Demonstrators and Changemaker in the City
2051: Smart Life in the City


The rooms of the magdas HOTEL are furnished with restored furniture finds. © AllesWirdGut Architektur/Guilherme Silva Da Rosa

Ten project teams that have already collected viable experiences in the urban sphere and come up with new strategies were invited to construct so-called “demonstrators” at various locations in Vienna. These are experimental prototypes for mobility, work, money, healthcare, housing, sustenance, hospitality, shopping, and entertainment in a context of urban daily life. Their example is instructive and provides a basis for negotiating the future. These visions are not based on futuristic scenarios, but on a philosophy of incremental change, which is already happening today on a small scale.

Demonstrator 1: The School
Van Bo Le-Mentzel, Jakob Listabarth & Crowd

Berlin designer und architect Van Bo Le-Mentzel, known for his Hartz IV Möbel and his One-Sqm-House, used his time as guest professor at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg to experiment with an open learning approach (crowducation). His initiatives like Open Academy of the Fine Hearts and #dclassconference feed into the educational experiment #openschoool designed as a demonstrator for 2051: Smart Life in the City by Le-Mentzel together with Vienna design student Jakob Listabarth.

Here, the sphere of education is removed from any economization and becomes a public good. “Openness counts more than knowledge. Orientation is better than certification. Orthografy is overvalued—relationships are everything,” is the manifesto of the school of the future, where there is no separation between teachers and students, no syllabus, and no fixed location. This school is based on the principle of mutual learning and leverages the collective intelligence of the local neighborhood and the global Internet community. Public opinion fora or “speakouts” are a part of this vision of a “flying classroom”, which will be created in a participatory process and invite people to take an active role in shaping the topic of education.

Temporary
Location: Alois-Drasche-Park, 1040 Vienna
Opening hours: Mon 3.8., 10.8., 17.8., 24.8.,
4–7 p.m.
Demonstrator program:
www.openschoool.org
Supported by
HAND.WERK.STADT Mödling

 

Demonstrator 2: The Bank
Projekt Bank für Gemeinwohl

Failed banks, whose damages must be mitigated communally, and dizzying financial speculation outside of the real economy, from which few profit, have shattered trust in the banking sector. Ethical banks represent a sustainable alternative to existing banks and eschew financial dealings that lack a real economic basis. The only projects deemed to be creditworthy are those serving the common good. The amount of interest depends on an evaluation of public good, performed supplemental to a credit rating assessment. Private consumption for status is not creditworthy at the bank of the future and neither is investment in enterprises that, as an example, harm the environment, infringe upon human or worker rights, or conduct questionable research. Instead, areas like nutrition or ecological farming, renewable energy, resource efficiency, social projects and social engagement, education or culture projects, housing strategies, and socially and ecologically oriented companies will receive financing. A branch of a future bank may be visited during the Vienna Biennale to try out participative handling of money in a way that serves the common good.

Permanent
Location: Projekt Bank für Gemeinwohl
[Project bank for the common good]
Rechte Wienzeile 81, 1050 Vienna
Opening hours: Thu 18.6., 2.7., 16.7., 30.7.,
13.8., 27.8, 10.9., 24.9., 5–7 p.m.
Demonstrator program:
www.mitgruenden.at
Supported by DKIA - Nora Dibowski & Simon
Laburda, Psychosoziales Zentrum Schiltern

 

Demonstrator 3: The Factory
Thomas Schneider
NANK

The City of Vienna proclaimed 2015 to be the year of going on foot. Against this background, NANK Neue Arbeit Neue Kultur [new work, new culture], supported by GEA Waldviertler Werkstätten and OTELO, the open technology laboratory, will demonstrate a new form of urban shoe production in the Kunstkanal [art channel] workshops as an alternative to global production and exploitative forms of labor. The strategic underpinnings are the linking of traditional craftsmanship with technological production methods, such as laser-cutting or 3D printing, offered by local fab labs. This “shoe factory” ought to serve not only as a model for new forms of production in the city, but also as an experimental realm for new modes of work in the future, which repre- sent alternatives to the currently predominant labor model. The research questions of the project focus on the potential for individual production, circular economies, and leveraging creativity as a common good. Designer and shoemaker Stefanie Kerschbaumer, who is based at the Kunstkanal, will contribute her craftsmanship expertise to produce the shoe of the future and give insight into its production process.

Permanent
Location: Kunstkanal,
Ulrichgasse 1a, 1020 Vienna
Opening hours: Thu 11.6. – Sun 21.7. and
Thu 27.8. – Sun 4.10., 4–7 p.m.
Demonstrator program:
www.kunstkanal.at/viennabiennale
Supported by GEA Waldviertler Werkstätten,
OTELO, Kunstkanal, NANK

 

Demonstrator 4: The Hospital
ID2 die Angewandte

According to a prognosis of the European Commission, by 2050 there will be as many people over 65 as people in the employable age range between 15 and 64. An aging society and changing lifestyles demand citizens to become active participants in a new kind of health culture. The decentralization of the healthcare system offers possibilities. Sitting on the high street, the pharmacy has a unique position as a public interface. Participatory and DIY cultures continue to expand and enter into hierarchical health structures. Similarly, in 2051 the pharmacy no longer exists as we know it. In the project The Health Distributors: Imagination and the Real World: Testing Possible Futures Using parallel Realities, students of Industrial Design 2, University of Applied Arts in Vienna, students examine design methods for the collective imagination, exploring how film sets can be used as a tool for health experts to tell new kinds of stories about health futures. 1:1 props “hacking” Hollywood’s science fiction filmmaking are used to create sets for social fiction micro-films on a zero budget. The speculative design proposals are demonstrators that suggest new behaviors, new rituals, new tools, and new attitudes. Fiction is used to sketch out an alternative world, revealing a different set of values.

Permanent
Location: Saint Charles Complementary,
(Shop window), Gumpendorfer Straße 22,
1060 Vienna
Opening hours: Mon–Sun, 24 hours
Demonstrator program:
id2studio.at
Supported by
Saint Charles Apotheke & Complementary

 

Demonstrator 5: The Shopping Mall
Julia Landsiedl
jeplus

In Digital Modernity, the shopping center, next to the virtual world of e-commerce, counts as one of the so-called “third places” (after home and work) that, according to sociologist Ray Oldenburg, play an important role in community building. Nonetheless, the analogous shopping mall is only one of many marketplaces and social spaces representing a model no longer in tune with the times, due to its focus on maximum consumption. For malls to keep up with online competitors and enhance their value proposition, designer Julia Landsiedl envisions a commerce-free zone where consumers can hang out and meet others. “The Mall” at the Wien Mitte railway station—a hybrid train station, office building, shopping and gastronomy center—is a laboratory for the demonstrator Shopping Spotting. Visitors are invited to observe what unfolds within the Mall, with the focus being on “dying” species of shoppers and their behaviour in today’s merchandise territory. By means of design-ethnographic methods this transit point for travelers and locals is studied with a view to sustainable alternatives to our current “temples of consumerism.”

Permanent
Location: WIEN MITTE The Mall
balcony, 2nd floor,
Landstraßer Hauptstraße 1a, 1030 Vienna,
www.wienmitte-themall.at
Opening hours: Mon–Sun, daily
(1–5 a.m. closed)
Supported by
WIEN MITTE The Mall

 

Demonstrator 6: The Street
future.lab
TU Wien
In several workshops during the 2014 summer semester, the future.lab of the Faculty of Architecture and Planning at the Vienna University of Technology involved its students in several new future models of streets in the field of tension between technological innovation and social transformation; these will be tested during the Vienna Biennale as prototypes at several locations throughout the city. The physical interventions on a 1:1 scale alter the usage and production of the existing social space. City residents are confronted with the changed reality of a public space and become an integral component of urban research by means of their reactions and feedback. Future possibilities of the street as a traffic place and living space, as a space for presentation and representation, as a place for encounters and communication thus become visible and debatable. In a sense of micro-urbanism, the interventions create locales for a future city.

Temporary
Project A: as far as work goes
Location: Vienna river (Stubentorbrücke,
Weiskirchnerstraße), 1010 Vienna
Opening hours: Thu 11.6., 9:30 p.m.
Project B: MOLD[ING]
Location: Burggasse (between house
numbers 5 and 73), 1070 Vienna
Opening hours: Sat 13.6. – Sun 14.6,
Thu 18.6. – Sun 21.6, Thu 25.6. – Sun 28.6.,
9 a.m.–6 p.m.
Project C: above
Location: Künstlergasse, 1150 Vienna
Opening hours: Sat 27.6., 6 p.m. (Opening);
Sun 28.6. – Fri 3.7. daily, 24/7
Project D: Ephemeral Temporality
Location: Lindengasse/Stiftgasse, 1070 Vienna
Opening hours: Sat 13.6. as well as on
Thursdays 18.6., 2.7, 16.7., 30.7., 13.8., 27.8.,
10.9., 24.9., 8–9 p.m.
Demonstrator program:
www.futurelab.tuwien.ac.at
Supported by Gebietsbetreuung
Stadterneuerung: GB*6/14/15, GB*7/8/16 and
GB*10


Demonstrator 7: The Stadium
SUBOTRON

Game studies claim that digital games will define the entertainment industry of the 21st c. and that the display screen will be the stadium of the future. Technological innovations have been driven to a large degree by electronic game development. For 2051: Smart Life in the City, Subotron, a platform for digital gaming culture in Vienna, examines the potential of gaming as a tool for social transformation. Under the rubric “serious gaming,” it will be possible to experience thematic spheres like politics, healthcare, or ecology apart from traditional, primarily entertaining content. Within the game, not only will empathy be fostered, but users will develop possible future scenarios and solutions to problems. The demonstrator will be settled on Reinprechtsdorfer Straße in Vienna’s 5th district as a type of crisis intervention. The accumulation there of gambling and betting locales was a contributing factor in reducing the quality of life in the neighborhood. The recently imposed prohibition of “small-time gambling” by the City of Vienna led to closures and vacancies and exacerbated the situation. To what extent gamification can offer a means of escape from gambling-induced misery is part of an experimental game.

Temporary
Location: Comics Box, Siebenbrunnenplatz,
near Reinprechtsdorfer Straße, 1050 Vienna
Opening hours:
Sat 13.6. and 26.9.,
12 a.m.–10 p.m.
Demonstrator program:
www.subotron.at
Supported by
Gebietsbetreuung Stadterneuerung GB*5/12

 

Demonstrator 8: The Hotel
AllesWirdGut
Architektur

According to statistics collected about lodging by the City of Vienna, the number of guests staying overnight has risen by over 60 % in the last ten years to 13.5 million per year—trending upwards. In front of a backdrop of similarly growing streams of migrants, hospitality is required not only with regard to paying guests, but also towards refugees. The value-added gleaned from tourism ought to be used to improve the situation of refugees, according to the vision of the future demonstrated by the magdas Hotel. It opened in spring of 2015, is operated by a subsidiary of Caritas of the Archdiocese of Vienna dealing with social business projects, and was designed by the Vienna based architecture office AllesWird-Gut. In addition to tourist accommodations, it provides workplaces for refugees and lodging for minor asylum seekers. Through its social value proposition, the hotel links cultures, offers opportunities, and creates a lively space for encounters. Crowdsourcing, participation, focus on upcycling (where waste products or—seemingly—useless materials are refashioned into new products) and responding to the extant as well as to the coincidental—the hotel having moved into a former retirement and nursing home—required a new design approach, which will be offered as an open-source blueprint in the context of 2051: Smart Life in the City, enabling it to be scaled up to hotel chain magnitude. VIENNA BIENNALE visitors can rent rooms in the hotel, participate in workshops, or familiarize themselves with current operations.

Permanent
Location: magdas HOTEL,
Laufbergergasse 12, 1020 Vienna
Opening hours: Mon–Sun, 24 hours
Hotel reservations
and demonstrator program:
www.facebook.com/magdasHOTEL
Supported by magdas HOTEL

 

Demonstrator 9: The Home
Klaus Kada

The apartment buildings planned by architect Klaus Kada, as well as architects Bernd Vlay and Lina Streeruwitz of Studio Vlay and architecture firm Riepl Kaufmann Bammer in the Sonnwendviertel near the Hauptbahnhof, Vienna’s main railway station, already have occupants; these quarter expands the functions of private living into the semi-public space and form the background for working with flexible floor plans in a pioneering housing project. Instead of walls, movable furniture elements separate the various rooms and their functions via the building components conceived by Klaus Kada. The mutability of floor plans and their adaptation to dynamic living situation—a vision of residential living, which up to now has foundered mainly due to the norming of Viennese housing construction—here is ensured over the long term. Returning the apartment in its original condition as required by the rental contract now is easily possible even after numerous floor plan adjustments. Participation in the design process, i. e., involving future users in the planning, is exemplified here by an alternative that empowers the future residents to intervene in the interior design of their apartments by themselves without approval by the authorities or remodeling costs. A generally accessible 1:1 model of the apartment makes the room transformation experiential and invites visitors to experiment with space.

 Permanent
Location: stilwerk in the Design Tower, Praterstraße
1, Shop 23, 2nd floor, 1020 Vienna,
www.stilwerk.at
Opening hours: Thu and Fri 3–7 p.m.,
Sat 12 a.m.–6 p.m.
Supported by stilwerk Wien, tina vienna
urban technologies + strategies, Department
of Spatial and Sustainable Design  /
TU Vienna

 

Demonstrator 10: The Open Space
Samstag

A mobile market kitchen jointly developed with fasch&fuchs.architekten serves as a temporary research laboratory for urban open spaces. Communal harvesting, preparation, cooking, and eating of vegetarian fare provide an outlet for the narratives, stories, and lifestyles of a diversified society with heterogeneous faith practices and worldviews. According to the Vienna integration and diversity monitor, 49 % of Vienna residents have a migration background. The market kitchen offers a framework wherein ancestry, status, education, and language move into the background and shared activity, fleeting conversations, as well as in-depth debates are in the foreground. Behind the informal collective cooking looms the question of future nutritional sovereignty as an alternative to globalized food production. The project Saturday in Town at the Schwendermarkt in Vienna’s 15th district for years has demonstrated how a neighborhood can stake a claim on a city. A large barren area gave rise to a space where plants grow and people cook, concerts are played and festivals are celebrated. The “Samstag” [Saturday] team bring this experience to other locations in the city under the VIENNA BIENNALE banner in order to collect new insights and transform other open spaces with the help of local neighborhoods. They are supported by fasch&fuchs architects, who have taken on the design of the market kitchen.

Temporary
Location 1: Hannovermarkt, 1200 Vienna
Opening hours: Sat 13.6., 5–9 p.m.
Location 2: Schwendermarkt, 1150 Vienna
Opening hours: Thu 2.7., 16.7., 5–9 p.m.
Location 3: Nordbahnhof: An den Kohlenrutschen/
Krakauer Straße 12, 1020 Vienna
Opening hours: Sat 4.7., 5–9 p.m.
Location 4: Theodor-Körner-Hof
(Reinprechtsdorfer Straße/
Matzleinsdorfer Platz), 1050 Vienna
Opening hours: Sat 18.7., 5–9 p.m.
Location 5: Macondo, Zinnergasse, 1110 Vienna
Opening hours: Sat 1.8., 5–9 p.m.
Demonstrator program:
www.samstaginderstadt.at
Supported by Aquarex , MA 59/Marktamt,
Pego Natura, RIESS KELOmat, Spar
Österreich, SimplyLeaf

 

Changemaker

Hannes Langeder
Ferdinand GT3 RS

An optical replica of a Porsche 911 made of plastic pipes and adhesive tape nonetheless signals speed, mobility, and status. Built upon a bicycle frame and operated by muscle power, the vehicle becomes a persiflage, its symbolic power debunked. “The last auto ever built will be a Porsche,” the
car’s inventor Ferry Porsche is purported to have said. He may have been right, because artist  Hannes Langeder uses this model to show that to achieve stated objectives in changing our values we must bid adieu to the “golden calves” we have worshipped up to now. Langeder’s object is located at the nexus between creative process, social-ecological statement, and utility. The mobile sculpture in an urban space instigates confusion and unrest. As a strategy for rethinking our actions and as a tool of change, it opens the exhibition 2051: Smart Life in the City.

 

Team of the “Milliardenstadt” [billions city]
HYPOTOPIA Fragments

The bankruptcy of the Hypo Alpe Adria Bank could cost Austrian taxpayers as much as 19 billion euros. For this amount of money, the team planned an exemplary city, which was poured in concrete on a 1:100 scale and put up for debate for several weeks in the fountain in front of Karlskirche to lively participation by the Viennese populace. The HYPOTOPIA city model was carried to Parliament in a protest march on 30 October 2014 and the operation concluded with its symbolic disposal into the “hypo pit.” For the exhibition 2051: Smart Life in the City, the team was invited to rebuild the remaining fragments of the demolished city model and to metaphorically situate the ten demonstrators within it. The aim of the “2051 Forum” is to generate a collective vision of a city by
means of a participatory process involving visitors and guests.

Program of the Team of the
“Milliardenstadt” billions city:
www.milliardenstadt.at

 

ORANGE 94.0
Stadtradio Orange

Since 1998, ORANGE 94.0, as Vienna’s only free radio station, has composed an acoustic image of the city’s diversity. Its new project Stadtradio Orange [city radio Orange] makes it possible for city residents to become directly involved and to produce their own contributions about the environment
they live and work in. How does my city sound? The basic information for creating radio is conveyed in workshops and online tutorials. For “mobile reporting,” one’s own smartphone becomes a recording device and editing room in one. The amateur contribut ions can be uploaded from anywhere via the stadtradio.o94.at website and disseminated across the ether. A city plan functions as an insight instrument showing which terrain has already been acoustically discovered and which is still open for exploration. For 2051: Smart Life in the City, sites of transformation will be broadcast under the VIENNA BIENNALE motto “Ideas for Change”, thereby allowing a crowd-generated vision of a city of the future.
Radio clips: Monday through Friday, 11:50 a.m.

 

Park supervision by the Wiener Familienbund
[Vienna Family Association],
Wiener Spielstraße

The Wiener Spielstraße [Vienna play street] initiated in 2012 by the municipal government represents a seemingly utopian institution. During the warmer seasons, in a number of Vienna’s districts, street segments are closed to traffic and temporarily made available as a children’s play area for one afternoon. This fosters neighborliness, opens the street area to people, while at the same time creating a realm of possibility for a future city that aims to reduce motorized individual traffic to well
under 15 % by the year 2051. As a means of “tactical urbanism,” it makes the future of the city palpable and negotiable. Simple tools and materials like textile cords or cardboard suffice to configure the environment. The empty street as an open play situation supports learning to treat one another with respect, an important competence of future urbanites, which can be tested in the exhibition 2051: Smart Life in the City.
Locations and program of Wiener Spielstraßen:
www.wiener-familienbund.at

 

 

 

 

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Date
11.06. – 04.10.2015

Location
In the city

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