Learning from one another

Planning processes are always simultaneously processes of social and cultural learning and qualification. The focus is on learning from one another: planners from citizens, politics from science, business from culture, etc.. This always involves the mobilization and networking of existing knowledge and specific qualifications. In this understanding, planning goes far beyond classical design processes and requires a special procedural creativity and the composition of customized cooperative processes and organizational structures. 

Just as planning always has the task of stimulating developments and daring the new, questions of process and procedural organization are about finding specific ways of bundling forces in the development of city and space. Against the backdrop of the challenges ahead, the culture of urban and spatial development thus increasingly requires a willingness to explore new, and certainly experimental, paths - in questions of concept development as well as in questions of activating civil society involvement or communicating and disseminating knowledge. Ideas are needed on how concepts can be developed, how processes can be designed, how people can be encouraged to participate and how (building) cultural processes can be initiated and accompanied. This requires appropriate occasions and platforms for brainstorming, communication, exchange, and learning from one another. And that requires a particularly creative atmosphere and the courage, enthusiasm and capacity for enthusiasm of urban developers from planning, politics and civil society.

The Research Unit of Local Planning (IFOER) is located in this exciting intersection of urban planning, urban development and spatial planning, design and process design. In teaching and research, we work on the project- and task-specific shaping and development of instruments, methods and processes in urban development and the production of space.