ERSATZSTADT / SUBSTITUTECITY

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While the European urban bourgeoisie regards urban life without highly regulated norms to be potentially anarchic, outside Europe forms of normality contradicting this ‘Civitas’ can be observed: irregular urban life in self-constructed settlements is frequently met with state repression, state control and violence typical of the Mafia or of civil war. The image of the “European city” leaves out of account the fact that phenomena attributed to “Third World cities”, such as multinational immigration, informal markets and other economies of poverty, long existed in European cities. ErsatzStadt / SubstituteCity is the virtual counterpart, as it were, to the existing European city. It thematizes public and private spaces between illegal land occupation, privatized corporate land and ‘gated communities’, and thus falls back on experiences and ways of living in various global metropolises

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It invents, intensifies, condenses and beautifies urban everyday practices and forms of spatial appropriation and transfers them back to the actually existing city. ErsatzStadt / SubstituteCity turns “NeuStadt”, built by Bert Neumann in the Volksbühne, into a public assembly space which – depending on the type of event – will take on different forms: that of a market, a production space, a congress hall, a service and information space, a media studio or ‘public education center’. The project is not limited to the space of the theater, but will become interwoven with the urban space of not only Berlin, but also various partner cities (Tokyo, Lagos, Mumbai, Istanbul, Belfast Sarajevo).

ErsatzStadt is a project initiated by the Kulturstiftung-bund working in coperation with the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz

http://www.etuipop.de/ersatzstadt/