 Back live on placemaking the solar punk and life with me now is Moments, Weithart, Mara Klein and Andrei Zakharov. And I'm happy to have this channel really looking on placemaking. We have examples from a garden, from a roof and from the ground, so to say. And what does that mean? We will find out in the next one hour. I would love to start with just a tiny introduction of everyone and then Moment can start to present his project. Maybe everybody of you can have a little introduction to their projects and then we can discuss together in this way. Moment would you like to introduce your project first? Yeah, well hi everyone and thank you for having me here today. It's really important platform for me. This is the first time I'm gonna be speaking in public about this project. We have announced it online but we haven't really got any sort of discussion going or in the media or like a part of our website that got online last week. So my name is Moment and I'm from Genine. I live between London and Palestine for the last 10 years now and I am a theater maker, playwright and an artist. I grew up in the north of Palestine in a city called Genine and my project will be drawing around my childhood space where I grew up in the forest as a Palestinian bidwin in one of the largest forests in the West Bank. So this is what my project is about and it's called the Swatat Garden. Swatat is my family name but the place also called the Swatat because my family were the first people to live in this forest and my grandfather, the one who plants all the trees around this forest which is now becoming a run-down forest. And then I grew up as a child and playing all the time in this forest and then later on in life I go back to this forest to find out that it's not accessible anymore. And then here where my project began to how to bring back this space to the community and yeah. So this is what my project would be about and this is what we'll be talking about. I'm just looking at what is the homepage of your project where can we find it? Oh yeah so basically we have two things going on and online that you can find the project. If you go to www.swatat, you will find the website okay and then if you go fund me because we are launching a fundraising online things to have seed funding to start the to be artists who will be working with us as an architect, as an urban planning who will design the whole project for us. If you go to go fund me, I mean if you go to the website you will definitely find the link to go fund me and to Playground for Palestine and and other project links there and you will find all about the project. I will repeat it again is www.switagarden.com. Jacob your sound. All right the links are coming up to the stream there and Mara you've been having quite some success with some weird project and some taking over a shopping center or so to say. What do you mean by weird Jacob weird? I mean shopping centers are weird places right? Yeah and so I introduced it just briefly right later we talk a bit more about it right? Yeah and yeah so thanks for having me Jacob really happy to be here also with Momeni who I met a long time ago in Geneva in 2011 so a small world and yeah so my name is Mara Klein and I'm an artist and part today as part of the collective operation Himmelblick which means operations sky view which Andre the third speaker is also part of by the way and yeah and so we're a collective of people from different disciplines, architects, urban planners, artists who whose aim is to reclaim an urban space that is under use namely rooftops and today I will talk mostly about a project that we did this summer because it illustrates what what our intention is with this project of bringing together peoples of the neighborhood but I'll talk about it later if it's in detail about the weird experience. Yeah thank you so much Andre what are you up to? Hey hello yeah so what I'm mostly involved in and spending pretty much all of my days on is we are a part of an initiative which is creating a community land trust in Berlin so it's a foundation which buys ground so it collects resources monetary resources and buys land in order to give it in leasehold contracts to groups initiatives cooperatives under the condition that they open it up to as many people as possible that they that their social criteria like when they for example rent flats or that the neighborhood has a has a say when talking about how using the space for example commercial spaces like what one is needed actually in the neighborhood and through this decoupling it from the market and creating a different type of yeah commons governance on how urban space mostly we're starting here in Berlin but we are open to areas around we want to make the connection between areas around Berlin and Berlin but we are limited to Berlin and yeah so this is this is a project it's called Stadtboden Stiftung so community land trust Berlin that's how you find us. Great I think this gives us interesting you know starting point to see to go into this discussion what does the practices or the different angles you can take on really like on the practice of place making and in the in the telegram chat that you can join the first recommendation for collaboration was directed to moment to collaborate with some open source seed project that's a cool comment I'd love to hear a bit more on the on the context and on the difficulties and on the maybe on the dream that you have moment around your vision and what this dream can how this dream can vitalize the community and the neighborhood yeah basically you know like it's growing up and in a place like Palestine like the West Bank it's not an easy place to to grow up but this is there is no time to to complain in the same time so there is only time here to make things work and and to make things happen in the best possible way otherwise you're gonna end up in a in a in a in a like in a lot of complicity that that will not be helpful to neither yourself or you or your mental health or or or your sort of community engagement outreach facility or communication so when I was a kids growing as a bidwin my only space it was available for me to play it was this forest and I was very lucky unlike other kids who have to be growing up in a refugee camp which is is built from concrete which there is no any little green area for them to have access to so I was way way lucky and this is where the whole the whole things for me why I care about greenery and space and community engagement and and one of my earliest memory as a childhood it was it was going waking up in the summer holiday from school and going to the forest and creating my own universe there by building toys building cities building like a shot like from from trash from rubbish that people have left behind there and make it recycle in and and and and create all my sort of like child and or childhood playful space and then one day I remember that this forest also saved my life so one day I was during the second intifada which is pretty harsh military intifada it was it was a lockdown which is funny that we all have experienced lockdown now in a way but I have been experienced lockdown since I was a kid since I was like this really I open my eye to this life to a military look now and and and then one day I was it was just maybe just begun to go to school by myself and you know this memory is very nice memory you would never leave this memory behind and then I was coming back from school by myself and then I experienced having military Mark cover right next to the forest and the forest was my way to school it sound like spring awakening you know and and and this is where I discovered everything in my life you know I discovered my my sexual sense of things I discover my my dreams I discovered who I am I discovered my sense of the smell I discovered my sense of learning unnecessarily learning process you know I discovered everything so and then one day I was walking there and then I always also had animals I always have dogs I always I always grow up having horses and donkeys and and the house of those animals it was always this forest and then one day I have to basically I was shot at by a sniper because it was sort of a beginning of a lockdown of a core few lockdown military core few lockdown and then I have to run to the forest and and and this is the only way I was basically saved my life many times not only one not only twice many times that I was going back from school and then I was I will I will encounter military soldier and then I'll be shot at and then I will have to run to this forest so all my sad beautiful amazing crazy memory is in there this year I went to Palestine to do a documentary film about something different about about a theater maker called Juliano Mirchamees who were my teacher and who were assassinated with the German company I was I went down to Palestine early this year and February end of February to to do a documentary with the with the Munich Film Fund and and then and then the lockdown happened so the German crew went back to Germany and as a Palestinian holding a Palestinian passport to have a lack of freedom of movement I got stuck in Geneva again not a stuck but I got sort of not able to move again which it was it was sort of a bit annoying but in the meantime it was good because I thought it was an important time later on I find out that it was an important time for me to reconnect to this place again and then I have a daughter she came to visit me with her mom that halfway through the lockdown and then my daughter's only was ten in two years when she was in Genine and then she always wanted to go to to a playground and then I wanted to take her to a playground in Genine and which is the forest and I found out all the break all the equipment in the playground in that forest it completely destroyed and really extremely dangerous for kids to be around because there are metal sharp plastic broken plastic and really sharp so I mean I decided to basically to investigate the whole things and to have this project back to the community and and to work on this in this project and to bring it back in the meantime around all of this in the middle there was also a facility for for for for all kind of people that access to this place but also destroyed like like stairs or steps or a small walkway to disabled people or like or the blind because there was there is also a blind the school next to the forest so the blind student can go and and and enjoy the forest but absolutely it's all destroyed and and and left behind so so I thought that was a good responsibility for me to take on and and to to speak about this project at least to speak about it at least to to to rise awareness about it in the local community so I start to hold groups of meeting in the forest with with my local community who is basically partly my family partly my neighbors who I grew up with you know and then they all agreed that that this place need to be redone and this place need to be accessible to everybody again and then I sit down with the local government there and and we had a great great that they're gonna give us the space which is they get now we have the space we about to form a contract with them I don't know how long it might be for 10 years 15 years and then also in the meantime there is an open a band theater there that once was full of life for kids there that was a lot of clowning show a lot of circus show there's a lot of musical show there was a lot of fire camp around it then and all of this so now we are basically in this case I start to get in touch with a friend and a friend of a friend and then I find out there's a place called playground for Palestine that they have a they have a community group in New York in America and they have a community groups in London so we got in touch with the team in London because I base in London now and and team in London they love the idea and then they pick up on this project to be the responsibility of funding the equipment for the playground only but what we're looking for is we're looking for more than the playground we're looking for for for a place to be accessible to all people from all different walks we're looking for to renovate the theater space and to make it accessible again and to make it into like a theater or an art hub community space we're looking to establish a program for alternative outdoor self-learning education about the history of the space and about what is in the space and what stories had happened in this space so now we have got the fund for the equipment which is a good news for the playground and then this is why we launch we launch another another like a seed funding that we can be artists and architect and think and and and and and from the community and from from from the international artist community to join this group because we want people to be paid to do this job and and and so yeah this is basically part one of the project yeah now we are interested in part two of course but I also I want to open up for questions both to like you can post them in the telegram chat and Mara and Andre that are here as well if you have questions to the project and that are burning and please feel free to to share yeah I have a question I mean and I wonder like because Janine also has like seen like a few projects that have you know the freedom theater but also cinema Janine which came from like completely an outsider's perspective coming in and creating something without like real knowledge of the place and I just wondered how people feel about you like returning and kind of taking this initiative if you if you feel like there's quite a positive ground to to build this or how yeah how's your experience been with this I think I think your question is a very good question because mean our main obstacle here is the sustainability and and and in every step we take in here we always having the sustainability question above our mind you know around our mind like in a surround sound you know and and yeah you're right basically the freedom theater if we want to have a look at this two perfect example the freedom theater and cinema Janine okay and and two of them have they give us the different answer which is a great sad any grade for our project sad in a way that the the tragedy what happened in the freedom theater is obviously the people of who were in the first line benefit from the freedom theater have lost the main tour you know the legend man who created the whole idea and vision around it okay and and and who basically thought me to become who I am now you know so we lost him and and that's that's for me now a lesson to learn how safety and security in working in this environment is the most important thing you know but in the other hand the freedom theater in term of sustainability is still working you know it's working in a way that is adapt now to where the freedom theater is today it doesn't have to be necessarily working in the same speed or the same idea or the same formulation that it used to be working when Juliano was alive because Juliano was a one-man show he was he knew what he want okay I wouldn't agree that the freedom theater will be still working exactly how the same energy when Juliano was alive because Juliano is not there anymore so we need to have a new identity which is now they're working on it I believe which is a great the saddest the other sad and also good for for for a new project to come with somebody who have a knowledge and an out outside ice and an inside ice to the whole things which is now Cinema Jeanine okay which is I don't know maybe some people know some people doesn't know that cinema Jeanine have been bulldozed down to the ground and and being replaced to a shopping mall center a sheep shopping mall center terrible design and and this is sad now okay here is like we want to stand on this question what the sustainability of this project gonna be okay so I wouldn't say that the reason why the cinema Jeanine were were bulldozed and run down because it was mainly foreign young creative people who come to the to the place without having a full knowledge of the culture and the community understanding of things I wouldn't say that was the reason I would only say the reason was there was a gap between between buildings in cinema space engineering and between how to keep how to keep this sustainable okay I remember and when when cinema Jeanine open and and when I was a student at the freedom theater in the same time I used to finish what my school time at the freedom theater as an actor and then walking back to my flat which is opposite cinema Jeanine okay and seeing like 70 people working from all different background from Germany from mainly Germany obviously but it was also other people working there and like Palestinian local young people working and it was it was sort of refreshing it was like giving a big massive huge hope like for me it was like if it was the case is still the same thing I wouldn't have left Jeanine you know it's open up a lot of like dreams for us to see all of this visual in that time but obviously it was no plan there was no plan there was no the plan was just for tomorrow you know or after tomorrow the plan wasn't even how to keep this space sustainable how to keep how to use how to take an advantage of the fund that the cinema Jeanine have received if from an NGO organization or from the German government that time okay and to make it circles recycling inside the the the the building itself rather than is just spending money and goes and never come back you know so and here where I want to say about death of the ed for Palestine I think is sort of very close together like the ed and the death is the same things for Palestinian now obviously Palestinian who work with a big NGO fund you know but what I want to do in this term and if we want to go back to this new project I think it's much easier because first I speak the language easily I born there I know the community I have been involved in a lot of different level of community engagement to project in there okay and I think I felt that young people in the community there look up for what this guy who used to be very controversial working with the freedom theater now he went away and come back what he want to do in this space is he's going to do another controversial things or he going to do another thing but this time I'm not coming back by myself this time we're working with as a collective we're working with a lot of young people male and female and different gender from the ground itself that they the one who gonna hold the ground together you know and and we still open for international collaboration obviously because this is very important for us so it's just a question is does have no one side answer is have perfect example to look at which is cinema genine and freedom theater I I found it super interesting and also said to hear that the the whole work that went into building the cinema genine just got replaced but I mean projects come and go and rise again the question of sustainability is I mean it's great I mean what this is we're building I would laugh with the like looking at the time to invite Mara to to share on your project and then we can come back together around the commonalities and challenges of our of our projects in the very end yeah so um yeah thank you mommine for explaining I find it super interesting this question of the yeah who who who creates what where you know like how how are you anchored in a space um yeah so I'm here to talk about operation Himmelblick and as I mentioned before we're a collective which is Berlin based of a group of interdisciplinary peoples and our aim is to reinvigorate spaces that are not used so often which are rooftops which which are precious precious spaces in cities that have little little space that people can share and I would like to share today very briefly um one of our projects that we did this summer which was like a pilot the first test phase for this group so we went to Chemnitz in Saxony and we were part of a festival called the big yeoman which is the biggest cultural festival there and it's run I just want to mention it because I find it really yeah it's a really great festival it's run by a group of volunteers that come back every year for the last 17 years which I think says a lot about their dedication and also the quality of a of a festival and the idea of this festival is to reinvigorate spaces which are underused or which people don't go to so in the past years they've been to a brewery, prison, lots of spaces that are normally not really accessible or not of interest and this year they were in the Heckert area which is a huge area of prefabricated buildings prefabricated buildings in German Plattenbau which a lot of people know from GDR architecture and the Heckert was actually the third largest in the whole of the GDR so it's massive and it was built in the 70s on this utopian idea of providing good housing for workers so enough light, enough space, access to all important amenities, Grundversorgung and now since the fall of the wall and in the last 20 years it's really turned into quite the opposite it's become very empty there's an aging population which doesn't really have access to amenities because everything is moving out so there's a lot of space there but not so much room for innovation and this year the the big iung went there and they went to one huge platte, one huge prefabricated building and asked artists to reinvigorate the space and also an old shopping mall so in German in East German that's Konzum which is just the name for a small shopping mall and they asked us to do something with the roof so this was a flat roof and we went we came with ideas but really our idea in general is to find out what is needed and what is dreamt of in that space and so we came with a few ideas but most importantly to us was to really find out what people there wanted and so we came with these research questions like what do you dream of what utopias could be realized on roofs and basically what is missing and to our surprise you know dreams can also be very grounded and people mostly said that they lack the basic things that make a life kind of easier which is a pharmacy and ATM benches to sit on to meet some people mentioned beauty in public space and so after this research phase which included walking through the streets and asking people and also a rooftop dinner where we invited people from all over Chemnitz to dine in this on this roof we collected these impulses and we built a spaceship which to us represented utopia you know utopia of this area utopia of generally city planning and urban planning and what people dream of like going far and around this spaceship we built benches which were in part made out of the material of the roof because we knew that this roof was going to be taken down in a month or two the whole shopping mall will be destroyed because there's too much empty space there empty housing empty buildings and so we used parts of the roof to build these benches around the spaceship and so people could come and sit on these benches meet and see each other look at this spaceship and also listen to a sound installation that talked that basically condensed everything that we'd heard on the streets and this was our aim to kind of like combine the very grounded needs of a community which are kind of yeah they're simple and yeah they're just simple needs which which are really important and then on the other side this idea of like yeah where do we dream to and roofs are a great place for this and so the festival was four days and they were four thousand people i think and this was only due to the pandemic they had a limit of a thousand so a thousand came a day four thousand people came and sat on this roof and i really i could feel that people were really really touched by this because on the one hand roofs have a there's just a magic in roofs and on the other hand people felt heard because we'd come there as artists from another place but we really took time to find out what people actually wanted and we took it seriously you know when people say we want benches to sit on that sounds you know like nothing but actually if people want benches then why not have benches and um after this festival was over um what was really important to us which also addresses this question of sustainability that we talked about momy um yeah what was really important to us was also that something remains and obviously memories remain when you do like a something like a festival for a few days but these benches were then also bought by the city of chemnitz and they will put them up in the heck of area so that people can still sit on these benches which are part partly made out of this consume this shopping mall that no longer exists or that will no longer exist but the trace remains where people sit is actually the physical remain of this shopping mall um yeah and this was like the the first time that we tested out this kind of um way of doing things as a collective but we're all based in Berlin and the city obviously has um incredible potential and is a fast moving place where there is a lot of question of like public space being um yeah being not accessible to the community that is there and and so now we are planning our next project which is hopefully gonna play take place this summer and also be longer because our aim is really on the one hand to do short interventions which are interesting and they're exciting and they make people maybe you know think or excite them but really our aim is to create spaces on rooftops that are sustainable where people can come together and then take it over so we want to be the impulse givers just i i guess a bit like momy and what you were saying about the forest you want to be the impulse giver but then in the long term we really want people to take this over the people of this building and so what we're looking at now is a a building in Mitte a platte which has around 80 plus people living there and um we're looking at building a space on the roof that is modular so that it can be also shifted around changed according to needs if we do like a debate or a concert or a film evening they will be rooftop gardening and also our aim is to really have it green up there because this is another thing about cities that's the dark the dark roofs obviously take away a lot of the or store a lot of the heat and so we need greener roofs in general and to then start this process that people start taking care of their own building so we will be there in the beginning but really on the long term we would like these roofs to then become what the people want them to be um yeah and i think this is what i find really exciting about this initiative is that it combines something artistic with a social and creation with community so this idea of really we want to combine functional and beautiful because they do need each other um yeah and there is really a magic on roofs i'm sure that many of you know how roofs are magical because there's air there there's a sense of possibility and i remember last summer in chemnets when people were sitting on this roof which was quite um low down so you could still see trees it really felt like a market square and market squares have something you know really special where people come together but this is a market square in the air and there's so much potential there there's some kind of magic that yeah i guess the ground is harder to to find that i don't know yeah um yeah and just lastly just to say um we really want to stay independent of organizations so the idea is really that we offer something to a community but we don't want to be a provider of services for a certain housing company or etc the idea is really that we would like to use funds that are given to us but really stay independent in the way we design things and also in the yeah in the narrative that we create up there because this is really not up to an agenda but up to the community that is is around there yeah thank you for bringing up this challenge around the funding as well i mean creating up places like tapping into this untapped potential of roofs and making comments out of rooftop places in general is one thing but also like creating a space where people actually can come together obviously um is doing a huge service to local community to democracy to like to um to the well-being of of people and um yeah how to how to support that is an an interesting challenge i again invite everybody listening to to get in touch or ask questions via the telegram chat and um i before we like go why just mingling between the projects maybe andrei you can um give us some update on what's happening with that boden stiftung um yeah please yeah i tried to make it quite quickly um because there's already so much very super interesting content there um and really nice to just keep on talking like for what we have a little bit time to prolong our session um because we started like seven minutes late but okay this is so you have to know that you have time to share thank you um so um yeah but what are we doing we are an initiative um mixed out of people who come from neighborhood initiatives in berlin from working in cooperatives um people working who've been like working in academia and kind of trying to find alternative ways of ownership questioning kind of kind of how the capitalist market in our cities destroys communities and and people who are active in politics quite a diverse group um kind of came together also mostly people who didn't knew each other before and um we came together um with the idea of creating something called like something inspired by the community land trust so so first before talking about this organization inspiration of a community land trust i want to talk again or more deeply about like what's actually the problem what what brings us together is kind of a problem that we see in berlin is that in the last 10 years um berlin has changed very quickly and in accelerating speed and spaces are becoming less and less available like it's really an explosion of kind of capitalist exploitation of the ground in berlin ground rents are rising prices for housing commercial spaces are rising local shops are being kicked out and replaced by kind of multinationaly operating startups and funded startups um on companies it's kind of all like a shift which all goes in the way of like creating the highest profit from the space which is available and this is really affecting our neighborhoods it's affecting our communities when very important shops are leaving when places where where child care places used to be they cannot pay the rent anymore they're being replaced like neighborhood shops which kind of have been there for 30 years and there's a community of people regularly going to the same cafe knowing each other and all of this being threatened and this is this is kind of the the problem we are like facing in this type of yeah where the only thing that counts is making the highest profit on the land as long as it's in private ownership and there's so much pressure like quite opposite to what we experienced in cabinets where there was lots of empty space and it's really the question okay how do you create inspiration and do something with empty space here we have the opposite of like there's so much pressure on creating something and so we came together and we're inspired by this idea of community land trust and community land trust a type of organization which acts for many different places or houses but in a specific location like in a specific city and they are they have three principles community land and trust so community means it's a community run organization so it's organization where people who are live there who live in the neighborhood they can directly become in part of the organization and vote for the people who are in the decision-making power so there's a democratic structure in the bylaws and it's like fixated it's also it's about land so that's really important for us as community land trust we we we think we need this kind of civil society run kind of neighborhood based organization that owns the land it doesn't have to do all the things on top of the land but it's about kind of owning the land and making sure it stays out of a kind of a market out of being traded to whoever can make the highest money but actually take that land in the organization and then give contracts like for 50 60 100 years to groups or cooperatives which use the land but for a social purpose or a neighborhood purpose so for example say okay we we own this land but now we give the the the house on top we give it to a cooperative or an initiative and they run the house for the next years decades but they have to comply to some like conditions like for example if there's a big commercial space they cannot just rent it to the highest price they have to ask the neighborhood what is actually needed here or for the flats they cannot just give them to anyone they have to give the flats at least a big amount of them to people who actually need them the most like who they cannot be like we just want these type of people here no they have to be open and accessible to people who actually need these flats and who are like have the most problems kind of on this capitalist market in Berlin and this is the concept of trusty ship like the last the trust that the community land trust is acting as a trusty and holding the land in trusty ship for groups and communities who have otherwise not the possibilities to decide what happens in the city because they don't have the monetary resources to like buy land themselves so these are the three principles and we are finding a way of making that happen in Berlin and we are just in the moment of creating a foundation it will be like we will hand in all the papers in January we have collected one hundred fifty thousand euros as a starting capital kind of for making the first projects possible but it's really about kind of a a long-term vision like there are foundations which operate like this like ours which are not non-profit organizations and they started one of them started 30 years ago in Switzerland with 20 or 14 000 francs and now they manage more than 300 million francs and it's really this idea of creating a foundation which starts slowly but it only is not just for one property because it's actually from each property giving a little little money for like solidarity and to make the next project possible and through this grow and kind of be a revolving land trust which not in five years time but in 10 20 30 years really can have an impact in the city but at the same time stays democratically accountable to the people who use the space to the people who also are in the neighborhood and who people who are active for a different type of city so this in short is what we are kind of working on and maybe to make it more clearer like what could be a project for example like example like I think there are two types of projects which are we are already working on the moment where we're already negotiations one is quite a simple one it's where there's a people who inherited a multi-family house there are like 20 or 15 people living in this house and two of them are the people who inherited it but they they want to give this house they don't want to deal with managing it and dealing with all the rents and repairs they want to give it in good hands and we negotiating with them a way to give it to the foundation kind of they can stay there live there forever like they have the rights secured but we also make sure that the other tenants are treated well and there's a small space which can be used as a neighborhood space and make sure that it's unlocked for the neighborhood now it's not used so this is one kind of quite simple way of kind of securing a house securing the low rents there securing that everybody can stay there and that it's not sold to the highest price to some investment company from Luxembourg which you there's no face anymore it's just acts for highest profit the other example is there's a commercial property in in a bit outside of the center and it's really at the edge of the residential area it's like an intercommercial area and there are three centers like housing centers like a refugee center where where people kind of refugees who arrived in Germany are put in like not their own choice like they are put in there can live everything but they live really at the edge of the city and it's really there's nothing around it's very like a dire situation there's another center where people who are homeless and alcoholics and then there's a big house where only people live who work short term in Berlin and then there's this there's a very empty public space around there's no amenities nothing and there is a house which we try to buy and convert into something that's actually of use for the people living there like kind of creating a point of connection between people living in the residential areas in these different housing centers and yeah and secure affordable rents for yeah for for social purposes for organizations that try to make something different um yeah so these are the examples and I think what is what is it about is about this idea of of breaking up ownership of like not thinking about something is owned by one person one organization but really involving as many people as possible when talking about something and giving them rights to have a say and through this maybe you know being guided by this principle of a commons of like how can we create this land which which should be a commons i mean we cannot multiply it or produce new land like how can we how can we most possibly treat it as something that is commonly owned um yeah this is the the the vision and that's what we are working on step by step trying to realize the first projects next year yeah thank you so much i i love this initiative a lot and i i was walking in the park today and with you know and in some way the park has the commons and then you have the stories of people buying a land and really accepting thereby the kind of custodianship that they take for this land and um i especially in the in the city or so i find it so interesting to and invite people into like active custodianship for their places and i feel like this mechanism can empower this relationship from you to your to your neighborhood or to you to the place you're in and um i mean obviously Berlin is there's a lot of like business happening in the moment and uh but i mean still from the visionary power of this project i find it so strong that i'm wondering like what is the challenges uh for for places to actually become um community land trusts and why is there not more and more and more places already like falling in your in your way and then just to add to this question maybe like um your own understanding of agency you gave an example where you where you said you want to go into shaping the place yourself um as a way or like where's the activists where's the city land trust how much are you giving an impulse in the same way that Mara said you wanted like given impulse or like yeah you you feel the question mark somehow yeah so there are two two things the first one you're referring to um the challenges so i mean they're i mean the the message challenges that for buying kind of a piece of land kind of funding it like it's millions like we're talking about millions of euros for kind of a property in Berlin which is perfect like it's crazy like like it's yeah so it's really about how do we gather the amount of funds we need um find people who give maybe loans for very great conditions because they want to support it it's really about kind of collecting the money to even be possible to make things happen and so this is the one big challenge the second challenge is always kind of work we are we are already a group of 20 active people and many other supporters like we have 140 people who gave money and who are also feeling like supporters of the project and just in the small group of 20 already to work as a community like to like like not as a community like work as a as a group and make collective decisions look at hierarchies powers kind of how do you deal with different interests different like where should we start like but in this big what kind of projects should we first work on where should we put our resources our energy um that's that's always a big challenge like just kind of if you want to make many people voices heard you also have to find a way of mediating these voices and kind of still come together um so these are two of the challenge which come to my mind right away we are working on them i think we we are dealing with them but they keep on being challenges and we always have to find new ways of dealing with them and the second question is um this role of yeah initiative with this um being maybe an instrument which can be appropriated by the the the neighborhood initiatives and it's something in between like it's a quite a it's sometimes more the one role sometimes more the other i think in the beginning we have to be a bit active and show some initiative because you have to show what you can do what the instrument can be used for to then be approached but there are already many initiatives approaching us and being like hey we have this house in our neighborhood we want to this and this happen like how how do we make that happen like how can you support us so i think making the first projects possible there will be others coming and i think because we always separate the ownership of the land from the ownership of the house on top it always also restricts our power like there are many things maybe we have a certain vision but we cannot decide everything like we always have to find somebody like a neighborhood group which works together with the cooperative in shaping actually what's happening on the place like we can we can only set the parameters but we always cooperate with others and by having to always cooperate with others it also kind of we might we might have to have some vision to extract the first groups and the people and the neighborhood depending always on the place maybe they are already there like there are houses where there is already a very strong vision and it's really us just bringing in the finances and kind of the long-term stability and being like we have a structure which enables you to make your goals which you already have to make them long-lasting and give them a structure which is not only valid for the next 15 years but actually can work for 100 years or more so it depends quite quite a lot but i think the idea there is some initiative we bring in but it's also restricted because we are not the people realizing the project in the end the every day of the project we only set help set out the conditions and we always have to cooperate and i think but that's a good that we always have to cooperate because otherwise it gives too much power to us i i love the aspect of timing you know organizing always this is also like synchronized by by the factor of time and sometimes it's easy to have a short time span where you like produce something and sometimes it opens up a big thing to have like a long longer window of operating speaking about time our time is getting very short now before we get ready for the next panel but i would love to hear if you have some if you want to share some inspiration that just came up for you in this moment listening to each other and obviously i want to just get a glimpse of moment into part two this was a great cliffhanger yeah maybe mara first you have you have some fresh insights fresh insights no pressure okay fresh insights and yeah i mean as i was listening to andre and before it's a moment as well and just thinking about like what these three initiatives have in common i think especially this year for many parts of the world where this pandemic changed everyday lives and maybe also perspectives on place i think we are coming to more of a sense of like growing belonging you know um i like this word belonging in the sense that there is longing in there which is normally far away but i think a lot of us are also realizing that a lot of what is there and what we need is around us that we don't have to go too far and that it's about committing to this place and making it better so i think this is what i find really beautiful about these three initiatives is that there is something about a shared commitment to take responsibility for growing um for me it's like wow it's like so interesting to hear about a project in in a sort of a metropolitan city you know like we're talking about like an early planning city like Gineen and then we're talking about Berlin like a massive metropolitan city well i i thought about like obviously like the the the roof roof garden project in a city which is full of of of of like you know like big businesses and and building and and stuff like this i think i think this is sort of a very uh utopian escape out of of of like uh i mean what Berlinists still have a like a a lot of knife like nice uh uh playground and and greenery side of it that where people can escape a little bit the city and and and just go for a long walk or something which is nice you know as well as here in London um but but to have to have something easy access in in in your own building not your own building but the building that you basically live there and it's absolutely amazing and to have like i love the idea of of a dining table the the the idea of the dining table i think is is very interesting in this in this kind of making a very diverse community now in Berlin in and i think there's a there's a lot of there you know there's a lot of so much to be done that so much to be uh work around community that like how to make sense of community i think this is a good question about about like a metropolitan city you know and a futuristic city sort of and and a very capitalist in the meantime as as andrew was saying and i i think i think i just the only thing come from my mind it was it was like i think it's we we we working in a complete reversal project like for me i i want you need to become very uh invested in you know i want i wouldn't say i want you need to become a capitalist it does there's no doubt there's no question in there because there's the landscape and the politics surrounded it will not make it that way you know which is i'm very relaxed from this point but in the meantime there's no investment engineering so sort of how to work around juggle between these two spaces and how to switch it in the meantime you know and how to look what underneath this all of this how to bring it publicly up in a small little city that suffer if from a from a long period of a lockdown of a military lockdown this this is a big question but for me it's like the second part of the project it's a lot of questioning it's a lot of like how can we move left the whole community into a new different level by programming a lot of different new visual visual program uh to the community into this fallacy of genean city and and and how to left them from the dystopia to to utopia you know and how can we do the journey from dystopia to to utopia without harming any things as we had this two fantastic example which is the freedom theater and cinema genean that both end up costing a lot of harm to the people who work there and how can we do the safe journey again from from dystopia to utopia and and and begin left the community because because i feel as a as a member of a Palestinian community from genean i do feel that once upon a time genean and the west bank was there they were there there was there was a lot of happiness there was a lot of lightness there was a lot of freedom and and and and and and expression and and and sense of individuality you know and how can so this space i believe in this space to be the hub of a factory of argument discussion ideas and and and and and and and formulating and and and research on from small things to big things you know and um okay i think the people that have been abandoned from so many small things thank you daniel you know over to you and how can we bring back those things into and i think this is space it's the right space for it i'm not talking about a building here i'm not talking about theater or cinema gene i'm talking about like an environmental space which is an open massive huge space that can be done a lot there for people to come and and how can we leave and and and and like all of this question for me this is what the the next thing and how can we see this question being questioning by the community there and how can we leave the space between the the the the creator and and and and and and the performer which is the community you know and which in which time can we leave this gap and to to see it in a foggy mingling and and and trying to struggle and trying to succeed in all of that so i think i think this is for me the the next step of the project is to to let people let go with a lot of like a lot of things and and and and relief and here where we can have a new beginning you know yeah and i think the same i mean the the thing with with with the housing things in in in europe now and berlin and and the ownership you know i think it's a big question also you know i think i think this is what i meant by reversal that it's not a big question in pakistan because by nature in pakistan you have to have a house you have to own a house there's no way you have to have a garden there's no way you know um and and now like i have so many friend of mine in berlin that been renting for the last 30 years and when i i rise the question about are you planning to own your own space in berlin they will be like uh they're not sure about it um and and also uh the idea of like rich people coming in poor people have to leave to the edge of the area you know not only refugees who are arriving to the edge of the city but also the people who have born in this neighborhood their kids can't afford to keep in living in this neighborhood so and that's what it creates um a family saga and and and and you know like all of this question and there's no right there's no wrong you know um so yeah it's a lot of a question in there for me as well as making it fact and making it functional and work you know thank you andre any reflections or words of goodbye and i mean thanks so much for the yeah just inspiration it's time to talk like i find it's super inspiring i mean also very grounding you know just talking with you mean it's like yeah they're also these different realities and yeah yeah like i mean we all have our local struggles um and kind of see what can we do here locally and i think this is important to not always yeah i think you have to act where you are grounded to and where you're connected to and where you've where you're connected but it's also see like what kind of um yeah solidarity across spaces can you create and kind of what kind of possibilities we have here what kind of privileges we have here how can we connect with other other spaces in an emotional exchange and learn from each other um yeah that's just as a as a point to go forward but otherwise i'm just yeah just grateful for this time today yeah thank you i have the same input of how can we integrate these partnerships between place making efforts in one place and the other and how can there be some kind of portals or windows of you know of just going in relationship with each other so you can um you can you can learn from each other's realities in the way this was a great panel for the framing place making the solar punk and um i i hope we can follow you guys and support your journeys forward um i wish you all a great ending of the year and lots of energy for for the upcoming year and the whole new decade so to say the next talk we have on our channel is michael bowens giving a talk on the cyber physical infrastructure that is needed for humanity to um organize in the planetary boundaries um that are there and um this is gonna start in um five minutes so all the listeners can grab a coffee or a tea and um tune back in and meanwhile thanks a lot and a big applause for all the beautiful sharing today thank you jacob for the initiative was really really interesting beautiful thank you