Our contribution is based on a project that has been running for a year and addresses interrelated aspects of teaching, research and practice in the Hamburg district of Rothenburgsort. In the designated urban development area Aufbruch Ost, the initiative Mikropol initially plays the classical repertoire of urban social movements. In co-production with the seminar Project Management in Urban Design – the initiative actually employs a polyvalent strategy of coproduction – it was possible to raise relevant questions regarding the concrete case situation in the context of knowledge production along the Modes of Play methodology developed by UD on and for Live Projects. The initiative's concern is based on the RothenBurg district centre, which had been demolished just a few months earlier, and the resulting shortfall of capacities for communal uses in the district: among other things, tenant and social counseling, a bicycle and wood workshop, an intercultural women's café and dinner groups. In the seminar/initiative co-production, students and members of the initiative problematize the elimination of spaces for such communal uses in an early phase of urban transformation projects with regard to the erosion of everyday knowledge and the associated knowledge orders in the field of urban planning – what must urban planning be able to “realise” in order to work with the knowledge of everyday experts and why does it so often decide not to? The contribution provides some early insights into how project management as a simultaneously and reciprocally affirmative and critical form of practice is able to take care of urban forms of knowledge.