LED Workshop Kassel 2017

Process Biography of the Kassel Intensive Study Programme

Kassel University, June 23 - August 1, 2017

In advance of running the 2017 Online Seminar and the Kassel Intensive Study Programme (ISP), the LED team met several times in virtual team rooms and face-to-face in Kassel. Learning from the first year of the LED project, the team adjusted the seminar structure and content, and it started advertising and recruiting students for the seminar and for the IP. To help participants to get familiar with “Kassel-Nordstadt”, the 2017 IP area, before arriving in Kassel, the team introduced two online meetings as a new IP feature. Student participants discussed potential landscape democracy challenges using air photos and later, after visiting the site in person, checked these assumptions against realities they met on the ground. They also had prepared questions about the Nordstadt that they asked local stakeholders, starting on day one of the workshop.

The Kassel IP team began identifying and visiting with local stakeholders as early as January and February 2017. Speaking with key stakeholders proved to be a good way of learning about actor and stakeholder constellations in the Nordstadt early enough for building trust with a larger number of people who then agreed to get involved with the LED project themselves. During the Kassel University summer-term, the Landscape Planning department ran a student project “Nordstadt Landscape & Power”. Twenty-three town and landscape architecture students interviewed Nordstadt actors and stakeholders, such as a senior citizen group, a migrant women association, and an ethnically mixed football club. They also mapped evidence and symbols of power in the landscape. In a feedback process, the Kassel team shares results from the summer-term project and from the Kassel IP with Nordstadt communities.

Prof. Dr. Diedrich Bruns, Kassel University