TRANSURBAN Residency in Bielefeld

How do we move co-productively from the vacancy into the new neighbourhood?

This is the guiding question for the TRANSURBAN Residency in 2022 in East Westphalia-Lippe at the Rochdale Barracks in the city of Bielefeld. In its second programme year, the residency creates transitions: from a former barracks into interim use, over the barbed wire into the urban space, from a non-place to an urban living space.

Here, the city and its development are negotiated artistically, because a new quarter will be built on the barracks site in the near future. But how does the co-productive neighbourhood development proceed from historically grown stock to participation, planning, demolition, construction and new use?

In collaboration with the city of Bielefeld, actors from Bielefeld’s cultural landscape and urban society, as well as artists and urban researchers, the Rochdale Barracks will become a temporary laboratory; a playing field for urban artistic practice. Here, art opens up a dialogue between history and the present, between design and use, between space and utopia.

Building on the experiences and results of the TRANSUBRAN residencies in 2021 in the Ruhr region, an interdisciplinary research, art and cultural programme is being designed that invites the exploration, appropriation and transformation of the Rochdale Barracks. Following the research phase in spring, the TRANSURBAN Residency will open the doors to the still closed barracks in summer.

A place for the joint production and negotiation of the city is created; a place for discovering, dwelling and experiencing urban art and culture; a necessary cultural transit space of a dynamic city. A model for the region of East Westphalia-Lippe is being created.{:}{:de}Wie gehen wir ko-produktiv aus dem Leerstand ins neue Quartier?