban Practice. New Contexts for Cultural Infrastructure, the conference will focus on the relationship between artistic research and planning practice in urban space. We consider it as closely related to and contextually framing our current field of research, the investigation of houses and sites of artistic-cultural mixed uses, their accessibility, programming as well as extended scenographies. Re-uses, interventions and appropriations of urban places and spaces often aim to update and develop cultural infrastructure. The overwriting of past uses and usages implies the activation and incorporation of urban knowledge by– among other things– their various historical layers.

Urban practice is understood as an interface between artistic work and interventions in urban space, as a way of working and designing in urban planning, as an exploratory process and spatial experiment. We want to discuss the following questions with the invited experts: How do artistic and cultural initiatives set impulses for city-changing developments? What is the relationship between appropriation by self-organised actors and participatory formats of urban development and planning? Which processes of transformation and reconstruction of derelict or reprogrammed stock can be described as urban reset? How are different historical layers of urban spaces made visible and how can memory be activated?

For further information and the program see here