Field Trips in Public Space 2020 - Big Things: Öffentlicher Raum im Wohnungsbau der 60er und 70er Jahre
The fifth edition of Field Trips focused on public spaces in post-war modernist residential buildings. The selected housing estates are primarily notable for their size. In addition to the architectural and urban planning characteristics of these planning areas, the respective developments in housing policy and land policy were also discussed.
Referring to the thematic focus of Field Trips in Public Space 2020, visiting professor Maren Harnack writes:
The housing estates of the 1960s and 1970s are visible evidence of a welfare state that now seems like a distant utopia. They were planned as fully-fledged environments that were intended to offer their residents not only a healthy but also a socially and culturally satisfying environment. Recent discussions about the qualities of these housing estates—opportunities for appropriation, individual lifestyles, social problems, and design deficits—largely ignore this and assume that for most of their residents today, they are little more than practical places to sleep. These housing estates are characterized by a differentiated range of open spaces and communal areas, which was programmatically justified and permeates the design of the estates at all scales. While they are often described as “undefined” in the current urban planning debate and tend to be viewed negatively, under increasingly neoliberal market conditions they can be urgently needed places of negotiation and social cohesion, which we unfortunately rarely afford in new housing estates.