In the summer of 2022, we were asked by a small municipality in Baden-Württemberg if we could help them write a master plan for the transformation of their town center. The community is home to around 5,000 people who were concerned about the impending desolation of their city center. Together with them, various strategies and perspectives were to be developed to help make the city center a little bit more sustainable. No sooner said than done: in order to achieve the most sustainable and realistically implementable result possible, we divided our mission into three phases.

The first phase involved getting to know the city and analyzing the challenges and needs as adequately as possible. To ensure this, we came up with a special strategy - the principle of covert development:

The mayor, as our accomplice, helped us organize “undercover internships” at various key locations in the city. We were on site for two weeks and spent the first two weeks undercover in the outdoor pool, in the town’s only ice cream parlor, in the town hall and setting up a cultural festival. During this time, we stayed with host families who were privy to our plan. Apart from that, we wanted to get to know the city and its inhabitants without a clear agenda or mission in order to develop a real feel for everyday life and the problems and potential on site. After we were officially uncovered by the mayor at the annual folk festival and our work was announced, we started to develop a program for phase two with key local players that we had been able to identify by then: the What-If-Week.

During the What-If-Week, we - together with local stakeholders - brought things into the city center:We staged and improvised things in the city center that did not yet exist in the city, but which were urgently desired, such as an inner-city school bus line to relieve morning traffic, a meeting place in the church as a third location, together with the city library, a youth discussion forum and - as a special highlight - a pop-up restaurant in a central parking lot, in which very different dishes were cooked and served by Adelsheim residents themselves on three evenings. In and around our double-decker bus, a cooperative test laboratory was created for ideas and their potential for long-term implementation. In addition, we used a performative intervention with chalk paint to transform the inner city area in question into a giant grid - a piece of sketch paper that indicated for a few weeks which future space was actually at stake. During this action, we also got into conversation with people and were able to draw attention to the project beyond the active participatory actions on the bus.

We then compiled the findings and results from this intensive week and pre-formulated them into possible goals, associated measures and potential pilot projects and reviewed and reflected on them again together with local residents in a citizens’ forum.

We then edited the final result and summarized it in an easy-to-understand manual as a step-by-step guide to transformation. And to ensure that this plan actually has a realistic chance of being put into practice and does not end up in some administrative drawer like so many “master plans”, “future strategies” and “vision papers”, we edited the final result into an easy-to-understand and inspiring handbook. This step-by-step guide to transformation was distributed to all households in the city with the support of the mayor and local council and, as far as we know, is still being used today. We are pleased that many of the ideas that emerged from this process have actually made their way into implementation and thus into current and future reality.