How do we want to live in our cities? Who designs urban spaces and what will remain of creative urban development projects when the funding ends? The jetz's ma jut. festival in Dessau invites you to a mixture of conference, city rally and creative exchange on Friday, March 21 and Saturday, March 22, 2024 to celebrate the end of the "Young City Makers" research project. The two-year cooperation between the Departments of Design and Architecture, Facility Management and Geoinformation at Anhalt University of Applied Sciences and the city of Dessau-Roßlau was made possible by the federal program "Sustainable Inner Cities and Centers".
The festival name jetz's ma jut. (Dessau for "Now it's good.") - alludes to several aspects. Wencke Hamann, research associate on the project and keynote speaker at the festival, explains: "Dessau has experienced many temporarily funded urban development projects that promised a lot but often failed to find a sustainable structure. We want to raise the question of how such initiatives can have a long-term impact and what it takes to ensure that vibrant, creative places do not disappear again." Friday is dedicated to these questions. From 14:00, the Young City Makers will present their results at the Bauhaus Museum, followed by a discussion round with guests from politics, academia and urban development. In the evening, the day will end with a vegan dinner and a concert by the Latin American band "Cuatro Piraguas" in the garden of the VorOrt-Haus.
Saturday is all about the campaign. "We don't just want to invite visitors to talk about urban development, we want them to play an active role in shaping it. What does it feel like to be involved in a mural? What happens when you don't just consume a city tour, but fill it with ideas yourself?" From 11:00 a.m., the "mitte" and "Werkstattcafé" venues open their doors for workshops and hands-on formats. The artist Jakob Wolf invites you to create a mural. The interactive city tour starts at 2 p.m. at KiOSK on Albrechtsplatz. This will be followed by a conference with city makers from other cities at the Bauhaus Museum. The festival will conclude with a musical celebration at Pluspunkt, the "Skurrilen Raum" in Askanische Straße, with a jam session by the group city.jam Dessau followed by a party with the DJ collective Polychrom.
What remains after the festival?
The "mitte" store - the urban living room at Ferdinand-von-Schill-Straße 3 - will remain open until at least August 2025 - and the Young City Makers are committed to anchoring it in Dessau for the long term. The "KiOSK" on Albrechtsplatz will also remain as a street gallery with changing exhibitions by people from the neighborhood. A less visible but equally important result of the project is the collection of data on urban meeting places. "We collected this data to show what makes a city vibrant and how such places can be designed sustainably." The findings of the project will be summarized in a final documentation in the form of a book. "jetz's ma jut. is therefore not a final farewell, but an invitation to continue thinking, shaping and changing."
Program and information:
https://jetzsmajut.de
