Mainstreaming Urban Interventionist Practices: the Case of the BMW Guggenheim Lab in Berlin

Authors

  • Monika Grubbauer

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.7.2.774

Abstract

The paper examines how practices of urban intervention have entered the mainstream by discussing the case of the BMW Guggenheim Lab. Financed by the German BMW group and realised by the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, the project addresses issues of contemporary urban life in the form of a ‘mobile laboratory’ with an explicit emphasis on participatory forms of urban intervention. The Lab’s temporary residence in Berlin in 2012 encountered fierce protests from residents and activist groups.

I revisit the ensuing public debates and discuss the impact they had on the project. Drawing on in-depth interviews with people involved in the Lab the various notions of participation underlying the project are examined. It is shown that the Lab generated new and unexpected encounters and individual experiences. However, for solving actual problems the debates and experiments held at the Lab were too general, too exclusive and too short-lived to be of lasting relevance.

Author Biography

Monika Grubbauer

Monika Grubbauer (PhD) is an architect and urban researcher currently based at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. Her interests include architectural and urban theory, urban political economy, the globalization of architectural practice and urban informality. She is co-editor together with Joanna Kusiak, and a contributor to the volume Chasing Warsaw. Socio-Material Dynamics of Urban Change since 1990 (Campus, 2012).

Downloads

Published

2013-06-01

Issue

Issue # 13 | Autumn 2013 | The Participatory Turn in Urbanism

Section

Review article

License

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.