Urban Design Project I Parapolis — city residents * 2015/2016

Currently, approximately 1.7 million people live Hamburg. Statistically, 31% of these citizens come from a background of migration, as many as 5.8 million tourists visited Hamburg in 2013, an estimated 325,000 commuters travel to the city on a daily basis, and an ever growing number of fugitives are waiting in cramped lodgings for the outcome of their asylum applications.

Who is where and when a resident? Who is a citizen? How is this loose conglomerate gathered, produced, and negotiated under the name “Hamburg”?

Our focus of study this year analyses the urban reality in terms of translocal relationship structures and studies the city under the premise of increasing migration, refuge, tourism, and commuter activity as a highly complex structure whose “form is vague and difficult to define [. ..]” (Terkessidis 2010). Mark Terkessidis coined this “large or small city” “Parapolis” and compares it to the constructed notion of the “European city” as a definable cultural unity.

In analytical consideration we will learn to recognize the physical arrangements and materialities, the actors, practices and various sites, and the complex spaces and rhythms of these structures, sort through and glean, to describe, and to gather this information in an “Atlas of Parapolis.”

10 CP

  • Source: Christoph Herrmann
    Source: Christoph Herrmann

contributors

2016/2017

Parapolis

Parapolis

City of Residents