Park Fiction @ Massachusettes Institute of Technology

MIT, Monday, September 28

Factory City: Christoph Schäfer / Park Fiction

The City is our Factory: Politics of desire and the production of urban spaces between Grande Latte and Park Fiction.

"After the industrial age, the city has become the central point of production. In the new urban fabric, subcultures, cultural workers, musicians and artists play a significant role as producers of collective spaces, of places shaped by desires, as inventors of new perspectives and lifestyles. Christoph Schaefer will introduce his practice in the frame of Park Fiction, a collective selforganised project that managed to break an expensive piece of land at the prestigeous river bank of Hamburg St. Pauli out of the real estate market. Instead, a group of residents together with artists managed to organize a production of desires for a public park with a view on the harbour - and realized it. This long, small but thorough and successful process actualizes itself to the current struggles for a right to the city and against gentrification - and it asks questions: if the neoliberal urbanization model is the root of the fiscal crisis - how could more social alternatives work? What role can cultural workers play in this scenario? In a society, where passion and work, privacy and professionality are increasingly hard to tell apart - the struggle for urban spaces is the struggle for the means of production: the city is our factory."

Video des Vortrags am MIT jetzt online/video of the talk is now online:
 http://techtv.mit.edu/collections/vap20:834/videos/4174-christoph-schaefer---factory-city