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Good enough to eat: the city center of Lutherstadt Wittenberg as a cake!
Stadtlabor Wittenberg: Wandel durch Handlung
In Lutherstadt-Wittenberg, we are developing and operating the city laboratory for two and a half years with the aim of making Wittenberg’s city center more sustainable and attractive, especially for children, young people and young families. Here, too, our aim is to allow local people to become active themselves and inspire them to develop different futures in relation to their built and social environment. Our focus here is on the picturesque old town center of Wittenberg, which, thanks to Luther’s legacy, attracts numerous tourists from all over the world to the city all year round, but has little to offer the people of Wittenberg themselves - especially the young. We try to address this problem in the Stadtlabor, with action and negotiation in many different formats.
1/17
Design Build Workshop at Stadtlabor with students from Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle and trainees from local craft businesses
The rooms of the Stadtlabor are in an absolutely central location, on a first floor of over 400 square meters directly on the market square. With a varied program that is as little didactic as possible, we try to get people excited about their inner city, or rather about the opportunity to become active and creative in it themselves. To this end, we organize themed cultural events, workshops, discussions, collaborations with universities and much more. In addition, the space is used to a large extent by residents themselves, who approach us with format proposals for which there is otherwise no space in the city center, such as dance evenings, cell phone consultation hours, solidarity cooking, feminist salons, a secular choir and repair meetings and more.
1/15
The second, future-oriented part of the project is a disposition fund, in which a total of up to €300,000 is available over three years for the implementation of ideas from the urban community. We distribute money for ideas from the city for the city that contribute to a city center development oriented towards the common good. After we developed the first round of funding projects in the first year as part of an ideas marathon, in which the public was able to decide on the projects at the end, we will continue in 2024 and 2025 with a particularly forward-looking process. In a joint workshop, we developed a very special voting procedure with the administration. The future projects for the city center are not decided by us, the administration or the politicians, but by all of the city’s students. In this way, we are taking our target group particularly seriously and handing over responsibility and influence at an early stage to a group that otherwise really has no say in the city administration - from as early as third grade. There is no age limit for submitting ideas and everyone from the city community is invited to take part.
1/13
All students in Wittenberg from the 3rd grade onwards vote on which ideas for the city center will be implemented.
We publish the ideas in a newspaper and distribute them directly to classes and schools in counted packages together with ballot papers. To help and as a basis for voting, there is a 10-point guide that explains what makes an idea a truly public-spirited idea. A total of at least five ideas are implemented each year, with the children and young people having the choice, and in this case we can truly say: urban development makes school!
…you have to do everything yourself