The Neighbours Network City (NNC), a project developed in 2004 for the city of Essen and the Ruhr region in Germany as the Cultural Capital of Europe 2010, is based on and addresses the networked structure of the Ruhr Valley.
NNC operates on the scale of the agglomeration comprising 4,435 square kilometers and over 5 million inhabitants; for, in 2010, the Cultural Capital of Europe will not be a city but a region, the Ruhr Valley.
Publication Neighbours Network City @ Metalocus, Madrid, Spain, 20 May 2007
Ruhr
Region
Networks
Situated in the west of Germany, the Ruhr region is part of the west European urban network. The urban structures of the Ruhr echo the industrial networks that shaped this cityscape: the hidden patterns of the underground mining galleries and the logistical systems of waterways, railways and roads that cut through the urban landscape. In the post-industrial era, with the closure of the mines and the demise of heavy industry, this urbanised landscape became more and more fragmented as manufacturing sites were abandoned and city populations steadily dwindled.
In order to understand the highly complex patterns in this cityscape, it needs to be read as a network of overlapping and interweaving traffic arteries, waterways and media connections. To get to grips with this dynamic urban fabric, to comprehend the forces at work within it, one has to appreciate the relations inherent in this fragmented networked landscape. It is a question of understanding the systems that give this splintered landscape its complex – and dynamic – open structure.
Hybrid
Space
Today, media networks (Internet, telephone, television etc.) are influencing and interacting with ‘real’ places. The emerging space of digital information-communication flows is modifying not only our physical environment but the social, economic and cultural organisation of our societies in general. Examples of this hybrid space can be found everywhere in our daily lives. Take, for instance, the private (communication) space of mobile telephony, creating islands of private space within public urban space. Or monitored environments where cameras keep watch over open urban areas. More examples can be found in our private environments, as our homes become ‘smart’ and our cars become networked spaces with, amongst others, GPS navigation. Physical space and objects should not therefore be looked at in isolation. Instead, they should be considered in the context of and in relation to the networked systems to which they belong and with which they interact. These hybrid, ambivalent spaces are simultaneously analogue and digital, virtual and material, local and global, tactile and abstract.
A new interdisciplinary field researches these transformations in the architectural-urban space of the emerging ‘information-communication age’ and explores the dynamic interaction between urbanism and the space of mass media and communication networks. It deals with information-communication processes in public space. It is therefore not about determining places, but about creating frameworks for processes of self-organisation and developing strategies that can steer and support the ongoing growth, transformation and recycling processes in the urban landscape, by exploiting the forces at work in the urban networks.
Neighbours
Network
City
The Neighbours Network City (NNC), a project developed in 2004 for the city of Essen and the Ruhr region in Germany as the Cultural Capital of Europe 2010, is based on and addresses the networked structure of the Ruhr Valley. The NNC project operates on the scale of the agglomeration comprising 4,435 square kilometres and over 5 million inhabitants; for, in 2010, the Cultural Capital of Europe will not be a city but a region, the Ruhr Valley.
The NNC proposes an infrastructure that can be decentrally deployed and is open for bottom-up development. This infrastructure will help to create openings to initiate and support urban cultural self-organisational processes. As the inverse of CNN, the NNC project develops synergies in the many local forces in the urban network to create an open Gesamtkunstwerk, the Cultural Capital Ruhr. The NNC proposal consists of a series of interwoven sub-projects, each of which addresses a different layer of the urban network and thus follows a different ‘network logic’.
Urban
Dinners
“wir ESSEN FÜR DAS RUHRGEBIET” (We’re eating for the Ruhr region) is a German play of words on the slogan of the Cultural Capital project “ESSEN FÜR DAS RUHRGEBIET” ([the city of] Essen for the Ruhr region). The “wir ESSEN FÜR DAS RUHRGEBIET” project proposes that urban dinners be held simultaneously in neighbourhoods throughout the Ruhr Valley on the longest day of the year. The urban dinners are organised decentrally by and for the neighbourhood residents and the users of the city. Travellers, tourists, down-and-outs, commuters and business travellers are also welcome to participate and dine. The many different cooking cultures, reflecting the multicultural character of the region, fuse and combine to create a new hybrid cuisine.
The tables are laid in derelict spaces throughout the region, the wasteland of the cityscape. Temporary occupation and habitation of this no-mans-land reintegrates this space in the regional mental maps and turns the borders of the urban landscape into communicative seams of the cityscape. Theatrical and musical ensembles and other cultural groups from the region roam around on that evening, going from table to table and performing small artistic intermezzos. At exactly the same moment, throughout the whole of the Ruhr Valley, a million voices join in a toast: “wir ESSEN FÜR DAS RUHRGEBIET”!
A second urban dinner will be held along the A40/B1 motorway, the basis of an important network in the Ruhr region and the backbone of the cityscape.
Water
Mobili
The post-industrial landscape of the Ruhr is criss-crossed by a complex system of partly derelict waterways. The Water Mobili project that we developed for the regional initiative Fluss Stadt Land (River City Land) addresses this waterway network. It envisages an array of leisure elements to stimulate the ‘acupuncture points’ on this networked landscape and open it up for leisure society (and ‘society of forced leisure’).
The project provides simple modular building components that fit easily into containers which can be moored at specific spots in the water landscape. The modular components can be assembled in all sorts of ways to make camping rafts, floating bars, fishing points, kiosks, exhibition decks, picnic places, floating water theatres, storage or W.C. units, cabins, relaxation decks, roofs, swimming pools or other imaginative compositions yet to be discovered.
These pieces of mobile water furniture are small, floating constructions that add recreational possibilities to the abandoned industrial network of the waterways, thus activating the post-industrial water landscape of the Ruhr.
SubCity
Big
Urban
Game
Like no other region, the Ruhr region has been defined by its ‘underground’, its sub-city. The coal seams were the determining factor for industrialisation and hence urbanisation. The patterns of the cityscape were based on and shaped by the complex underground networks of mine galleries and shafts. The region is highly conscious of its sub-layers as the foundation and the driver of its cityscape. The memories of this, however, are ambivalent. The deeper layers contain forgotten mining galleries, inaccessible shafts and groundwater lakes, and these are regarded as a threat, reminding people of the many disasters that took place in the past.
The SubCity game deals with the sub-layers of the city. Using mobile devices, SubCity can be played individually, in groups or even by large communities. The Zollverein colliery in Essen, a World Cultural Heritage site, offers access to the virtual reality of SubCity. Here, in the only remaining functioning entrance to the underground network, one can enter a three-dimensional, interactive media simulation, take part in the networked space of SubCity’s urban dreams and interact with the communal urban substrate.
The game re-interprets and re-codes this communal urban substrate. Via a simulation the inhabitants and the visitors of the Ruhr can recreate the deep layers of the cityscape. They can dig virtual shafts and galleries, develop and revitalise an urban underground and live there with their revelations and dreams.
-> roaming the urban network, searching for connections to the SubCity -> the keyholes to the SubCity are spread around the cityscape: you have to find them -> the moment you pass through a keyhole you become an actor in SubCity -> you communicate with your fellow actors and their dreams -> you exchange and interact using the SubCity tools -> while interacting you define your avatar, the actor of your dreams -> you search for new keyholes -> the moment you re-pass through a keyhole you become a new actor -> you redefine your character by interacting with the help of the SubCity tools -> you pass through the next keyhole -> you exchange information -> in search of your docking elements -> in search of your home ->
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