“From an aesthetic standpoint, Gießen is not mediocre. Gießen is ugly. No real Gießener would contest that,” Die Zeit has put it bluntly. This workshop examines the contested production of what we term “urban ugliness”: a discursively circulated yet locally negotiated stigma attached to cities with purportedly little aesthetic charm.
As the town hall’s reappropriation of the “Elefantenklo” as a site for events during the “elephantic summer” illustrates, the stigma of urban ugliness is not limited to the discursive sphere but informs local negotiations of the city and its image on the ground.
Consequently, in this workshop we follow the stigma on the ground. Henri Lefebvre situates the production of urban space in the concrete practices of everyday life. We aim to elicit the aesthetic judgments of city dwellers in relation to their built environment.
In this workshop, we will discuss our conceptual premises, engage directly with pedestrians in the city, and then situate our findings within wider dynamics of neoliberal urbanism. For this, we will set up makeshift discussion stands (“urban reflectors”) in Gießen’s Business Improvement Districts––an instrument of neoliberal policy to enhance urban attractiveness through consumerist design. In so doing, we conceive of “urban ugliness” less as instructive of a city’s individuality and more as a general urban condition of our times that surpasses exemplary cases.
Worskhop Programme:
- 10:00-11:30 Morning Reflection / Discussion of the approach and the project
- 12:30-14:30 Urban reflectors at the stand (in Giessen City)
- 14:30-15:30 Consolidating results within the groups
- 16:00-18:00 Consolidating findings through discussion
Kristian Svane (M.A., Hamburg University) is a Ph.D. student of German Literature at Yale University. He is interested in the sociology of literature, the translation of forms, and contemporary practices of life writing in Germany, France, and Denmark. In his current articles, he investigates autosociobiography as a form across cultures, and the role of fictionality in narrating history through autofiction.
Marc Hertel (M.Ed., Mainz University) is a research assistant in human geography at University of Klagenfurt. His research interests involve mobility and border regimes, viapolitics, and urban infrastructures. Together with his former Studienstiftung fellow Kristian, he has started to interrogate the stigma of “urban ugliness” that besets several German cities.
