Presentation of the Studienprojekt in the IfEE’s Institutskolloquium (SoSe22)
On July 19th 2022, 14:30-16:00, the main results of the Studienprojekt’s ‘Ageing Cities’, coordinated by Tomás Criado, were presented in the IfEE’s Institutskolloquium (SoSe22). The presentation was delivered by the group of students who partook in the project: Maximilian Apel, Erman Dinc, Christine Maicher, Adam Petras, Doreen Sauer, and Anna Maria Schlotmann.
In this year of work we have been asking ourselves: How are cities and urban designers responding to the challenge of population ageing, and how could we as ethnographers understand the social and material transformations underway in their efforts to make cities more ‘ageing-friendly’?
In this choral presentation we showed our project’s findings, searching to answer these questions through specific cases, most of them taking place in Berlin (on variegated issues like intergenerational and intercultural gardens or queer housing projects; the urban activism of the gray panthers; the controversies in public space design, focusing particularly on the conflicts of bike infrastructure; and VR projects to enable urban displacement or travel for older people living in residential care homes). But also some instances of our excursion to Europe’s biggest “pensioners’ coast” (Costa Blanca) in Spain.
In doing so we not only wished to tell specific stories, but also share the conceptual and methodological explorations and the many questions this process brought about, namely: the contested scripts and the distinctive intergenerational challenges of late life urbanism projects.
The presentation was held in English and in a hybrid mode. As a result, this video was recorded from Zoom.
