Urban Design Project III 2024/25. Dirt Cheap! - Modes of Construction

The construction industry is in large parts responsible for planetary destruction and the climate crisis, emmitting 40% of global Carbon Dioxide, while construction and demolition waste accounts for 55% of this nation’s gross waste volume (Umweltbundesamt 2022) and almost a third of the global waste volume - with no end in sight. At the same time, around 52 hectares of land continue to be designated as new residential and infrastructure areas every day in Germany (ibid). Excessive power demand is still covered by burning lignite, gas, and oil to charge our phones, second phones, laptops, TVs and keep our cities illuminated by LED advertisements 24/7, while some districts in Germany campaign against wind power plants as not to obstruct their undisturbed views of the countryside.
Meanwhile real estate has become the most secure financial investment not only for private house owners but even state owned pension funds. Impossibly high towers are being constructed on soft, marshy grounds to turn the best views into money, while existing structures are torn down to make space for yet another, more profitable office building. The building stock of European cities serves first and foremost as financial capital rather than as places to live in, and the never-ending hunt for higher profit margins keeps calling for lower production cost of the goods (the buildings). This results in a fabrication of built ‘cheapness’, which ranges from the globally shipped and assembled materials by low-paid-workers, up to the integration of shiny interior designs, which we find in prefabricated housing as well as in luxury homes or office towers promising individualised and authentic lifestyles of consumption.

At the same time Europe is facing an increasingly urgent housing crisis, almost no European capital is able to meet the demands of affordable housing for their constantly growing populations. German politicians responsible for the building sector face this development with one answer: “build, build, build!”. But who are the people supposed to build our future homes and finally cover the demand? Who pays these workers and to what costs? Where and how do they live? What material do they touch, move and assemble on a daily basis? Where do these materials come from, and who has dug-up, touched, and processed them? Which companies keep the global supply chains, local building processes and economic flows running? What energy fuels their machines, tools and future inhabitants demands? What sort of life style desires are produced through the availability of materials in the furniture and interior design industries and through other related fast productions of goods? On what grounds are future neighborhoods supposed to stand on, to live and work in, who owns this land and whose rules apply to the value chain of those newly developed real estate? And finally, what are the global consequences of such (political) measures?

In UDP3 we look closely at different modes of construction within Hamburg, wanting to understand who and what is involved in current building sites and related -processes and keeps the surrounding systems running. We will look at sites of: construction companies, short-term accommodation, building material suppliers, haulage companies, building authorities, planning offices, work allocation agencies, investment banks, disposal and recycling companies and of course: building sites.

Time: Thursdays, 2:15 pm
Location: R 3.104

  • Photo: Bernd Kniess
    Photo: Bernd Kniess

contributors

2024/2025

Current annual theme

Dirt Cheap!

Dirt Cheap!